Personal Traits and Attitude

Most skills can be learned, however there are some traits that are very
difficult to teach, and as such they should form the foundation of any
search for a product manager.

- Product Passion

There are some people out there that just love products. Not
necessarily every type of product, but also not just a single type of
product. Great product managers have a love and respect for good
products, no matter where they come from, and they live to create them.

This passion for product is an essential ingredient as it will often be
called upon to provide the motivation to get through the many very
difficult challenges, and long hours, of defining a great product.
Further, the product manager will need to inspire the rest of the
product team, and the passion for a product is contagious.

It is fairly easy to determine whether or not you are talking to such a
person by simply asking them what some of their favorite products are
and why. It is hard to feign passion; the insincerity comes through.
Ask for examples from different domains. Ask what they would improve on
their favorite product if they were the product manager. Ask about bad
products too.

- Customer Empathy

The ideal product manager does not necessarily have to come from your
target market (there are pros and cons to this), but they absolutely
need to be able to empathize with your target market. This trait is
often difficult to find in high-technology companies trying to produce
mass-market products. We tend to want to think of our users as we think
of ourselves and our friends. However, the target market very likely has
quite different values, priorities, perceptions, tolerances and
experiences.

Ask the candidates about the target market, and how they believe they
might be different from themselves. Try and detect how the candidate
feels about the target market, and most importantly, does the candidate
respect and empathize with that target market, or does he view his job
as “enlightening” the target market.

This is doubly important for international products, or those products
targeted at specific countries or cultures. There are many
similarities, and many differences, between cultures. Many of the
differences are incidental and not important to defining products.
However, some of the differences are essential. Does the candidate you
are talking to have enough understanding of the target market to know
which is which?

- Intelligence

There is really no substitute for innate intelligence. The successful
product manager must be able to learn very quickly. Product management
is about insights and judgment, both of which require a sharp mind.
Hard work is also necessary, but for this job, it is not sufficient.

Hiring very smart people is harder than it sounds. Much depends on the
strength and security of the hiring manager. Hiring smart people speaks
to the company culture which is another important topic in its own
right, but suffice it to say here that if your goal is a truly good
product, it is simply not going to happen if you can’t find a truly
bright product manager.

Assuming you are anxious to find the brightest, most insightful person
possible, one technique is to drill in on problem solving. Microsoft is
famous for their very intensive and effective interviewing for
intelligence based on problem solving. The technique is to use one or
more experts in some topic to drill the candidate on a problem. The
interviewer is not looking so much at whether or not the candidate
simply knows the right answer (knowledge rather than intelligence), but
rather, how well they deal with not knowing the answer. How does the
candidate work out problems? When the candidate comes up with a
solution, the interviewer changes the question somewhat and asks what
the candidate would do then. This is done continuously until the
candidate must force herself to deal with a scenario she doesn’t
know the answer to, and then she is asked to verbalize how she would go
about solving that problem. With practice, this can be a very effective
technique in assessing a candidate’s problem solving capability.

Another approach is to ask two or three people in your organization who
are well known for their intellectual prowess, and ask them to interview
this person, and help you determine the candidate’s problem solving
ability.

- Work Ethic

Not every role in the product team requires the same level of commitment
and effort. However, the product manager role is not for someone who is
afraid of hard work. It comes along with the responsibility. The
product manager is the person ultimately responsible for the success of
the product, and this burden weighs heavily on the successful product
manager.

Even when skills such as time management and the techniques of product
management are mastered, the successful product manager is still
consumed with the product. Can you have a family and a non-work life
and be a successful product manager? I believe you can. At least once
you have some experience. But there are many people that want to be
able to work 40 hours a week and most importantly, leave their work
problems at the office when they leave at the end of the day. This
unfortunately is not the life of the successful product manager.

I believe in being very frank with candidate product managers about the
level of effort required for successful product management. But to be
perfectly clear, it is not about requiring the product manager to work
certain hours – if you have to actually ask or tell the product
manager to come in during a critical point you have the wrong person for
the job.

It should also be emphasized that the level of effort and commitment is
not uniform throughout the lifecycle of the project. There are certain
phases that are much more intense than others. What won’t change
for the successful product manager is the degree to which they care and
worry about their product and the lengths they are willing to go to
ensure its success.

- Integrity

This trait also relates to the company culture, but of all the members
of the product team, the product manager most needs to reflect the
values of the company and the product. In most organizational
structures, the product manager does not directly manage the people on
the project team, and as such, he can’t simply direct the people to
do his bidding. Rather, he must work by influencing those on the team.
This persuasion is done by mutual trust and respect.

