How to find a good product manager

Find a good product manager

"Where can I find an excellent product manager?" The CEO often asks me this question.

I usually answer this: excellent product manager is actually in the company, but he is in other positions, there may be user Experience Designer, software engineer, system engineer, waiting for Bole to explore. Whether you're recruiting a product manager from within the company or outside the company, you have to know what the right person should be. In this chapter, I will enumerate the qualities I think the product manager should have.

Personal qualities and attitudes

Technology can be learned, but quality is difficult to cultivate, and some quality is a successful product manager indispensable.

~ ~ Passion for Products

There are such a group of people, they have a instinctive love of products, their own life in all things as a product, with the love of good products and respect. This enthusiasm is the quality of the product manager, they are the driving force to overcome difficulties and improve products. This enthusiasm can infect team members and motivate everyone.

Distinguishing this trait is easy, allowing candidates to talk about their favorite products and why they like it, talk about products in different areas and the products he hates, and ask each other if he has a chance to improve his favorite products. Enthusiasm is difficult to disguise, hypocritical affectation easily barb.

~ ~ User Position

The ideal product Manager does not necessarily come from the target market of the product (which is good or bad), but he must be integrated into the target market. This trait is especially rare for high-tech companies that manufacture mass products. We tend to understand users and markets from our own perspective. In fact, the experience, preferences, values, perceptual ability, endurance, and technical understanding of the target user are likely to be quite different from ours.

Ask the candidate about the product's target market, and let him talk about how to change his mind. Understand how the candidate feels about the target market, and the most important thing is to see if the other person is respecting the target market or trying to change the user's habits.

Transposition thinking is particularly important for internationalized products and products for specific geographies. Although there are similarities among cultures, there are many differences. Some differences do not matter to the product, others are important. Should examine whether the candidate is enough to understand the target market, can distinguish between these two kinds of difference.

~ ~ Intelligence

People's intellectual level is irreplaceable. Product management requires insight and judgment, so you must have a sharp mind. Diligence is certainly necessary, but it is far from enough to be diligent in this work.

Recruiting smart people is a easier task, and the results depend largely on the ability and reliability of recruiters. As the saying goes, "Birds of a feather flock together". One way to do this is to test the candidate's ability to solve problems. Microsoft's commendable, in-depth and effective interview, that is, to examine the applicant's ability to solve problems, usually by one or more field experts on a question to the candidate for in-depth examination. The interviewer does not care whether the candidate knows the correct answer, but rather the idea and method of solving the problem (intelligence is better than knowledge). If the candidate answers correctly, the interviewer will slightly adjust the question and ask the candidate how to cope with the new situation. Repeat the process until the candidate is forced to deal with a situation where he does not know the answer and say the solution.

~ ~ Professional Ethics

Each team role has a different commitment and effort. Product managers shoulder The future and fate of the product, is not suitable for people who covet ease. Even with the skills of time management and product management, product managers are still putting a lot of effort into the product. Can a successful product manager have time to enjoy a leisurely family life? As long as I have enough experience, I believe I can do it. However, if you expect to work only 40 hours a week, leaving your work behind after work is unrealistic.

How much effort does a successful product manager have to pay? On this issue, I have always been frank with the candidate, product management work can not be measured in time, the amount of pay can not be too much. Most of the "firefighters" who come in for emergencies are not the right product managers.

During the long project cycle, the effort and commitment of the product manager is not static. Some stages are more relaxed, some are tense. But a competent product manager's focus on the product and the degree of anxiety and willingness to work for it will not change.

~ ~ Integrity

In all product team members, the product manager is the best embodiment of the company and product values. Usually the product manager does not directly manage team members and cannot ask others to execute orders, so he must influence and convince his colleagues by action. This influence is based on mutual trust and respect and requires that the product manager be an upright person.

The product manager is the pivot between the product team, the sales team, and the company executives, often dealing with various issues such as early delivery and meeting the special requirements of the major customers. The way the product manager deals with these problems, colleagues look at them.

Trust and respect need time to develop, product managers only through the work to show their quality and ability to become a real team leader. If the product manager treats colleague lacks sincerity, has the selfish intention, a bowl of water end uneven, then certainly will affect the overall unity and the work efficiency. Although the product manager does not have to be proficient in everything, he should know what each member is best at doing, respect the willingness of everyone to exert their work expertise, and fully trust everyone.

It is more difficult to investigate whether a person is upright or not than to examine his intelligence. For those who have work experience, ask them how to deal with the pressure in the work, and more details of the work.

~ ~ Confidence

Many people believe that experience can lead to self-confidence. If only experience can build confidence, why do many product managers who have worked for years have no confidence? Instead, college graduates who have just entered society tend to be confident (though this confidence usually comes from ignorance of their own situation).

Self-confidence is a very important quality. Company executives, product teams, and sales teams need to see the product manager's confidence that their time, money and effort will not go down the drain. Confident people are more persuasive and more likely to become leaders they want to follow.

