7 hiring strategies to scale a product management team

Hiring is tough. Hiring a Product Manager (PM) is tougher. Hiring your first few PMs is tougher still. Your ideal first PM could be different from what you need as you scale. As the authors of Blitzscaling will tell you, you need to prioritize speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty. So, what skills and behavior do you seek as you scale your PM team? Should PM be a horizontal function or aligned with a business unit? Is this only applicable for startups?

Here are seven strategies to hire and scale your first product team.?

Hire for Attitude over Aptitude

While this holds true for most hires, it is even more critical for your first few PM hires who need to have the right attitude more than core PM skills. In your early days, you may not have clear boundaries defined for PM and other functions. So you need someone who is a hustler and exhibits extreme ownership. You want a PM who thinks customer first and does what is right for the business. Because she is the product owner, strategist and marketer, all in one, until you can grow to hire others for those functions.

Hire for growth mindset

What's a startup without some drama? So you need to hire PMs who can not just survive, but thrive in such a transient environment. Every PM is a leader and rest of the organization will look to the product team for certainty when there is none and calm when there is chaos. You may have to pivot at the drop of a hat, might lose a key leader, wakeup to a lost sale. While this can break down the best, you need a PM who sees each surprise as a challenge and quickly gets into problem solving mode.

Hire top down first

This may sound counter intuitive. It is very tempting to equip yourself with a few early career PMs for scale but without someone to coach them, you will find them frustrated soon and seek a place that will give them structured learning. Hiring a rockstar senior PM who can not only help hire other rockstars but also coach them as they navigate their careers amidst rapid growth.

Hire for diversity

As you start to scale, need for diversity cannot be understated. A product team is only as successful as the variety in thoughts around the table. You need diversity in every dimension of the demography so they can represent, in many instances, your customer base. You need PMs in different stages of their career so they can challenge old ways of working. This structure also ensures the team has mentors and growth opportunities at every level.

Hire for the right org

What is the right PM org structure as you scale? Do you want a single PM function across the entire product portfolio or do you want each product team to dovetail into their respective business units or market segments. There is no perfect answer here. As your product portfolio grows, a horizontal PM organization can benefit from economies of scale and sharing of best practices. However, it comes at the cost of accountability. While core PM skills remain the same for either structure, you may want to lean more heavily into a generalist for a horizontal PM function and more heavily into domain knowledge for a vertical business-aligned structure.

Hire on every occasion

Once you reach a critical mass, hiring becomes a constant. There is opportunistic hiring when you spot the right PM for the future. At the other end, you want to become a talent magnet, constantly coaching PMs to get to the next level, either in your company or elsewhere, while attracting new talent to replace them. Plug into universities, industry forums and social platforms to identify your next set of leaders. Lean on your recruiting, corporate marketing, HR and Learning and Development (L&D) partners to develop a talent attraction and development program.

Hire for large and small

Scaling a product team is not a challenge only for startups. You may be building a product team in a new geography to complement the headquarters team. You may be entering a new market or launching a new product in your market. While you may additionally benefit from the structure and processes of a large company, these hiring strategies apply just as well.

Hiring and scaling your first PM team is not easy. But then, what's a PM who doesn't love a challenge! What strategies have you used? Share your learnings here.