How do I hire a product manager as a software engineer?

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

Hey folks, it's CrossFit time. We are going to experience devs for a topic. Um, it's going to be a little interesting compared to normal. This one is about hiring. Um, but what makes it interesting is it's not talking about hiring software developers. It's talking about hiring product managers. So, the poster was saying, "Hey, they're a lead dev. You have a team of like four developers. I'm assuming at like a small company, a startup or something like that. And um they're I guess in responsible for or part I didn't read the whole thread, but they're part of hiring uh a new role into the team and that's going to be a product manager. So they're kind of asking like what should I be looking for? How do we approach this? And I figured this would be an interesting one to talk through because I mean a few different reasons.

one we get to talk about like engineering and product management kind of like synergy and what what things would be good at least from my perspective. Um cuz I'm the one talking here. Um but the other side of it is that there's I feel like this is a little bit unique. Um and we'll see some differences between what I would say like smaller companies and maybe larger ones as well. So, um I'm going to start off with that second part though, like why this is kind of like what I feel is kind of unique here. And so usually usually I find um and this isn't based on like stats that I have like from the industry or something like that but generally from my understanding either my own experience or talking with other people it's pretty common that product management uh is not directly associated

with engineering like they work together, but in terms of like reporting structure and stuff like that that it's pretty common that you have like a like product manager that manages product managers, not necessarily an engineering manager that manages product managers. Now, in in some setups, you might have like say a director of engineering that manages like the whole group or something, but even then I've seen parallels go up in terms of like reporting hierarchy. And the reason I say this um and what makes this kind of situation interesting is that if uh if this developer is responsible for hiring a product manager, um I'm just curious like what their sort of reporting structure looks like. Now, they might be implying that like, hey, there is a product management or and they're hiring a product manager for our team and I'm going to be interviewing them. And that's that's cool.

But like to me that makes more sense or that seems like it's the more common pattern. Not that there's a right or a wrong here, but I just thought that that was kind of an interesting dynamic like uh are they responsible for hiring that person or is it they're part of the interview loop? Um I I feel that like in my experience in big tech when it's come to like I have never been in an interview for a product manager. I've never been in an interview for a different role that wasn't just software engineering to be totally transparent. like in at Microsoft in 5 years it's only been software engineers and um I don't know if that's just like unique to my experience or not. Um I know that when I was hired onto the team that I'm on now, they had like engineers interview me.

Um, you know, I met with my skip, my current manager, but um, in terms of interviewing with my skip and current manager, that wasn't so much of a, um, I I think they didn't like grill me in in like a sort of a traditional interview style. Um, and not not that the other people grilled me necessarily, but then I was interviewed by the other engineering manager, so my peer and uh one of the principal engineers on the team. So, I'm bringing this up because it's like a cross role kind of thing, but the point is that everyone is part of the engineering. At Microsoft, at least in Office 365, there is an entirely separate sort of like hierarchy of reporting structure for product managers. And where I worked before at a startup, it was like that too. But the difference is that when I was at a smaller company, there was a lot more um sort of like crossroll interviewing.

And I actually personally I think it's really helpful but it's also challenging because uh I already like no offense but I already see how bad people are at interviewing software engineers because they don't do it often right like once every year once every two years or something you get pulled into an interview loop and like you're interviewing software engineers and you're using lead code to to try and trick Um, and like just this whole thing is not uh I find like statistically it's pretty bad. Um, and this isn't like Microsoft specific or big tech specific. Even when I was working at a startup as we're scaling, we need the team to be interviewing. So you put them through some like interview training and I remember even then being on interview loops with people and we'd be walking through like coding questions that they were, you know, how did the how did the candidate do?

Oh, well they they didn't get the answer right. Like that that's the reason that I don't want to move on with them. I'm like, hold on. So, you're telling me it was like a binary pass or fail this coding test. Uh, and you said that they did a really good job explaining things, debugging stuff, and like they had a solution that was most of the way there, but they didn't get the final answer. And therefore, no. Yeah. Like they do they didn't they didn't know the trick to go to the next step. And it's like, dude, you're telling me that you're only going to work with people that can find tricks in your coding questions. Like, do you hear what you're saying? Um, so I find that people are bad at interviewing. I'm not saying that I'm the best in the world at it, but when you're not doing it regularly, how do you expect to be good at it?