This trust and respect is built over time by the successful product
manager demonstrating the traits and skills of a strong product team
leader. If the product manager is not perceived to have integrity, or
honesty, or fairness when dealing with his teammates, then the product
manager will not have the degree of collaboration and team effectiveness
that he needs to get the job done.

The product manager may not be an expert in every role of the product
team, but he should have a deep understanding and respect for what each
team member is responsible for, and he should be willing and able to
trust those people to do their job.

As the main interface between the product team and both the executive
team and the sales organization, the product manager is often put in
difficult situations, such as being asked to deliver products earlier,
or with special features for large customers. The product team will
watch closely how the product manager handles these situations.

As with intelligence, assessing someone’s integrity can be
difficult. For candidates with previous experience as product managers,
they can be asked about how they dealt with the stresses in past
products. Press for details of particular situations; what made the
situation hard and how was it dealt with?

- Confidence

Many people think of confidence as a result of experience. However,
while experience may be a prerequisite for confidence, many very
experienced product managers simply do not project confidence (you can
sometimes find brand new college graduates simply bursting with
confidence, although this is generally the confidence that comes from
not yet knowing what they’re in for).

Confidence becomes an important trait in that the entire product team,
executive team and sales organization is looking to the product manager
to convince them that what they are investing their time and money and
careers in will be successful. There will be many difficulties along the
way, and during these times of stress especially the product manager is
looked to for inspiration.

It is important that the product manager be able to project confidence,
to be able to remind the team and organization why the product will be
successful, and why the vision is a good one. In communicating
persuasively, confidence is a critical ingredient.

- Communication Skills

While communication skills can, for the most part, be learned, it can
take years to become an effective speaker or writer, and these skills
will be required from the start. As discussed above, the product
manager influences others by persuasion rather than authority –
making his case by communicating either through writing, speaking, or
both.

Speaking skills can partially be assessed during the interview itself,
but written skills should be assessed specifically. I like to suggest
that product manager candidates bring in examples of written material
such as white papers or strategic documents.

While good communication skills are absolutely essential, it is
important to emphasize that speaking with an accent, or minor
grammatical issues with a non-native language, do not constitute poor
communication skills. The person must speak clearly enough to be easily
understood, and write powerfully enough to persuade, but perfect
pronunciation or grammar is not required.

- Attitude

The successful product manager sees himself as the CEO of the product.
He takes full responsibility for the product, and does not make excuses.
The successful product manager knows he is ultimately responsible for
the success of the product. More importantly, he knows that there are
many very valid reasons for the product to not ship, or fail in the
market when it does – the product is too difficult to build, it will
take too long to get to market, it will cost too much, it will be too
complicated, etc. – but he knows it is his job to see that each and
every one of these obstacles is overcome.

This does not mean that he micromanages the product team, or that he
tries to do it all himself, but rather than he is quick to take the
blame if something goes wrong, and equally quick to give credit to the
rest of the team when it goes well. The successful product manager
knows that it is through the rest of the team that his product vision
will become a reality, but that it is his product vision they are
building.

Skills

In order to succeed at the job of product management, there are several
skills that are important. If the person has the right personal traits,
I believe all of these skills can be learned:

- Applying Technology

One reason many successful product managers come from the engineering
ranks is that a big part of defining a successful product is in
understanding new technology and seeing how it might be applied to help
solve a relevant problem.

While you don’t need to be able to invent or implement the new
technology yourself in order to be a strong product manager, you do need
to be comfortable enough with the technology that you can understand it
and see its potential applications.

There are many ways to develop this skill. Taking classes, reading
books and articles, and talking with engineers and architects can all
help you learn. Ask the senior engineers on your product team what they
would recommend as ways to learn more about the technology
possibilities. Brainstorming sessions with the engineering team is
another way to learn how new technologies might be applied.

- Focus

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
There are so many distractions out there, especially for the product
manager trying to create a product that customers will love. The ability
to keep the focus on the key problem to be solved, and not to succumb to
creeping featurism, or the loud voices of a few key people or customers,
requires tremendous discipline – both company discipline and
personal discipline.

The truth is that nearly every product has features that are not really
all that important – if the features were never there it would not
significantly impact the sales or customer satisfaction. Much more
often, if the features were not there, the product would be better for
it as more users could comprehend and appreciate the resulting simpler
product. Focus will help you reduce the number of cluttering features,
reduce the time it takes you to build the product, and therefore the
time it takes you to get to market.

