天下PM千千万，为什么企业就要雇佣你呢？

IT organizations are increasingly shifting from project-based organizational structures to product-based methodologies, which involve cross-functional teams. These new building blocks of business include both tech and business pros, and they’re generally led by a product manager, who acts as the point person throughout the product’s lifecycle.

IT组织正越来越多地从基于项目的组织结构转向基于产品的方法论，这涉及到跨职能的团队。这些新的业务结构包括技术和业务专家，他们通常由在产品的整个生命周期中充当指挥者的产品经理领导。

Product managers aren’t a new job category by any means, but this shift means that they’re newly prominent and important to many companies’ strategies. As a result, many corporate leaders who are used to hiring for IT now have to learn what makes a good product manager as they seek to fill these roles.

产品经理绝不是一个新的工作类别，但这种转变意味着他们在许多公司的战略中变得更加突出和重要。因此，随着他们寻求填补这些角色，许多习惯于招聘IT人员的企业领导现在必须了解什么是好的产品经理。

If that’s a position you find yourself in, don’t panic. We spoke to a host of experts, including product managers and those who supervise, hire, and mentor them, about what you should be looking for if you’re hiring a new PM for your team.

如果你发现自己处于这样的位置，不要惊慌。我们采访了许多专家，包括产品经理和那些监督、雇用和指导他们的人，如果你要为你的团队雇用一个新的产品经理，那么，你应该关注什么。

Seth Dobbs, CTO at IT services and consulting firm Bounteous, gives a pretty good thumbnail sketch of what an ideal product manager would look like. “This is absolutely a hybrid role and requires a good mix of skills,” he says. “They need to have enough knowledge in both technology and UX to at least be able to understand technical and experience constraints and tradeoffs, but need to be centered around business and customer value to drive decision-making around tradeoffs.”

IT服务和咨询公司Bounteous的首席技术官Seth Dobbs对一个理想的产品经理的模样做了一个相当好的缩略图。"这绝对是一个混合角色，需要很好地混合各种技能。"他说："他们需要在技术和用户体验方面有足够的知识，至少能够理解技术和体验方面的限制和权衡，但需要以业务和客户价值为中心，推动围绕权衡的决策。"

Dobbs says he also looks for adaptability given the rapid changes that often evolve in a product-based environment, in addition to the ability to “meet deadlines, budgets, and the overall business strategy as they work through these tradeoffs,” he says. “They also need to have strong interpersonal skills and know how to lean into the experts to leverage their insights in forming a roadmap and plan, but also leverage their skills in getting the work done.”

多布斯说，考虑到在以产品为基础的环境中经常发生的快速变化，他还会寻找适应性，此外还要有能力“在权衡取舍的过程中，满足最后期限、预算和整体业务战略的要求”。“他们还需要有很强的人际交往能力，知道如何向专家请教，利用他们的见解制定路线图和计划，同时也要利用他们的技能完成工作。”

That’s all easier said than done, of course, and in practice it’ll be hard to find a candidate who can cover all those bases. But our experts gave us some pretty good guidance on specific qualities to look for in a candidate.

当然，说起来容易做起来难，在实践中，很难找到一个能涵盖所有这些基础的候选人。但我们的专家给了我们一些很好的指导，告诉我们候选人应该具备哪些品质。

Look for great communicators

寻找优秀的沟通者

Almost everyone we spoke to agreed that communications skills are a must when it comes to product management. “I can typically tell within the first 15 minutes of a phone call whether or not I’m going to hire someone,” says Cait Porte, who is chief marketing officer at software development company Digibee and has a background in product management. “The people who can articulate themselves well can translate business and technology wording and phrasing in a way my team will respond well to. Effective communicators can not only articulate themselves well, but serve as translators between business and technology, ensuring that the right solutions are at the top of the priority list.”

几乎所有我们采访过的人都认为，在产品管理方面，沟通技巧是必须的。软件开发公司Digibee的首席营销官Cait Porte说：“我通常能在电话的前15分钟内就能判断出我是否要雇佣某人。“那些能够很好地表达自己的人能够以我的团队会很好地回应的方式来翻译商业和技术的措辞和用语。有效的沟通者不仅能很好地表达自己，还能充当业务和技术之间的翻译，确保正确的解决方案处于优先级列表的首位。”

Tal Laufer, VP of products at cybersecurity firm Perimeter 81, explains that communication is a must-have in this job because of the role product managers play coordinating various stakeholders. “A product manager serves as a bridge in the organization. Many aspects of their work involve connecting and bridging different teams and disciplines, striving for the success of the entire company,” she says.