Right? So, we have people that are generally not good at interviewing, and now you want to complicate it even more by looking for different roles. And so part of me thinks that there's a tremendous amount of value in having like cross interviewing because software engineers are going to have to collaborate with the product managers a tremendous amount. So I think this would be really good to have input into but if people don't know how to interview for them then it's like how do you ever expect that to be successful right? So, bit of a double-edged sword here, but in my opinion, things that I would want to look for in a product manager when I'm hiring. Um, this is going to boil down to like what kind of interactions do I think are really positive to have with uh product managers and and engineering teams. And part of this can also depend on the expectations in that role.

So, for example, where I used to work, um, we we were a digital forensics company and the product managers would have to do interfacing with customers, right? It's not necessarily that they're like cold calling like salespeople. It's not that they have to go to every conference, but there is some of that. and the company would arrange customer meetings and like so for me especially after being there for 8 years there are absolutely situations where I would be very curious like you know how well do you do with sitting down with actual end users and understanding their pain points right that is one thing that I think is incredibly important for product managers and that's an expectation I have It's trickier on a platform team because it's not that we don't have customers, but you're not sitting down with like um or like and when I

say trickier, I mean like for me conceptually, I'm not saying for product managers, but when you're on a platform team serving internal customers, the really nice thing is you have direct access to your customers. They're all of your colleagues. So this is something that I would want to make sure that people feel comfortable doing because what I don't want um and there is overlap with project management just like how an engineering manager has overlap with product and project management but um what I don't want is a product manager that comes on just to manage timelines like a project manager. Again, I'm not to be crystal clear. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a project manager. Like, that's not the statement. I'm saying if I'm hiring a product manager, I don't want them to have zero product manager capabilities and all project manager capabilities because that would mean I'm hiring a project manager.

Nothing wrong with that. Just if I'm not hiring that role, that's not what I want. So definitely being able to effectively interface with customers, that's also going to mean one really big thing here is being able to like converse and translate to engineers. So the best product managers I know um don't necessarily have to be software engineers at some point in their time. They don't know how to code. Um but they are able to basically understand technical details from engineers and then they're able to communicate effectively with engineers and communic I if you've seen other videos I've made like I always try to make it clear that communication is a two-way thing. You know if you have two people that are really bad at communicating you're going to have results. If you have one person that's really good and one person that's really bad, you might have okay results because you have one person that's basically doing all of the compensation.

But if you have someone that's like totally like okay and the other person's really good, you can still start to have really good results from that. But my point is that if I have an engineering team and not everyone is like a rock star at being able to communicate with product, like I want of course I want product managers to be able to excel at that kind of thing. Um I think personally that when we talk about like I've said this a million times when we talk about software engineering the biggest challenges are around people. Software engineers are brilliant. They can solve technical challenges. The biggest problems are with people. And that means that like product managers are people. So when we have to interface with product managers as software engineers, we often do a pretty job of it. Now you can blame the product managers and if we're talking about hiring them, this is why I want to make sure that they're good at communicating with software engineers.

But it's uh I I think that you know stereotypically software engineers do a pretty lousy job around communication. This is why I talk about soft skills so much because I feel like it's one of the biggest areas that we can improve and we should improve. So how do you gauge if a product manager is good at talking to software engineers? I would personally I would be thinking about trying to ask them questions around like um you know tell me about times where you're working with engineering teams and trying to relay um sort of user pain points and like how you guys navigated as a team what you're going like what solutions you're going to come up with to address those. Um would be curious to hear about that. I would want to hear about when things were not going well and how they course corrected that.

Right. So you guys started talking about um these uh you know the goals of the user and basically there's a misunderstanding like how do you get out of that cuz I want to make sure that product managers feel like confident right they're they should be good to communicate with the engineers but they should be confident if the engineers are like bullying them around that's not okay because I have seen this too. One second. Got to do another lane change. Um, like I've seen product managers get bullied by software engineers. Uh, and when I say bully, I don't mean like literally harassed, but I mean product manager would say like, "Hey, like these are the things we want to get done." And the engineers are just like, "Nope." and no explanation or minimal or using technical jargon so that the product manager has no idea what to say and then they just have to be like okay I guess and like that's it.

