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A single great hire can change the trajectory of a team. A single bad one can set it back by six months. Hiring deserves more rigour and more time than most teams give it - especially for product roles, where the work is hard to define and the signals are easy to misread 🎯

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What you’re actually hiring for

Before posting a job description, be specific about what problem you’re hiring to solve. “We need a PM” is not a hiring brief. “We need a PM who can own discovery for our enterprise segment, has experience running qualitative research without a dedicated researcher, and can build trust with a sceptical engineering team” is. Kate Leto’s Hiring Product Managers makes this case compellingly - the failure mode in PM hiring is hiring for a generic PM profile rather than the specific context and challenges the role requires. Whole self, not just skills.

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Structured vs. unstructured interviews

Unstructured interviews - where each interviewer asks whatever they feel like - are consistently less predictive of job performance than structured ones. They also introduce more bias, because interviewers end up assessing how similar the candidate is to themselves. Structured interviews use the same questions across all candidates, with defined criteria for what a strong answer looks like. More work upfront, better signal overall 💡

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What to look for in PM interviews

Beyond the obvious product knowledge and communication skills:
  • How they talk about failure - do they reflect honestly or deflect to external factors?
  • Their questions to you - a strong candidate asks questions that reveal genuine curiosity about the role and the company
  • How they handle ambiguity - product work is inherently uncertain; someone who needs complete information before acting is a red flag
  • Evidence of learning - have they changed their mind on something significant based on evidence?

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The reference call problem

Reference calls are almost universally positive because candidates choose their references. More useful: ask for references from people who’ve managed them, been managed by them, and worked alongside them - not just their fans. And actually call them rather than sending a form 🙌

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Hiring for PM specifically

The PM role is particularly hard to hire for because it’s so context-dependent. Someone exceptional at a seed-stage startup may struggle in an enterprise environment and vice versa. Assessing fit for the specific context matters as much as assessing raw capability. Lesson learned: the best hiring decisions I’ve been part of all had one thing in common - we were clear about what we needed before we started looking. The worst ones started with “let’s see who applies and figure out what we need.”