Stop hiring product managers like project managers

There’s a quiet disaster happening in product organizations right now. Companies are hiring armies of people with “product manager” on their business cards, but they’re treating them like project management with better vocabulary.

Frankly I see it a lot with enterprise clients. Teams are drowning in tactical decisions and they’re optimizing for activity over outcomes.

The result is not ideal: Products that ship on time but solve all the wrong problems. Roadmaps packed with features nobody asked for. Teams that can execute but have no clue why they’re building what they’re building.

THE PROJECT MANAGER TRAP

This is what most companies get wrong: They hire product managers to manage timelines, coordinate stakeholders, and shepherd features through development. Basically, they want glorified project managers who can speak startup.

But that’s not what product management is. Product management is about making strategic decisions under uncertainty. It’s about understanding users so deeply you can anticipate their needs. It’s about saying no to good ideas so you can say yes to great ones.

Project managers ask, “How do we build this faster?” Product managers ask, “Should we build this at all?”

WHAT REAL PRODUCT MANAGEMENT LOOKS LIKE

In the workshops we run with C-suite leaders, this topic comes up constantly. What separates great product managers from the rest? Three things keep coming up:

• Curiosity over compliance. The best product managers don’t just execute whatever roadmap is handed to them. They question assumptions, dig into user behavior, and push back when the plan doesn’t make sense. Curiosity is one of the top traits we hire for, by the way.
• Customer obsession over feature factories. Great product managers spend more time with users than stakeholders. They can tell you not just what features customers want, but why they want them and what happens when they don’t get them. There will never be a replacement for direct conversation with users.
• Strategic thinking over task management. Project managers focus on the how and when. Product managers obsess over the what and why. They’re constantly asking: “What problem are we actually solving? Is this the right problem?”

A SIMPLE HIRING TEST

Want to know if you’re hiring a truly product-focused individual? Instead of asking candidates to walk through their process, ask them to defend a decision where they killed a feature everyone else wanted to build.

Great candidates will light up. They’ll tell you about the time they said no to the CEO’s pet project because the data didn’t support it. Or when they bravely pivoted the roadmap based on a real conversation with a real user.

Weak candidates will struggle with this. They’ll probably talk around stakeholder alignment and delivery timelines because it’s what they’re focused on.

THE STRATEGIC DIFFERENCE

Companies that get it right understand that product management is a strategic function, not an operational one. Product managers should be thinking three steps ahead, not three sprints ahead.

They should be the people who can walk into a room full of executives and say, “I know we planned to build X, but after talking to users, I think we should build Y instead,” and have the conviction to back it up.

That requires a completely different skill set than managing Jira tickets and giving progress or status updates in Slack.

A BETTER PATH FORWARD

Companies serious about product excellence need to rethink how they hire for the product management craft. Stop optimizing for people who can run efficient meetings and start looking for people who can make hard decisions with incomplete information. Because here’s the thing: In a time where everyone can ship quickly (accelerated by the Bolts and Loveables of the world), competitive advantage comes from shipping the right things.

George Brooks is CEO and founder of Crema.