How To Hire A Great Product Marketing Manager

A Product Marketing Manager is a key position. A great one can be invaluable. A bad one can set your marketing back by at least one year. Therefore you must be choosy and try to get a good one. I suggest 3 things need to be investigated : ideally through 3 different interviews. If not , there different people can ask these 3 types of questions.

1. Knowledge of Product Management : Estimating. Business Modeling, Marketing Data 
2. Leading : Customer Leadership and communication, Team Leadership
3. Working cross-functionally : within the org chart, in difficult situations

Knowledge of Product Management:
Whether the candidate can solve problems and think critically

Estimating skills (15 Minutes ) 

Product Managers should be able to process a wide variety of data and hypothesis quickly

using making assumptions and simple back-of-the-envelope estimates. Questions
 

1. What is the total annual revenue of a snack stall at a railway station.
2. What is the total annual revenue of a typical movie theater in Mumbai?
3. What must be the total manpower cost of each of these ?

How Business Model Ties Up Everything (15 Minutes )
Product managers must know that the success does not lie only in features, technology, pricing and communication but also in how all these operate within the context of Business model as a whole. Questions

a)      Based on what you know, how would you identify and validate the best business model for us to pursue for one of our products? Then, for each of the following as “Why did you choose this model? What other alternatives you considered and discarded?

i)        Revenue model

ii)      Gross margin model

iii)    Operating model

iv)    Working capital model

v)      Investment model

Based on the answer you can conclude ( trainee level : focuses only on product features, price and communications, Junior level : uses “ business model” as a checklist, Expert : understands various components and how they interact and  reinforces each other. Master : capable of disrupting )

Marketing Data for Problem Solving (15 Minutes)
Smart product managers use data effectively to make better decisions.

c)      Ask open ended question like “Tell me about how you use data to make decisions”. What you want hear is if the candidate talks of how decisions are linked to what you want to find, quantitative and qualitative research, interviews, questionnaires, discussion guides, focus groups, cross tabulations, dashboards, actionable metrics (not vanity metrics).

d)     If the candidate cannot figure this out alone, ask direct questions : How to build a dashboard for XYZ?  What metrics would you track for ABC decision?   What you want to hear is lifetime value, per-customer metrics, events, funnel analysis and cohort metrics.

e)      Can you walk me through how you might do a funnel analysis for one of our products? Rapidly and clearly doing this exercise will tell you a lot about the candidate’s ability to think on-the-fly and how smart he or she is about data analysis.

Leading through communication and interpersonal skills

To evaluate the ability to influence and motivate, advocacy for customers and key stakeholders, confidence and assertiveness, Attitude and pace, Sociability and team skills, Honesty and integrity

Customer Leadership & Communication Skills ( 15 minutes) 

a)      Can we talk about how you interacted with customers in your most recent product role? What you expect to hear is the readiness to “get out of the office” to talk  directly to  customers, running experiments, and iterating to improve the product and selling nas quickly as possible,

b)      Imagine you get this job and I am a prospective customer for the product XYZ and I know nothing about your product or your company. How would you interview me about my “must have” problems and whether or not your product solves them for me.

c)      Your customer feedback shows that they prefer a particular feature but it does not align with your company’s long term strategy. How do you respond to your users – what would you exactly say? Make sure the candidate can say no to a customer when necessary: Can you talk to me about a time when you had to say no to a customer? Why did you have to say no? How did you handle it?

d)     If the candidate will manage an existing product, ask : imagine you’re taking over a mature product and you find out that customer issues are being dealt with reactively and much of the team that built the product is no longer with the company. What would you do to be more proactive about prioritizing fixes and enhancements?

e)      Test the candidate’s customer communication skills under pressure: Imagine you have recently deployed a major release of an enterprise software-as-a-service product. Unfortunately, you have found a bug that was missed in testing. Your QA group tells you this will impact less than 1% of users, but for those 1% it will be very bad. What do you do? Ask to actually write the email (during the interview).

