How to Hire a Product Manager: the Classic Essay | Ken Norton 8/13/22, 13:32

How to Hire a Product Manager

The classic essay that defined the product manager
role
Ken Norton

What is product management? What does a product manager do? What

makes a great product manager, and how do you become one? Updated in
2022, this is the classic essay by Ken Norton that defined the role of
product management and launched thousands of PM careers.

I started my career as an engineer and advanced pretty quickly into

engineering management. During the bubble, I probably hired over one
hundred engineers. I learned a lot about hiring, mostly by making mistakes.
When I transitioned to product management I was able to apply some of my
experience hiring technical people, but I also learned a whole new set of
lessons. Last week a friend called to say they needed to hire a product

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manager and wanted my advice. I realized there’s not a lot of good

information out there about interviewing PMs (there’s not a lot of good
information about product management in general). More to the point,
there’s not a lot about what you should look for in a product manager no
matter what kind of environment you’re in — startup or big company. So I
thought I’d pull together some of what I learned.

Remember friend, nobody asked you to show up

Product management may be the one job that the organization would get
along fine without (at least for a good while). Without engineers, nothing
would get built. Without sales people, nothing is sold. Without designers, the
product looks like crap. But in a world without PMs, everyone simply fills in
the gap and goes on with their lives. It’s important to remember that — as a
PM, you’re expendable. Now, in the long run great product management
usually makes the difference between winning and losing, but you have to
prove it. Product management also combines elements of lots of other
specialties — engineering, design, marketing, sales, business development.
Product management is a weird discipline full of oddballs and rejects that
never quite fit in anywhere else. For my part, I loved the technical challenges
of engineering but despised the coding. I liked solving problems, but I hated
having other people tell me what to do. I wanted to be a part of the strategic
decisions, I wanted to own the product. Marketing appealed to my creativity,
but I knew I’d dislike being too far away from the technology. Engineers
respected me, but knew my heart was elsewhere and generally thought I
was too “marketing-ish.” People like me naturally gravitate to product
management.

1. Hire all the smart people

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So what do I look for in a PM? Most importantly, raw intellectual horsepower.

I’ll take a wickedly smart, inexperienced PM over one of average intellect and
years of experience any day. Product management is fundamentally about
thinking on your feet, staying one step ahead of your competitors, and being
able to project yourself into the minds of your colleagues and your
customers. I usually ask an interview candidate a series of analytical
questions to gauge intelligence and problem-solving ability. Generally I’ll ask
questions until I’m sure the candidate is smarter than me. For some reason,
lots of people I know are reluctant to do that. They argue that it’s insulting to
the candidate. I think the right candidate will relish the challenge. In fact,
that’s the first test — how do they react when I say “I’d like to pose some
theoretical problems, is that okay?” The best of the bunch are usually
bouncing out of their chairs with excitement. The super smart sometimes
counter with questions of their own.

Update in 2022: please don’t ask “brainteaser” or logic puzzle questions.

My perspective on analytical interviews, like much of the industry’s, has
evolved since I originally wrote this piece. At best, these questions are
worthless. At worst, they’re discriminatory. Most strong product companies
have moved toward structured interviews that emphasize work samples and
situational problems that don’t have a “right answer.” Please see my
retrospective for more on this.

2. Strong technical background

Some managers I’ve known insist on hiring only PMs with computer science
degrees. I’m not as snobby — maybe it’s my own liberal arts undergraduate
education - but I do tend to favor people who’ve been in technical roles.
Having a solid engineering background gives a PM two critical tools — the
ability to relate to engineers and a grasp of the technical details driving the
product. It depends on the product of course — a PM working on low-level

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developer APIs is bound to need more technical chops than one working on
the front-end of a personals web site. But the basic principle applies —
product managers with technical backgrounds will have more success
conveying product requirements to engineers and relaying complicated
details to non-technical colleagues and customers. That said, there are
pitfalls you need to avoid. Most importantly, a PM who’s a former engineer
needs to realize that he or she is just that — a former engineer. PMs who
come from engineering and still try to take charge of technical decisions and
implementation details will crash spectacularly. For that reason, I like hiring
technical people who’ve already made the move to product management at
a previous job. They’ve already gone through the challenging adaptation
period and by checking references you can get a feel for how well they’ve
evolved. I won’t bore with you with interview questions to evaluate technical
competency. They depend on the skill set and there are hundreds of web
sites that give good tips for hiring engineers. Instead, here are some good
product manager interview questions for gauging how well a technical PM
has adapted to the role and their ability to work with engineers:

Why did you decide to move from engineering to product management?

