Experimenting with Hiring Product Managers

I think I messed up.

I’ve been trying to hire a Product Manager for a while now, and I think I went about it the wrong way.

You see, I’m in a bit of a tight spot here. Usually, there’s a trade-off when trying to choose between hiring a senior and a junior employee:

1. More\Less Risk — Experience will dramatically reduce the risk of employees that don’t know the “job”
2. More\Less ‘Cost of Training’ — Less experience will increase the investment in the training of an employee (adding risk that they will leave just as they have become “experienced”)

Let’s call this trade-off “the normal hiring trade-off”, and it’s a trade-off I can handle. But something really weird happens when it comes to PMs — the normal situation breaks. More experience can mean adding A LOT more risk, and less experience might mean investing less in training.

Hiring PMs is Upside Down

How can that be? Well, to understand, let’s take a different profession to help us — accountants! If I’m a master accountant and you give me a list of 10 mid-level accountants, I’ll probably be able to rank them with high certainty between 1 and 10 by looking at their previous jobs, where they went to school, their grades, etc. These signals help me filter out noises and make better decisions.

But with PMs it’s much harder, since different companies and people see product management in completely different ways, which makes it hard to identify the right signals .Though recognizing someone who doesn’t fit isn’t a real problem (I can recognize a bad signal when I see one), getting the people with the right signals can be incredibly hard. Trying to do that in a system that uses modern recruiting techniques like sourcers, HR agencies, etc. can be almost impossible for two reasons:

1. It’s easier for them to miss signals about a candidate’s perception of product management (and this can happen even if you work with AMAZING agencies like Gifthead who can almost read your mind)
2. They won’t know how to signal to the correct candidates that Databand’s product management view is a good fit for them

So what happens is that since the profession of Product Management is perceived so differently, the signals I need to filter out noise and see talent are almost impossible to detect.

I’m not just venting for the sake of it though. I’m a PM. And as a PM, I know a “good” problem when I see one. I’ve been trying to hire a “good” PM for a while, and I didn’t even reach the stage of seeing enough PMs that think of Product Management in the same way as me. This is a huge problem I’ll try to tackle in the next few posts.

The goal of this series will be to start a recruitment process for PMs that impact Databand and grow with us as people and professionals. I’m going to start a series of posts that tell you what kind of Product Management happens at Databand, and what signals we’re looking for to identify a good PM.

I’m going to measure this experiment by looking at the qualified leads I’m getting from this series, and I’m going to share these stats with the community for transparency. Qualified leads are leads that passed the first interview.

To start, a basic definition: Being a product manager at a start-up means constantly looking at your market’s critical pain points, choosing the pain points that the company\squad should focus on, designing the solution that would alleviate that pain and leading the execution of that solution.

How would good PMs do that?

1. They will be obsessed with validating the right problems, making their assumptions explicit and constantly looking to create a feedback loop between the market, the product they are building and the assumptions they made.
2. They will understand they are not the smartest person in the room and will make sure the entire squad knows the problem they are solving so they will be able to offer solutions.

The above is how we see product management @ Databand, and it’s how we try to work. We fuck up a lot, and we succeed a lot, and I’ll try to share how and where in the future.

I want this experiment to lead to amazing candidates that can be PMs. I want them to reach out via email and I promise to personally read everything. Who should reach out?

1. Anyone who thinks about product management as above but feels he’s currently just building features without purpose
2. Anyone who wants to join a company that works in a true cross-functional way
3. Anyone that wants to work in an environment that constantly feedbacks itself and encourages mentoring and growing

Notice I didn’t mention your experience, where you learned or where you come from. I truly don’t care. BUT, it’s your responsibility to signal we’re part of the same profession, and that you’re good.

Good signals:

1. Insights about product management from books\blogs\podcasts you consume (working with devs, creating product culture, validating problems, etc.)
2. Impact you created in your workplace that reflects how we think about being a PM
3. Impact you created\tried to create and failed miserably when doing side projects
4. Links to things you’ve written in the past that show you’re a thinker with a sharp product\business mind
5. Insights about my own company and market (you can see a demo of Databand’s product by our CEO Josh Benamram for reference)
6. You have a good PM friend who will vouch for you, and will do the signaling for you (and for himself)

Bad Signals:

1. Reshuffling my definition of being a PM above and sending it to me
2. Telling me that you can be an amazing PM if someone just gave you the chance wo giving me good signals
3. Just sending a CV

Are you a good PM who wants to be part of this experiment? Shoot me an email to shani.keynan@databand.ai and make sure the subject contains “PM experiment hire”.

Just want to know how it ends? Just follow me here and on Linkedin.