How To Hire A Stellar Product Manager For Your Startup

Hiring first product people to your startup can be a daunting job. You have built your baby startup from scratch and now you need to hand over the important parts of your business to someone new. How do you know they are the right person? Can you trust them with decisions?

I’ve spent the last ten years of my life building products and product teams and the last five working with TransferWise. Recently, I have been fortunate to share my successes and mistakes with next-generation start-ups who just start to develop their products and organisations.

Here are my views on how to hire a stellar product person for your fast-moving start-up.

First Product Manager in the Company

If you are the CEO/founder of the company, then you already have the best product manager in your company — YOU!

YOU are in the best position to understand the problems or opportunities that your customers have.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that there are product managers who can come in and make your product successful simply because they have more experience or better market or tech understanding. It’s your company. Therefore, it’s your job to understand how and why the market, customers, or company work.

However, you can ask for help from people with different levels of experience, skills, views, and connections to have a better understanding of the problem, offload some tasks, bring in different views, or simply have a strong “partner in crime.”

First Things to Assess in the Hiring Process

Don’t start with experience but rather from personality. Figure out what makes them tick! Its way more powerful to have someone with a strong motivation and similar values next to you than just experienced person.

• Motivation — Why do they want to join you? Do they have a passion for your specific area? Why do they have that passion?
• Values — How do they make their decisions in everyday life? Are they win–win thinkers? Do they care about others, and are they able to understand them?
• Humility — PMs need to understand that they are not always the smartest ones in the room and that they have a million things to learn from customers, from colleagues, or about the market itself. Are they open to exploring new paths, views, or opportunities? Or are they stuck in their own little world?
• Ambition — Can they think big? I know it’s cliché to say this, but are they able to dream your product up to a ridiculous scale then multiply it by 100 and work backwards to determine how you could actually make it happen?

Do They Walk the Walk or Just Talk the Talk? Test Them!

1. Are they proactive?

Do they approach you? Do they ask questions? Are they interested in customers and products? Or do they wait for you to show the way and ask them questions?

2. What is their risk tolerance?

Are they willing to think out loud and risk being wrong? Do they ask stupid questions, or do they only move when they know the right way? A product manager’s daily job involves constant wandering into unknown paths and the risk of being wrong. If they’re afraid to take those risks, they will be stuck and helpless.

I like to ask about their favourite products and dissect how these actually work. This creates situations where you must assume things and often make mistakes. It also demonstrates how a person’s brain works, whether they are willing to think out loud, and what happens when they are wrong.

3. Can they show you proof from the past?

What amazing stuff have they done in the past? A lot of good future PMs have never been PMs in the past but have done excellent work in their previous job, in school, or even in their personal life. What are they proud of? If you can’t find much there, don’t expect much when they join your team.

People are inherently different and have passions for different things. Use that to your advantage. Find out exactly what makes them tick and figure out if they are truly passionate about it or if they simply said so in order to look “cool”.

Passionate people tend to go into detail and show you the new side of that passion, which teaches you something new. For example, there is a difference between saying, “I like to go to the gym,” versus “I’m fascinated by CrossFit because X, how Y trainer inspires people to do more, what changes I’ve made to my diet and how that changes my body, how I have evolved over time, etc.”

4. Is their thinking analytical?

Can they probe your company and customers enough to identify real problems and opportunities? Can they draw it out and suggest how to make your current situation better?

Literally take them to the whiteboard and build some product flows with them. Explore how different use-cases should be handled, and identify what is an important path and what is not.

5. Can they get things done?

What happens when they don’t have an answer for something? Do they seek different ways to get that answer? Are they willing to go the extra mile to solve problems or gain understanding?

6. Can they inspire others?

How do they inspire people around them? If a PM cannot make others follow them, then it’s going to be particularly hard to mould the product properly. Yes, you can force people to build what you want, but that will not last long. With that attitude, you will destroy a relationship and find it increasingly hard to delegate or solve problems in the future.

7. Ownership! Do they have it?

PMs need to OWN the product. When shit hits the fan, it is fully the PM’s responsibility. It is their product, they designed it, and its flows, but they may not have foreseen the current difficult situation. They are not allowed to point fingers or delegate blame. They need to fix the situation and deal with the core problem later so it doesn’t happen again in the future.

Ask them about bad situations, and dissect what happened, how it was fixed, why the situation happened, what mistakes occurred during the fix to that situation, what you learned, etc. Look for ownership, leadership, humility, lessons, positivity, etc.

Okay Is Not Enough

It’s tempting to hire someone quickly because you continue to see missed opportunities or perhaps your workload is killing you. Think twice, however, before moving too quickly, and learn to manage priorities and time first. Hiring quickly is good, but be sure you don’t hire mediocre talent.

Mediocre people can ease pain but for the wrong reasons. It’s far better to have a painful hole in the company than a mediocre person filling it. This painful hole helps you to prioritise problems and reminds you that you need someone good in that position. Weak people do just enough that you forget you need someone there but not enough to actually fix the problem.

When you scale your business with mediocre talent, you weaken the company over the long term. Remember, A people hire A and B people, B people hire C people, and C people hire D people. This goes all the way down the chain, eventually damaging the quality of your company.

Who You Should Avoid

• People who want to stay in their safe comfort zone (big salary, little ownership, short working hours, etc.) but also want to work in a cool start-up
• Consultants who don’t take ownership of the problem but just help you from the sides and charge you for their time. They can be a good filler at times, but over the long term, you need a team that puts 110% into the product every day.
• Know-it-all people. It’s important to understand that every customer and situation is different; more often than not, you need to make an effort to address every situation as though it’s your first time.

Happy hiring!

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