- Time Management

In today’s e-mail, instant message, and cell-phone based world, it
is so very easy to come in to work early in the morning, work
frantically all day even skipping food, and then head for home well into
the night, not having actually accomplished anything important for your
product. That is because you have spent the day chasing fires and
working on “urgent” items.

It is absolutely essential to get very skilled at distinguishing that
which is important from that which is urgent, and to learn to prioritize
and plan your time. If you can’t manage to get the time to focus on
those tasks which are truly important to your product, your product will
fail.

I have known too many product managers that burn themselves out with
70-hour weeks and the worst part is when I tell them that they’re
not actually doing their job. The natural response is that they just
don’t have any more time and can’t work any harder. I then go
into my lecture on time management and working smarter. So much of what
these people spend time doing is avoidable.

- Written Skills

Product managers spend a great deal of time writing – composing
e-mails, specs, white papers, strategy papers, data sheets, competitive
product reviews, and more. The successful product manager is only
taking the time to write these if he believes people are going to read
them, and since they are going to be read, they need to do their job
well, which is typically to describe, educate and/or persuade.

Being able to write clear and concise prose is a skill that product
managers use every day. The successful product manager realizes that the
readers of his writings are constantly evaluating him based on his
writings. Especially with senior management, sometimes these writings
are all they have to go on.

- Presentation Skills

The other major form of communication that product managers frequently
need to do is a presentation. Presenting in front of a group is hard for
many people. Presenting effectively is even harder. Yet this is an
important skill for a product manager since many of the most important
events in the life of a product require the product manager to stand up
in front of company executives or major customers or the company sales
force and in the short time you have, explain what your product is about
and why it is important.

We have all sat through terrible presentations, with slide after endless
slide; the speaker simply reading the bullets; people straining to read
the too-small print; meaningless graphics; and being unclear what the
key messages actually are and why you should care.

In contrast, the successful product manager has a minimal number of
slides; he is engaging, clearly knowledgeable and passionate about his
product, he speaks clearly and to the point, his slides provide relevant
supporting data for what he is saying, and he has unambiguously stated
his main points, and what he needs from the audience after the
presentation. His presentation finishes early, he entertains questions
and if he can’t provide a clear, useful answer immediately he
follows up diligently and promptly with the questioner, and if
appropriate, the entire audience.

- Business Skills

Finally, business skills are also important for the product manager. As
the main interface with the rest of the company, the product manager
will need to work with company finance staff, marketing people, sales,
and executive management, and the language and concepts that these
people deal with.

I sometimes talk of product managers as needing to be bilingual. They
need to be able to converse equally well with engineers about technology
as with executives and marketers about cost structures, margins, market
share, positioning and brand.

This is one reason why so many product managers are recruited out of
business school. The product organization knows that they need someone
that can talk the language of the business side, so they hire an MBA. I
have known some great product managers that have come through the MBA
path, but if you’re read this far, you know that the business skills
are but one part of the mix required for a successful product manager,
and they can certainly be learned. It is at least as common that an
engineer moves into product management and acquires the business skills
required by reading books, taking courses, and getting coaching and
assistance from mentors in the finance and marketing organizations.

So where do you find these people?

After reading this list of traits and skills, you may be thinking that
such people are extremely rare. They are rare – about as rare as
good products are. But few hires you make will be as critical as your
product managers, so it is worthwhile to interview for these
characteristics and to set the bar high.

There are different schools of thought on recruiting product managers.
Many companies think that all you need is someone from the marketing
organization or someone with an MBA. In the old-school definition of
product manager as product marketing, this may have been true, but this
is a recipe for failure today.

Many companies prefer MBA’s from top business schools that have a
technical undergraduate degree combined with applicable industry
experience. This can work well if you keep in mind that a problem with
MBA programs, even from the top-tier schools, is that they almost never
teach product management, so it is dangerous to assume that the recent
MBA grad has any idea of how to be a product manager.

My favorite source for product managers is to look for people with the
characteristics described above and then use training, an informal
mentoring program, and/or a formal employee development program to
develop these people into strong product managers. Such people might be
found virtually anywhere in the company. I’ve seen outstanding
product managers come out of engineering, technical support,
professional services, product marketing, sales, and the user community.
Often these people will approach management asking how they can get more
involved in the product. It can also be useful for senior management to
approach top performers from across the company about the possibility of
product management, as this can be essential experience for those on an
executive track.