How To Hire Product Managers

Jeana Alayaay, Director of Internal Products and Services at Pivotal (right) and Poornima Vijayashanker, founder of Femgineer (left)Interview with Jeana Alayaay, Director of Internal Products and Services at Pivotal

To build a product, you need a team of engineers, designers, and the glue that keeps them together: product managers!

The role of the product manager has dramatically changed over the past decade, and because it’s still a relatively new field that’s in flux, companies often struggle to find candidates, which in turn makes it hard for candidates to understand what companies are looking for.

So all this month, we’re going to focus on a number of best practices for sourcing, hiring, interviewing, and retaining product managers.

In today’s episode, we’ll focus on giving you a lay of the land, starting with how product management is evolving and how to go about sourcing candidates for a product manager position at your company.

To help us out, I’ve invited Jeana Alayaay, the Director of Internal Products and Services at Pivotal.

This episode is chock full of helpful best practices for both product managers and those looking to hire them. As you watch, you’ll learn the following:

• How product management has evolved over the years
• Why you need to think about the type of product manager you are looking for (hint: there is more than one persona!)
• How to communicate the key criteria you are looking for in a candidate
• How to build a pipeline of candidates
• How to train recruiters to help screen candidates
• How to stop hiring out of desperation
• Why it’s actually helpful to give candidates a quick no

Listen to the episode on iTunes!

You can listen to this episode of Build on iTunes.

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Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.

How To Hire Product Managers was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.