网络安全公司Perimeter 81的产品副总裁Tal Laufer解释说，沟通是这项工作的必备条件，因为产品经理在协调各种利益相关者方面发挥着重要作用。“产品经理在组织中起到桥梁的作用。他们工作的许多方面都涉及连接和弥合不同团队和学科，为整个公司的成功而努力。”

Seek out those who go beyond the data

找出那些超越数据的人

Most businesses, especially in tech, pride themselves on making data-based decisions, and many of the team members a product manager will be working with will be very data-focused. That said, a product manager needs to both be able to understand what hard data is telling them — but also be comfortable making more intuitive and creative decisions. “Being technical is great — it allows you to understand the details — but it can also hold you back at times,” says Luke Gannon, product manager at graph database company Neo4j. “If you can only view things with your developer/computer scientist hat on, you run the risk of being closed off to new, creative ideas and suggestions.”

大多数企业，尤其是在科技行业，都以基于数据的决策而自豪，产品经理将要共事的许多团队成员都非常关注数据。也就是说，产品经理既需要能够理解硬数据告诉他们什么，也需要能够做出更直观和创造性的决定。图形数据库公司Neo4j的产品经理Luke Gannon说：“技术性很强——它让你了解细节——但有时也会让你停滞不前。”“如果你只能戴着你的开发者/计算机科学家的帽子来看待事情，你就有可能对新的、有创意的想法和建议产生封闭。”

“Lots of folks are stressing metrics and being data-driven,” says Shane Quinlan, director of product management at software development firm Kion. “But in most cases, you’re starting with a dataset that’s not statistically significant — we’re not all building B2C at crazy scale. Yes, data is important. No, you don’t need to wait on perfect data to make a decision. Take chances. Make mistakes. Get messy.”

"很多人都在强调指标和数据驱动，"软件开发公司Kion的产品管理总监Shane Quinlan说。"但在大多数情况下，你是以一个没有统计学意义的数据集开始的--我们并不都是以疯狂的规模建立B2C。是的，数据很重要。不，你不需要等待完美的数据来做决定。抓住机会。犯错误。弄得一团糟"。

Emphasize measurable outcomes

强调可衡量的结果

Nothing helps attune a candidate’s intuition like experience. Holly Hester-Reilly, founder and CEO of H2R Product Science, a product management coaching and consulting firm, says that a candidate’s resume should show what they’ve done in the field — and what they’ve achieved. “The first thing a hiring manager should look for is measurable outcomes on their resume,” she says. “It’s not enough to say they’ve gone through the motions of product management. The hiring manager needs to know what tangible improvements were achieved.”

没有什么比经验更能帮助调整候选人的直觉了。产品管理辅导和咨询公司H2R产品科学的创始人兼首席执行官Holly Hester-Reilly说，候选人的简历应该显示他们在该领域所做的事情--以及他们所取得的成就。"她说："招聘经理应该寻找的第一件事是他们简历上可衡量的成果。她说："仅仅说他们经历了产品管理的动作是不够的。招聘经理需要知道取得了哪些切实的改进。"

And while there may be a stereotype of fresh-faced product managers with little real-world experience, many companies will choose candidates with in-depth knowledge of the business domain in which they’ll be working, according to Stephanie White, director and head of product, technology, and professional at fintech recruiting company EC1. “Product managers who our clients hire have to be domain experts, understand how the product is being used commercially, as well as understand end-to-end product build technologically,” she says. “This is so that they can attend client meetings and sell the user experience, as an extension to the sales and propositions teams.”

金融科技招聘公司EC1的产品、技术和专业总监兼主管Stephanie White表示，尽管人们对产品经理有一种刻板印象，认为他们是缺乏实际经验的新面孔，但许多公司会选择对他们即将工作的业务领域有深入了解的候选人。她说：“我们客户聘请的产品经理必须是领域专家，了解产品如何在商业上使用，以及了解端到端产品构建技术。”“这样他们就可以参加客户会议，推销用户体验，作为销售和提案团队的延伸。”

Charles Paumelle, chief product officer and co-founder of Microshare, a smart building data solutions company, agrees. “Business and technical acumen is needed to answer the questions ‘Why will customers spend money on our product?’ and ‘How can our organization deliver a cost-effective solution to the customer’s needs?’” he says.

智能建筑数据解决方案公司Microshare的首席产品官兼联合创始人Charles Paumelle对此表示赞同。“要回答‘为什么客户会为我们的产品花钱？以及“我们的组织如何为客户的需求提供具有成本效益的解决方案？”’”他说。

Look beyond certs and education

不要局限于证书和教育

On the flipside, many of the experts we spoke to held formal training and education in less esteem. “Certifications are not the key to becoming a PM,” says Kion’s Quinlan. “I don’t care how many classes your previous employer paid $5,000 for, if you can’t explain simply how a website works, talk about a product that inspires you, and prioritize work with some level of objectivity, you won’t cut it.”