What is the biggest advantage of having a technical background?
What is the biggest disadvantage?
What was the biggest lesson you learned when you moved from
engineering to product management?
What do you wish you’d known when you were an engineer?
How do you earn the respect of the engineering team?

3. “Spidey-sense” product instincts and creativity

This next category is highly subjective, difficult to evaluate, and

extraordinarily important. I am a strong believer that certain people are born
with innate product instincts. These people just know what makes a great

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product. They’re not always right, but their instincts usually point in the right
direction. They tend to be passionate advocates of a point of view,
sometimes to the chagrin of their colleagues. I’ve had the good fortune to
work with a good number of these people, and it’s an essential trait in
product managers. And it can be tuned, but it can’t be learned. Product
management, especially in highly dynamic environments like the web,
involves lots of small decisions. Sure, there’s a lot of big thinking and
strategy. But it’s the little decisions where a great PM distances themself
from a decent one. You know they’ve got the “spidey-sense” product
instinct when they suggest approaches that nobody on the team has
thought of, but immediately strike everyone as obvious when they hear
them. Evaluating product instinct in an interview is challenging at best. But it
can be done. One thing I always do is check to see if the candidate has
accomplished the following tasks during a one-hour interview:

Independently echoed some of my own concerns about my product

- if you’re a good PM, you’ve got a bunch of things that worry you about
your own product. Maybe they’re UI shortcomings, missing features, or
architecture flaws that need to be addressed. They’re things you know
need to be fixed. At least some of these should be obvious to an
intelligent outsider with strong product instincts. I look for that moment
in the interview when I smile, nod, and say “yeah, I know — that’s been
driving us crazy too.”
Taught me something new about my product - it could be an obvious
improvement that I’d never considered, a new idea for positioning
against a competitor, or a problem they encountered that needs to be
addressed. When I learn something from a candidate, I know two things:
(1) they’re not afraid to speak critically, and (2) they’re probably smarter
than me. I want both in a product manager.
Turned me on to something new and interesting - people with great

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product instincts tend to notice great products before everyone else. If

I’m interviewing a top-notch candidate, I usually walk away having
discovered something new and innovative.

Here are some good interview questions for judging product instincts:

Tell me about a great product you’ve encountered recently. Why do you

like it? [By the way, it drives me crazy when candidates name one of my
products in an interview. I had a hard time hiring anybody at Yahoo! who
told me the coolest product they’d come across recently was Yahoo!
Good grief.]
What’s made [insert product here] successful? [I usually pick a popular
product, like the iPod or eBay, that’s won over consumers handily in a
crowded market.]
What do you dislike about my product? How would you improve it?
What problems are we going to encounter in a year? Two years? Ten
years?
How do you know a product is well designed?
What’s one of the best ideas you’ve ever had?
What is one of the worst?
How do you know when to cut corners to get a product out the door?
What lessons have you learned about user interface design?
How do you decide what not to build?
What was your biggest product mistake?
What aspects of product management do you find the least interesting
and why?
Do you consider yourself creative?

Update in 2022: See my retrospective for more on what product “spidey-

sense” means. Since I originally wrote this piece, product designers have
ascended to become the “third leg of the stool” alongside PMs and

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engineers. One way to evaluate design sensibility and product instincts is to

include product designers in the interview loop.

4. Leadership that’s earned

Product managers are usually leaders in their organizations. But they

typically don’t have direct line authority over others. That means they earn
their authority and lead by influence. Leadership and interpersonal skills are
critical for product management. There are a thousand books about
leadership, so I won’t turn this post into a treatise on the subject (most of the
books are crap anyway). I find reference checks to be the most effective way
to measure leadership skills, especially references that involve peers and
individual contributors who worked with — but did not report to — the
candidate. But here are a few interview questions I’ve used in the past:

Is consensus always a good thing?