They're very passive. So when I say bully it's just that the product managers are being passive. I want to make sure that there's like some people don't like this terminology but I want to make sure there's like a healthy conflict between product and engineering. I want engineering teams to be able to say like hey we want to be able to focus on having uh an architecture that looks like X. We want to make sure that we have the right infrastructure test coverage all these things so that we can build effectively because these are things that are important to to engineers and I want product to be able to say yeah but we really want to get these features out. We want you know there's these bug fixes we have to do or like whatever the product side of things. And I I personally really like the conversations where you come together and you're you're basically forced to prioritize these things together.

I'm exaggerating when I'm kind of pitting them against each other at two complete opposite ends of the spectrum here. Um but I'm doing that on purpose because it's it's exaggerated to make a point. Um, those conversations I think are some of my favorite. Being able to to really get the whole team to sit down and prioritize what's actually important. I like that tension where product is like, "No, we want more features." And it's like, "Cool. Okay. Well, you want more features. We want we want to make sure that shit's not breaking every time that we press deploy. So like let's talk about this, right? Like you know how do we balance our time effectively in terms of what we're investing into and it again you need strong people on both sides of this. You need to have collaboration. You need to have a common goal because when you do that it forces you to prioritize from both sides.

If you don't have that what ends up happening is that you get either engineers that never feel heard. We can never do tech debt. everything's falling apart, product keeps like over, you know, like steamrolling us or the other way where never gets out the door because you have engineers that just want to refactor and rewrite everything and you've never shipped a feature. So again, going back to interviewing, I want to make sure that when I'm talking to product managers, like how they navigate conversations with engineers, I think that's really important. Um I would be curious about their approach with um with planning. So to give you an example when I say planning um this could be like at the micro or macro level. So um not that the specifics matter here. So I'm going to use the word sprint. So I'm not saying like hey you have to be an agile product manager and like it needs to look like this.

But I am very curious to know how they operate at a micro level in terms of planning like what are we doing for the next week the next two weeks what like what's happening today because there's something urgent like I want to understand how they operate at that level regardless of whether that's agile or anything else I just want to understand that and then I want to understand at the macro level in terms of planning and strategy the reason both of these things are important is because I think that if you lack in the micro side of things and all that you're doing is talking about like strategy and planning like once a year or whatever to me that's dangerous because I'm like everything that you're you're planning strategically I'm I'm going to say is like the only thing I know for sure is that's not what's going to happen in reality.

um we need something at the other end of that spectrum where it's like you know how how are we at a at a smaller cadence like what are we delivering on um what is the next priority right and especially for me as an engineering manager I want to make sure that I understand that and I would say if this person is a like a senior like a dev lead or a senior dev that's doing this interviewing like based on my understanding of this team composition that would be a helpful thing for them to to be able to lean into. Um, imagine if they're looking to their product manager for insights on like what's, you know, next priority and product managers only ever talking about stuff that's 12 months out. Like it's not okay. Like, you want me to go pick what's next then? Sure, I'll do it.

But if you're not thinking in a similar way, like you need to be able to get alignment. And then the other way around too, if a product manager is only very like nearsighted, what what's our strategy? Why are we doing this stuff long term? Like where are we headed? So, um that was I mean I probably should have saved this for a work drive because it's a longer conversation than I thought, but um definitely around how they interface with customers. That could be internal for platform teams or end users. Um I would really want to understand how they're interfacing with engineers, what that looks like. I want to make sure they're not going to be pushed over. I want to make sure that they can uh work through healthy conflict and balancing those things out. Um, and I would like to hear about scenarios where they had to navigate out of like challenges.

I like questions like that because the the reality is shit's not going to be perfect. And I just want to make sure that people feel like they have um even if they don't have the experience hands-on with it, if they can walk me through their thought process, like that's really what matters to me cuz I just want to make sure that they're not going to get bullied. Not that I think the engineers are bullies, but I think you get what I mean. Um and then finally, like the micro and macro like planning and strategy. Uh, I really want to make sure that I understand that because I want to know how they're going to be effective, um, where there's going to be blind spots, that kind of thing. So, hope that helps. I think that was an interesting topic from Reddit. Friendly reminder, if you want questions answered, leave them below in the comments and you can go to codemute.com, submit your question that way or send a message to devleer on social media.

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