另一方面，我们采访过的许多专家都不太重视正规的培训和教育。“证书并不是成为产品经理的关键，” Kion’s Quinlan说。“我不管你的前雇主花了5000美元让你上了多少门课，如果你不能简单地解释一个网站是如何运作的，不能谈论一个能激发你灵感的产品，不能客观地划分工作的优先级，你就不会被录用。”

Digibee’s Porte goes even further than that. “Historically, jobs for product managers were reserved for MBA graduates,” she says. “As someone who both served as a hiring manager and obtained her MBA, I believe it shouldn’t be a qualification as a product manager.” It’s not that having such as degree is a bad thing per se, she says, but “people naturally think an MBA is enough of a qualification. In reality, it’s so much more than that.”

Digibee’s Porte甚至更进一步。她表示：“从历史上看，产品经理职位是留给MBA毕业生的。”“作为一个既做过招聘经理，又获得过MBA学位的人，我认为这不应该是成为一名产品经理的资格。”她表示，并不是说拥有这样的学位本身是一件坏事，但“人们自然认为MBA学历就足够了。事实上，它远不止于此。”

Understand your specific product-based needs

了解您基于产品的特定需要

If you’re worried about finding someone who fits all of these bills perfectly, good news: In all probability you’re going to have more than one product manager at your company, and different specific roles and experience levels may be called for.

如果你担心找不到完全符合这些要求的人，好消息是：在所有的可能性中，你的公司将有不止一个产品经理，而且可能需要不同的具体角色和经验水平。

“In terms of experience, sometimes you are looking for someone who has experience in a certain market or with a certain technology, but other times you are ready to invest in someone who has the attitude and aptitude without the experience,” says Trisha Price, chief product officer at software development company Pendo. “There is no one-size-fits-all, because diverse teams with diverse experiences are what drive the best outcomes and create the best cultures.”

"就经验而言，有时你正在寻找在某个市场或某种技术方面有经验的人，但其他时候你准备投资于有态度和能力而没有经验的人，"软件开发公司Pendo的首席产品官Trisha Price说。"没有一刀切的做法，因为具有不同经验的多样化团队才能推动最好的结果，创造最好的文化。"

“There are different ‘flavors’ of PMs in practice,” says Kion’s Quinlan. “There are startup PMs, go-to-market PMs, scale PMs, design PMs, platform PMs, data PMs, and more. Someone who’s awesome at one flavor may not be the best at others (or there’ll be an adjustment period). Understanding your problem is key to hiring the right product manager. That’ll inform how you rate them on specific skills — more technical, more business-oriented, more design-oriented, a jack-of-all-trades.”

Kion’s Quinlan说：“在实践中，PM有不同的‘口味’。“有创业产品经理、上市产品经理、规模化产品经理、设计产品经理、平台产品经理、数据产品经理等等。在一种口味上很出色的人可能在其他方面并不是最好的（或者会有一段适应期）。了解你的问题是雇佣合适的产品经理的关键。这将告诉你如何评估他们的特定技能——更技术化、更面向商业、更面向设计、或者多面手。”

“I consider is a candidate’s ability and aspiration to be more of a ‘pioneer,’ a ‘settler’ or a ‘farmer,’” says Microshare’s Paumelle. “Product management ranges from pure innovation and R&D to create brand new products (the ‘pioneer’ heading into the unknown), to the productization of alpha products into a mainstream market (the ‘settler’ who establishes a community and builds the first structures), to the optimization of established products (the ‘farmer’ who increases the yield year after year).”

Microshare公司的Paumelle说：“我看重的是求职者成为‘开拓者’、‘定居者’或‘农民’的能力和愿望。“产品管理的范围从纯粹的创新和研发，以创造全新的产品（进入未知领域的‘先驱’）)，到alpha产品的产品化进入主流市场（建立社区并建立第一个结构的‘定居者’），再到现有产品的优化（年复一年提高产量的‘农民’）。”

Tailor your interview process

调整面试流程

You might be able to suss out some of this via resumes and email exchanges, but a lot of your hiring decision will come down to the interview and how the candidate does in the room (or on the Zoom, as the case may be). Our experts had plenty of advice on how to assess a candidate in an interview:

你也许可以通过简历和电子邮件交流来了解这些信息，但你的招聘决定在很大程度上取决于面试以及候选人在房间里的表现（或在Zoom上的表现，视情况而定）)。关于如何在面试中评估应聘者，我们的专家给出了很多建议：

“Something we do as part of our interview process is a bit of role playing,” says Mona Ghadiri, director of product management at cybersecurity firm BlueVoyant. “Part of that is to see how they respond to role playing in general; putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is so critical as a product manager. It is also critical to see how they answer the questions and think on their feet when a problem statement is in front of them, because we are in front of customers and our peers presenting information frequently. We also ask about how they have prioritized work in the past. We’re not so much looking for them to rattle off frameworks like RICE [reach, impact, confidence, and effort] or WSJF [weighted shortest job first], but seeing if they were able to use those frameworks in a practical application.”