What’s the difference between management and leadership?
What kinds of people do you like to work with?
What types of people have you found it difficult to work with?
Tell me about a time when a team didn’t gel. Why do you think that
happened, and what have you learned?
How do you get a team to commit to a schedule?
What would somebody do to lose your confidence?
Do you manage people from different functions differently? If so, how?
What have you learned about saying no?
Who has the ultimate accountability for shipping a product?
Have you ever been in a situation where your team has let you down and
you’ve had to take the blame?
How has your tolerance for mistakes changed over the years?
Which do you like first, the good news or the bad news?
What’s your approach to hiring?

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5. Ability to channel multiple points-of-view

Being a product manager requires wearing multiple hats. I often joke that
much of the time your job is to be the advocate for whoever isn’t currently in
the room — the customer, engineering, sales, executives, marketing. That
means you need to be capable of doing other people’s jobs, but smart
enough to know not to. Great PMs know how to channel different points-of-
view. They play devil’s advocate a lot. They tend to be unsatisfied with
simple answers. In one conversation they might tell you the requirements
don’t seem technically feasible and in the next breath ask how any of this will
make sense to the salespeople. There’s one obvious way to evaluate a
candidate’s ability to think through a problem from multiple angles — gets
lots of people in the interview process. I always insist that at a minimum,
representatives from engineering, design, and marketing meet a potential
PM candidate. Depending on the specific role, this list can grow — pre-sales
engineering, support, developer relations, business development, legal, or
customers themselves. Ultimately anyone who will be working with this
person should meet them. Note that I didn’t say everyone needs to meet
them. One carefully selected representative of each key function will suffice.
And it also doesn’t mean everybody has to give a thumbs-up — it’s hard to
build consensus in an interview process as the list of interviewers grows, so
consider the feedback appropriately. But nobody will be able to judge how
well a product manager understands the sales process like a salesperson. I
also strongly recommend that you give specific instructions to the
interviewers, like “I’d like you to see how well this person would understand
the issues you face in channel development, and how well they’d support
you in the field.” Here are some specific product manager interview
questions that I use (these are just examples, feel free to replace the
functional names):

How have you learned to work with sales?

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What is the best way to interface with customers?

What makes marketing tick?
How do you know when design is on the right track?
How should a product manager support business development?
What have you learned about managing up?
What’s the best way to work with the executives?

6. Give me someone who’s shipped something

This last characteristic may be the easiest to evaluate. Unless the position is
very junior, I’ll usually hire product managers who’ve actually shipped a
product. I mean from start to finish, concept to launch. Nothing is a better
indication of someone’s ability to ship great products than having done it
before. Past performance is an indication of future success. Even better, it
gives something tangible to evaluate in a sea of intangibles. When checking
references, I always make sure to talk to important colleagues from a
previous project, especially the PM’s manager and their engineering and
sales or marketing counterparts. (Incidentally, these rules are ordered for a
reason, and as I mentioned under #1 I’ll still take a brilliantly smart PM over a
dimmer experienced one even if the former hasn’t shipped before).

I originally published this on June 14, 2005. Read my later retrospective:

Happy 10th Birthday to How To Hire A Product Manager

And here’s my original preface:

It’s been a while since I was hiring at a startup, and recruiting at a startup is
very different from hiring at a big company. At Yahoo! Search, it seemed like
we were constantly hiring. I did an average of 5-8 interviews a week. It was a
never-ending drumbeat of resumes, interviews, and offer letters. Now, I

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wasn’t always the hiring manager. I only hired a handful of product managers
in my time there. But somebody was always hiring a product manager and I
was usually on the interview team. The first thing you notice at a big
company is the amount of specialization. At a startup, everyone does a little
of everything, so you need strong generalists. More importantly, it’s hard to
predict the future, so you need people who can adapt. You might think
you’re hiring somebody to work on something specific, but that something
might change in a few months. It doesn’t work that way at big companies.
Usually when you’re hiring you have a very specific role in mind, and the
likelihood that that responsibility will change is low. Lots of people were hired
at Yahoo! that probably wouldn’t have been appropriate at a startup. I recall a
lot of post-interview conversations that went something like this — “well, I’m
not sure they’re the perfect candidate, but they do seem suited for this very
specific role, so let’s hire them.” That may work fine at a big company, but it’s
deadly thinking at a startup.

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