~ ~ Attitude

A competent product manager regards himself as the CEO of a product and is willing to take full responsibility for the final success or failure of the product, and never find excuses. Although he understood that the product on time to successfully listed to overcome many difficulties-the development of difficult, long development time, high cost, product complexity, etc., but he understood that it is his responsibility to foresee and solve these problems.

This is not to say that the product manager must be respectful to oversee everyone's work, but that when there is a problem he should take the responsibility in time, when the progress is smooth he should give everyone encouragement in time. Competent product managers know that although the realization of the product can not be separated from everyone's assistance, but he should be responsible for their own product creativity.

Skills

Mastering some important skills is the key to creating a successful product. I believe that all skills can be acquired as long as they have excellent personal qualities.

~ ~ The ability to use technology

Many successful product managers are engineers, because the planning of products depends to a large extent on understanding the new technology and how to solve the related problems.

Good product managers do not need to invent or implement new technologies themselves, but they must have the ability to understand the potential of technology and the application of technology.

There are many ways to develop an understanding of technology, to attend training courses, to read books and articles, to consult with programmers and architects, and to participate in the brainstorming of development teams.

~ ~ Attention

The product manager should give priority to solving important problems. There is a lot of interference in the process of developing products. The ability to focus on key issues, to restrain the urge to increase functionality, to be unaffected by key people or important customers depends on whether the product manager is strong enough to be disciplined-not only to comply with the company system but also to be strict with himself.

Almost all products have some less important features-they have no effect on increasing sales and customer satisfaction. If these features are removed, the product will be even more popular with users for simplicity and ease of use. I recommend filtering excess functionality, shortening research and development time, reducing production costs, and making products available earlier.

~ Time Management

The world of email, instant messaging and mobile phones is full of distractions. You may come to work early in the morning, work hard all day, even eat and drink, and come home late at night to find that you have not finished an important job. Time is used to "fire" and deal with "emergency" incidents.

Skilled and quick to distinguish important tasks and urgent tasks, reasonable planning and scheduling is the product manager's necessary skills. If the product Manager is unable to concentrate on the truly important tasks, the product will inevitably be in the wrong.

I know too many product managers who work 70 hours a week and are exhausted. They devote all their time and energy to their work, and their stamina to the limit. The most terrifying fact for them is that they do nothing but useless work. To this end, I intend to include in the training courses time management and reasonable arrangements for the task of the content. The product manager's time should be used to change the status quo, rather than get tired of participating in meetings and conferences and replying to emails. There are many things that are not worth doing.

~ ~ Communication Skills

Although communication skills can be learned, it takes a few more than a few lessons to achieve excellence. The ability to communicate (both verbal and written) is a necessary skill for a product manager, and as mentioned above, the product manager can only reasoning and never be able to suppress others by position.

Verbal communication skills can be tested in an interview, and the ability to test written expression requires a different approach. I often advise candidates to carry text materials to prove their written skills, such as product planning documents that do not involve patents.

Note that if a candidate uses a non-native speaker with an accent or a slight grammatical error that does not represent a poor communication skill, the perfect pronunciation and grammar are not necessary as long as the speech is clear, comprehensible and persuasive.

Product managers spend a lot of time writing emails, product documentation, planning, and similar product analysis documents. Smart Product managers don't waste time writing things that no one sees, and when they decide to write, they're going to do the best, Yanzhiyouwu, convincing.

Written expression must be clear, concise, because colleagues (especially company executives) will be based on these words to evaluate the product manager's work. Sometimes text materials are the only basis for their judgments.

Another common form of communication is the presentation. For many people, speaking to an audience is not easy, and it is more difficult to express ideas effectively. Still, speech is a potluck for product managers. Product managers must be in the shortest possible time to the company executives, major customers, sales team to explain the content and importance of the product.

We've all heard bad speeches--the slides are going on and on and on, the speaker's rigid recitation of the item, the audience has to struggle to figure out the meaning of each chart, not to grasp the focus, not to understand the value.

On the contrary, successful product managers minimize the number of slides in their presentations, their speeches are passionate, focused, data-full, compelling, and never timed out (even prematurely). They prefer to ask questions and try to explain their understanding to both the questioner and the audience, even when they are confronted with questions that are temporarily unanswerable. Jerry Wessman (Jerry Weissman's speech winning: The Art of storytelling) is a very good guide to improving the level of speech.

Business Skills

As a spokesperson for the product team, the product manager coordinates the work between the team and the Finance Department, the marketing department, the sales team, and the company's executives-and must use the concepts and terminology that these people understand.

I think the product manager should have bilingual skills. This does not mean Chinese and English, but a product manager who can discuss technology with programmers and discuss cost structure, marginal effects, market share, product positioning and branding with management and marketers.

For these reasons, many product managers graduate from business school. Businesses need people who know business, so they hire MBAs. While MBAs can grow into good product managers, business skills are generally just one of the many skills that a product manager needs to have, and can be learned from outside the business school. For example, when a technician enters the product management field, it is common to learn business skills through reading and training.

