You don’t know how to find a good Product Manager.
You want a superstar Product Manager (PM) on your team. Everyone does. You know that as you scale, this is a critical function for your company so obviously you want to find the best person possible. The problem you face (and you’re not alone in this — a lot of people have the same problem whether they admit it or not) is that you don’t really know what makes a product manager good, let alone great.
You’ve heard phrases like “CEO of the product”, or “own the product vision”, but those are both pretty vague. It’s not really your fault — the reason you don’t know is likely because you’ve never seen all the things that a good PM really does. Given the fundamentally cross-functional nature of product management, most people in other roles only see a fraction of what a good PM does. This lack of awareness is easy to overlook, so it’s not a surprise that the role description that gets written tends to look for exactly the wrong things.
You’re looking for the wrong thing
Most companies start by looking for a PM who has some depth of experience in a specific vertical. This makes sense on paper. And it’s comfortable because it works for most other roles where the depth of vertical experience is a key indicator of how well that person can do the job. It’s also an easy trap to fall into when you’re writing job descriptions for front-end engineers, enterprise marketing analysts, blockchain engineers, or medical hardware business development specialists. Requirements like “5 years of fintech”, or “7 years in AI” make filtering resumes easy. They are also the reason why you are passing over the best PMs.
What is a Horizontal PM?
Great Product Managers are not the ones who know every detail of the vertical. They are horizontal.
Horizontal Product Managers understand product management. They tend to have a high IQ but also have a very high Emotional Quotient (EQ), bring a wide range of skills to the table but are incredibly humble. They navigate the personalities and priorities of various stakeholders to their various perspectives of the truth. They listen to the customer and to the user, balancing those needs, and they get insights from all sorts of places.
Horizontal is good, but vertical is actually bad
I say that having too much depth in a particular vertical makes a worse product manager, especially as you look for senior product leaders. Their vertical expertise causes them to be filled with industry bias and dogma. They all too often fall into the trap of ‘that’s how things are’. The reality is that the real value that ‘vertical depth’ gives you are the most learnable of things. Whether it’s understanding COPPA compliance, the nuances of UDP vs HTTP over mobile networks, the paper workflows for industrial projects, or how to generate good labeled data to train a neural network — any of these can be learned with a combination of some research and direct interaction with the subject matter experts.
The lack of ‘vertical depth’ is what enables a great Product Manager to actually identify risks and opportunities that others miss and they naturally build trust with all parts of the team while doing so. They communicate extraordinarily well with everyone, be they customers, end-users, sales & business development folks, or your engineering team, in ways that truly connect. They build great and real partnerships with not just their ‘business’, but with everyone.
Want a great PM? Look for this.
To find the best Product Managers, you need to change how you think and treat this role differently than most of the others. You need to look for qualities. Look for people who are thoughtful communicators and insatiably curious. People who can shift gears effortlessly between technical discussions with Engineering, brainstorming roll-out plans with Marketing, and find the real pain a customer feels with Business Development. Find folks who naturally are able to translate between Sales and Engineering, especially when the two groups are arguing while saying the same thing. Look for people whose curiosity drives them to understand the ‘why’ behind the status quo and whose humility empowers them to ask the “dumb” question that no one else will for fear of looking foolish. When you find that, hang on to them.
