Recruiting Product Managers

Marty Cagan argues that great product managers are rare but identifiable, and that the best way to find them is to screen for a specific set of traits and skills. He stresses that traits like product passion, customer empathy, intelligence, integrity and an owner's attitude are hard to teach, so they should anchor the search. Skills such as applying technology, focus, time management, writing, presenting and business fluency can be learned. He recommends hunting for these people across the company rather than defaulting to marketing or MBA hires, then developing them through mentoring and training.

01Key takeaways

• Screen first for hard-to-teach traits like passion for products, customer empathy, and integrity, then assess skills.
• Ask candidates about products they love and why, plus bad products, to test for genuine passion.
• Probe problem-solving with follow-up questions that change the scenario, watching how candidates handle not knowing the answer.
• Assess written skills directly by asking candidates to bring strategy docs or white papers.
• Look for strong performers in engineering, support, sales and marketing, and invite them into product roles.
• Distinguish important work from urgent work; overwork and firefighting usually signal poor prioritization, not poor effort.

02Key sections

Personal traits and attitude

Traits like product passion, customer empathy, intelligence, work ethic, integrity, confidence and an owner's attitude form the foundation, since they are difficult to teach. Cagan suggests concrete interview probes for each, such as asking about favorite products or past stressful situations.

Learnable skills

Skills such as applying technology, focus, time management, written and presentation skills, and business fluency can be developed over time if the underlying traits are present. Each skill is tied to how a product manager actually spends their day and influences others.

Where to find product managers

Cagan notes that strong candidates often already work inside the company in engineering, support, sales or marketing. He argues that MBA hires are not a reliable substitute because business schools rarely teach product management.

Developing talent

His preferred approach is to identify high-potential people with the right traits and build their product skills through training, informal mentoring and formal development programs. This approach treats product management as a skill set that can be grown in-house.

03From the post

“A partnership dedicated to teaching best practices to product teams and product leaders”

04Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.