网络安全公司BlueVoyant的产品管理总监Mona Ghadiri表示：“在面试过程中，我们会做一些角色扮演。“部分目的是观察他们对角色扮演的总体反应；作为产品经理，换位思考非常重要。当问题陈述摆在他们面前时，看看他们如何回答问题以及如何独立思考也是至关重要的，因为我们经常要面对客户和提供信息的同行。我们还询问了他们过去是如何划分工作优先级的。我们不太希望他们能脱口而出RICE（覆盖面、影响力、信心和努力）或WSJF（加权最短工作优先）等框架，而是希望他们能在实际应用中使用这些框架。”

“I ask for good, detailed examples of how they make tradeoffs against business need, user desire, and technical feasibility, and how they successfully navigate the different stakeholders to get to agreement,” says Bounteous’s Dobbs. “I’ll also typically ask them to walk me through a high-level strategy or roadmap for a product they have managed in the past. Overall, I try to understand how they think, how they have reacted in various scenarios, and how they drive things forward.”

Bounteous’s Dobbs说：“我要求他们提供好的、详细的例子，说明他们如何在业务需求、用户愿望和技术可行性之间做出权衡，以及他们如何成功地引导不同的利益相关者达成协议。”“我通常还会让他们向我介绍他们过去管理过的产品的高级战略或路线图。总的来说，我试图理解他们是如何思考的，他们在各种情况下是如何反应的，以及他们是如何推动事情向前发展的。”

“Don’t show up unprepared,” says Kion’s Quinlan. “JIRA does not make a PM. I don’t care that you’re a wizard in JIRA. Show me you understand problems. Show me you’re thinking about ways of working. Show me you can lead a small team.”

"不要毫无准备地出现，" Kion’s Quinlan说。"JIRA并不能造就一个PM。我不在乎你是一个JIRA的巫师。让我看到你理解问题。向我展示你对工作方式的思考。向我展示你可以领导一个小团队。"

“No matter what level they are interviewing for, from entry level to senior director, I always look for a passion for solving problems for the customer,” says Dan Ciruli, VP of product management at software services provider D2iQ. “That is the number one thing I want out of a product manager. One of my favorite interview questions is, ‘Tell me about your favorite customer.’ Their answer tells me everything I need to know about how they work with customers, what inspires them, and whether or not they are truly problem solvers.”

软件服务提供商D2iQ的产品管理副总裁Dan Ciruli说：“无论他们面试的是什么级别，从入门级到高级主管，我总是寻找有热情为客户解决问题的人。”“这是我对产品经理最看重的品质。我最喜欢的面试问题之一是：“说说你最喜欢的客户。”’他们的回答告诉了我我需要知道的一切：他们是如何与客户合作的，是什么激励着客户，以及他们是否是真正的问题解决者。”

Don’t lose sight of the intangibles

不要忽视无形的东西

“I’m a big fan of finding the ‘raw talent’ that would make a great PM,” says Kion’s Quinlan. “For an associate product manager, the day-to-day skills can be taught, but you can’t fake or learn interest in the problem and empathy with your peers and users.” In the end, most of our experts agreed, it’s that interest in solving problems that’s the most important quality to find in a candidate for product manager.

Kion’s Quinlan说：“我非常喜欢寻找能够成为优秀PM的‘原始人才’。”“对于副产品经理来说，日常技能是可以传授的，但你无法假装或学习对问题的兴趣，以及对同事和用户的同理心。”最后，我们的大多数专家都同意，对解决问题的兴趣是产品经理候选人最重要的品质。

“I went into product management coming from a hardware development background,” explains Perimeter 81’s Laufer. “Even as an engineer, I was always curious about the full picture. What do customers want? What is the market like? How can we build a better product for our customers? This curiosity and my love for working with people led me to a product focused role. I had to learn about a lot of subjects, all at once, but I had (and still have!) a blast doing so.”

“我从事产品管理工作的背景是硬件开发，” Perimeter 81’s Laufer解释道。“即使作为一名工程师，我也总是对全貌感到好奇。客户想要什么？市场怎么样？我们如何为客户打造更好的产品？这种好奇心和我对与人合作的热爱使我成为了一个专注于产品的角色。我必须同时学习很多科目，但我曾经（现在仍然如此！）喜欢这样做。”

She adds: “I love that part of the job, teaching young PMs how to do things right.” We hope that the product managers you find go down this same successful path.

她补充道：“我喜欢这份工作的一部分，教会年轻的经理们如何正确做事。”我们希望你找到的产品经理也能走上同样成功的道路。