Where to recruit product managers?

People with these qualities and skills are rare, and are as rare as good products. There is no more important position than product manager, so it is necessary to examine the candidate with strict standards.

There are many different opinions about recruiting product managers. Many companies think they need people who are in the marketing department or who have an MBA, just as a textbook defines a product manager. This view may have been true, but it is now a fallacy.

Many companies like to recruit MBA graduates from top business schools, with a bachelor's degree in technology, and with an industry experience. But don't forget that MBA programs rarely involve product management. If you think today's MBA graduates know how to manage their products, that's a big mistake.

The most effective way to recruit is to find people with the above traits potential, and train them into high-quality product managers through training courses and mentoring. These people may be hiding inside the company. I know a lot of good product managers who used to be programmers, user experience designers, customer service people, technical support staff, marketers, and even target users. They use their own experience to further improve product management work. For the same reason, executives should listen to the different positions of employees on product management recommendations. This is a valuable experience for executives.

Is industry experience important?

A friend of mine recently told me about a product Manager candidate (David) who I once worked with David. My friend is head of a mass network service company, he likes David very much, but he has a question: "David is an expert in enterprise software products, is he suitable for us?"

I couldn't help laughing and told him I had a similar problem four years ago. David's current supervisor asked me, "Is this person very good at System software, but is he able to do enterprise-class software?"

In fact, David's education has nothing to do with system software, enterprise-class software, mass network services, or even software technology. He is a financial background, very smart, good at fast access to new areas, understanding of new technologies.

Many product managers have been hired for their industry experience. I am often asked whether the product manager must have field and industry experience, and I think that for some products, expertise is necessary, for example, to develop a defibrillator, preferably a heart care product manager. But this is an example, not a principle.

I even think that a senior industry experience may be detrimental to the work of a product manager, because people who have long been in a particular industry often fall into a common psychological trap: they think they know the target customer and are blind to self-confidence. Product managers should be used to putting aside their preconceptions. People with experienced industry experience can do this, but they have to do more to keep an open mind.

I am not saying that the management of products does not require industry knowledge, on the contrary, I think it is absolutely necessary to understand the domain knowledge of the product (superficial understanding does not count). I believe that through active learning, high-quality product managers can quickly become familiar with the new industry. In my own case, it takes only two or three months to know the extent to which the new industry is confident in developing a product strategy.

I believe that the development of enterprise-class software, system software, mass network services and consumer electronic products have different skills requirements. For example, enterprise-class software users are a small number of large enterprises (rather than millions of consumers), so there are different means to understand the requirements, definition of products; different sales channels for various types of products; If the product involves a hardware device, you must understand what impact it will have on processes and progress; If you are developing a mass network service , you must know how to scale management and community management.

Overall, I think the product manager has about 80% skills and talents that can be used for different types of products.

I am not trying to belittle the value of experience, but I find that the most valuable experience is not industry knowledge or technology (which may be outdated), but the process of creating excellent products, the ability to lead a product team, the experience of coping with product expansion, the individual's perception of himself, and the ability to motivate.

Closely related to industry knowledge is the technical expertise, the industry once very much value the relationship between the two. On one occasion, I saw an enterprise-class software company recruiting product managers who wanted to have experience developing Linux products. Sure, there's a lot of difference between operating systems, but if a product manager doesn't have the ability to deal with the impact of different operating systems on the product, it's much more troublesome to wait for him than the lack of Linux knowledge.

Although the High-tech products industry requires fast learning of new technologies, it is more important to foresee how the application technology can solve the problem rationally. Technology is developing rapidly, so product managers must be good at fast learning new technologies and solve new problems. When I interview candidates, I do not care about the knowledge they have mastered, but only their learning ideas. Let them recall, for example, what knowledge they need to learn, how long they need to learn, and how to take advantage of it.

Age is not a problem

Excellent product managers at all ages. Why do people stand out when they are 25 years old? First of all, the Internet is really popular after 1995, so today's 25-year-old people and our experience in the Internet as much. As the internet sprang up, teens quickly learned techniques that adults could not understand. Second, experience may take time to accumulate, but other qualities, such as intelligence and passion for products, have nothing to do with age.

When I was working for Netscape's Young founder Anderson (Marc Andreessen), I had to adapt to the fact that I was working for the younger 20. But when I discovered his ability to absorb new technology and persuade others, I quickly forgot his age. People who have never met him will think that people who have this kind of business ability are at least 40 years old.

Finding a good product manager cannot be judged by age, sex or race. I know there are still a lot of biases in the industry. For example, due to the importance of communication skills, we try to recruit English-speaking candidates.

I'm not trying to condemn anyone, I just want to remind you that unintentional bias may make us miss out on the good product manager. The next time a college graduate comes to you with his product idea, you might want to hear it, and his idea is likely to be the next Facebook.