Team (Engineering and Design) Leadership Skills (15 Minutes)
Find out how the candidate would interact with engineering in different situations:

a)      Imagine you give your engineering team requirements for 8 features for a product release. Engineering tells you 2 of your requirements are not possible, but they can implement the other 6. They also say they would like to add two additional requirements of their own. How do you respond? (You want a candidate  who is open to ideas from engineering, especially if they are good ideas and would make the product much better). How does the candidate deal with requirements engineering says are not possible?

b)      Ask the candidate to give an example of when he or she had to influence engineering to build a specific feature: Can you talk to me about a time when you had to influence engineering to build a particular feature? You are looking for evidence that the candidate can influence engineering and earn their respect: How do you earn respect from the engineering team? How do you get a team to commit to a schedule? Get a sense for the candidate’s breadth of experience in working with engineering teams: Can you talk to me about some of the challenges of working with product development teams?

c)      Has the candidate worked with rock star engineers before? Does the candidate know how to work with great engineers, stand up to them when necessary, and get out of their way when they’re doing what they do best? Talk to me about the best engineer you’ve ever worked with. Why was the engineer so good? What results did you achieve together?

d)     You have provided your design team with a set of initial requirements, and they have turned around a first set of mocks. Unfortunately, the mocks are not what you had been hoping for. In addition, the design team added a bunch of features that were not in your requirements. How do you respond? You want to see how the candidate’s skills in leading designers. Does the candidate dictate to them? Or does the candidate listen to suggestions with an open mind? Does the candidate get results by raising concerns and asking questions about issues that the current mocks don’t address? With both engineering and design, it is usually more effective for the product manager to define the problems and let the respective team come up with a proposed solution.

Cross Funacitonal Leadership and Management

 
Cross-Functional Management (15 Minutes) :
A good product manager must provide leadership, advocacy and support to the executive team, sales, business development and any other stakeholders that your company might have. To succeed, product managers needs  interpersonal skills and leadership of key company stakeholders.

1)      Can you draw a quick org chart for a position where you played a key leadership role?

c)      Talk to me about a time when the team was not working well together. Why did this happen? What did you learn?

d)     Can you give an example of you coaching others on your team?

e)      Is consensus always a good thing?

f)       What kind of people do you like working with?  What kind of people have you had difficulty working with in the past?

g)      What about an example when you were being coached? What did you learn? How did you improve?

h)      In your mind, what is the difference between management and leadership? Some things you should be looking for: A solid understanding of how to achieve results by working with and through others . How much process the candidate expects (and if this is a good match for your company). Good negotiation skills. Now spend some time on a scenario where the candidate disagrees with a boss or senior executive:

i)        Imagine you and the design team have come up with the interaction design of a new feature. Unfortunately, your boss doesn’t agree and believes it should work differently. You and the design team are confident in your opinion and think the suggestion from your boss will be inferior. What do you do? Follow this up with the scenario of when a senior stakeholder or boss demands more in a given time frame than the candidate can possibly deliver: Can you talk to me about a time when a senior stakeholder or boss demanded more of you than you could possibly deliver? How did you handle the situation?

2)      Can you talk to me about the sales model of a product you have managed? How did you find prospects for the product? What did you do that made it easier for the sales team to sell the product? Can you talk about a situation where you were instrumental in closing a sale? What did you do? You want to know that the candidate understands what it takes to sell products and that he or she can work effectively with your sales team. Did the candidate “get out of the building” frequently and interact actively with customers? Did the candidate take the time to really understand and internalize the sales team’s pains? And while engaging with customers and the sales team is critical, a product manager must be very careful about being non-strategic and reactive. Imagine you are nearing code freeze on a release, but the sales team tells you a key customer will not buy it unless you add a specific feature. What do you do?

3)      Similarly, a product manager has to be very cautious about over-promising: Imagine the VP Sales has been pestering you to send her an updated product roadmap before she talks to a very desirable prospect. You have a draft, but haven’t prioritized it or built internal consensus around it yet. How do you help your VP Sales?

4)      When a company is cash-strapped and a sales team is under extreme pressure to deliver revenue, it can be easy to become sales-driven and non-strategic. This is a sign of a serious problem in the company, and usually happens when a company is scaling prematurely and has hired senior sales and business development people too early. An important role of the product manager is to help the sales team not sign the company up for things that can’t be delivered, shouldn’t be delivered, or that are not strategic.