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Rethinking Product Management: How to Get From Start-Up to Scale-Up

Lex Sisney has considerable experience in helping companies scale their organizations. And he regularly sees a breakdown in Product Management as a key element in holding a company back from expansion. A breakdown may happen if there is poor coordination between departments, a haphazard approach to releases, or having leadership that is too invested in minor product details. To overcome these obstacles he recommends that you make Product Management a separate function, moves the role closer to the customer and equip it with the right tools to get the job done.

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Five Stellar Questions for an Interviewee to Ask In a Product Management Interview

And don’t forget to ask questions of your own. As Jessica Barnett argues, this is a great opportunity to learn about the inner workings of the company. You should ask questions that help you learn about the culture, how ideas are found and nurtured, and if the organization is empowered by quantitative and qualitative research.

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Acing your Product Manager Interview

So how does the candidate herself deal with a well-prepared interviewer? David E. Weekly gives you a few tips including giving a crude answer first and then delving deeper, pausing occasionally on longer answers to look for feedback from the interviewer and being bold.

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Interviewing Product Managers

INDUSTRY ’17 speaker Brent Tworetzky places interview questions for the candidates into three buckets. One, assessing their will to do the job; two, assessing their skill to do the job; and three, seeing how they have handled conflicts in the past. The first two will show if the person has the motivation and ambition for the job and the requisite abilities to do it well. The last is especially important for a Product Manager who will be required to manage by influence rather than authority.

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Find, Vet and Close the Best Product Managers

Before outlining the questions you’ll ask as an interviewer you must decide on the type of candidate you are looking to hire. Todd Jackson believes the best Product Managers ‘articulate what a winning product looks like’, ‘rally the team to build it’, and ‘iterate on it until they get it right’. However, candidates will likely not have formal Product Management experience and instead, come from other functions. But there are experiences that are ideal for different types of candidates, such as internships for rookies or design experience for an engineer. Lastly, Todd describes a process for the interview itself — it should discern if the candidate has intellectual ability, leadership propensities, and entrepreneurial spirit.

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How to Hire a Product Manager

It would be remiss of me if I didn’t kick off this conversation with a reference to Ken Norton’s classic essay. He first reminds us that Product Managers not only have to sell themselves but also the importance of the role itself. Marketers, engineers or business developers could each chip in to take your place (albeit with lesser results). He then lists several rules to follow, including hiring the smartest people with a strong technical background and those who actively ship products.

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