Hiring a socially motivated product manager

How might we hire socially motivated product people…who might not know they are product people yet?

Thanks Google, you really helped me narrow it down

This week I tried to write a product manager job description from scratch for the first time. It was really hard. Not because I couldn’t think of what to include, but because it quickly ballooned into a giant wish list of attributes and experiences.

The more I consulted articles written by my product heroes to “make sure I’d covered everything”, the more I added to my list of what a great product person looks like. It was all really important, and every shiny new bullet point seemed more vital than the last.

What made it even harder is that we’re a socially driven tech non-profit (or ‘tech for good’ if you prefer). As well as being a good product manager, we want this person to genuinely care about the issues we work on. We want them to be a socially minded product manager.

So from a massive list of sources (see end of post) I ended up with my first draft:

Product manager attributes:

• Curiosity — you can’t wait to learn about and understand new things
• All about the problem — you’re obsessive about the problem you’re solving and the people you’re solving it for. You’re an intuitive researcher.
• Prioritisation — you’re a master of saying “no” and focussing on the right things
• Predisposed to action — when you see an issue, you don’t sit on your hands, you challenge, you get things done
• Outcomes focussed — you care about solving problems (outcomes) not on looking busy (outputs)
• Communication — you can get ideas out there clearly, with the engineer, the designer or the CEO
• Relationships — you can build strong, trusting relationships, even with people who don’t work in the same way as you.
• Technology — you understand what can be done now on web and mobile and other platforms and you’re excited about what’s coming next
• Design — you recognise good design when you see it — you have a sixth sense for what a good user experience looks and feels like.
• Detail and quality — you ‘sweat the detail’ and do the hard work needed to make something you’ve produced feel easy and elegant
• Data with empathy — you’re excited about discovering insights in a spreadsheet but you’re quick to relate your findings back to real people
• People — you can put yourself in others’ shoes and understand things from their perspective (both with your users and with your colleagues)
• Heart — you care about social issues: they’re the kind of problems you want to solve (this one is specific to us and our work in ‘tech for good’)

Useful experience:

• You will have worked in agile scrum teams before
• You’ll have some experience of writing code or hacking together your own ideas
• You’ll understand the principles of the Lean Startup and how to take a hypothesis based approach to product development.
• You will have eaten the following roughage (books) for breakfast: The Lean Startup, Sprint, Hooked, Design of Everyday Things, Thinking Fast and Slow

But as the list expanded and the job description got longer, my colleagues started to protest.

“First of all you can’t expect everyone who applies so fulfil all these criteria – you’re severely reducing our applicant pool and we need to fill this role soon.”

“And secondly how do we assess candidates against these things – a lot of them are really subjective. You need to reduce this down to 3–5 attributes that are clear, easy to demonstrate and easy to assess. You need to reduce ‘what does a great product person look like’ down to a maximum of 5 check boxes.”

Following an initial panic, I realised that I was actually in the exact position that I would use to challenge any product manager: I needed to prioritise. To go from a list of features that might solve a problem to the ones I’d build first to validate my assumptions. I needed a lean startup recruitment model…

To take this approach I needed to start at the end and define the problem that needs to be solved. For us at Social Finance it’s not as simple as ‘hire a great product person’. We’re a socially driven tech non-profit. So firstly we’re looking for people who are socially motivated and are prepared to prioritise social impact over some of the perks you might get in a stereotypical startup.

And secondly we’re not looking for a ‘first product hire’ type role where the person would need to be totally self teaching and self motivating. We’ve got a strong product team, so the new person would get a lot of peer support – in fact they wouldn’t necessarily need to have a product background at all, just the right frame of mind and a desire to learn. In many respects, we are happy for social motivation to come before product experience (which can be learned).

So the challenge was something like:

How might we attract socially motivated product people who might not know that they’re product people yet?

The question became ‘which of the attributes identified are the ones that great ‘potential’ product people would most identify with and therefore apply.’

I’m lucky enough to work in an environment where I’m surrounded by a lot of smart people who really care about social issues. In the 6 months I’ve worked with them I’ve built up a bit of a secret list of ‘which of my colleagues would make great product people’. These are the kind of people we might want to hire.

So I ran through the job spec with these people in mind, asking myself the following questions:

1. Would they understand my ‘product nerd’ language? If not, simplify it and make it more human.
2. Are there criteria that they would never be able to fulfil due to lack of product experience? If so, cut those things.
3. What big attributes do all these people have in common? Would they self identify as having those attributes? Make those things the headline themes so that they’re really clear and make these people think “that’s me”.

I then showed the job spec to the people I had in mind and validated my initial observations with their feedback. Yep, it didn’t make much sense to them and they definitely didn’t think “this is me”!

So I iterated. At every step I took it back to a selection of colleagues (and a few other friends who fit the same profile) and got their feedback. After 3 or 4 drafts we got to this:

You love learning:

• You take an analytical, hypothesis based approach to problem solving.
• You’re curious and want to understand how things work so that you can make them better.
• You’re eager to collaborate and learn from different people, from developers to social workers to the vulnerable people we are trying to support.

You make things simple

• You can breakdown problems and identify where to start in order to quickly deliver impact.
• You can turn complex ideas and concepts into language anyone can understand.
• You can translate data and insights into solutions that address real world problems.

You care

• You build strong and trusting relationships.
• You’re hands on and willing to do what is needed to help the team.
• You care about social issues — these are the problems you want to solve.

This felt like a good definition of a ‘socially motivated product manager who doesn’t know they’re a product manager yet’.

You can see the full job description here.

Now our challenge is getting this out to the right networks…of people who don’t know they’re a product manager yet…If you read this and thought “that sounds like me” or “I know people like that” then it would be great if you could share it!

Some sources of ‘what makes a great product manager’ that I used to make the first draft (there are lots more, obviously — see google)

• Ben Horowitz — Good product manager/ Bad product manager
• Ken Norton — How to hire a product manager
• Josh Elman — A product manager’s job
• Rosemary King (Mind the Product) — How Curious: mindset of a product manager
• Taylor Wescoatt — Being the first product manager
• Brent Tworetzky — Product manager skills by seniority level