Skip to main content

Domain Experience

A lot of job postings for product managers mention experience in a particular industry as a qualification for the position. I believe that the best product managers are the ones who don't need any experience in an industry to perform their jobs effectively.

Let's imagine a product manager who has extensive industry experience and knowledge. As with any product manager, her job is to continually understand an ever-changing market. She will be unable to perform her job effectively if she lacks the skills to interview prospective customers and quickly and thoroughly learn their situation and problems. Yet if she has these skills, then her pre-existing industry experience and knowledge are superfluous, since she should quickly be able to gain the knowledge.

It is also a product manager's role to communicate her understanding of the market to the sales, marcom, and development teams. Our experienced and knowledgeable product manager, therefore, should impart her knowledge to these teams. Once she has done so, she has effectively made herself obsolete unless she is uniquely qualified to learn more about the market. Again, the ability to extract and impart new information, not reliance on experience and knowledge, are the key qualifications.

Instead of requiring "ten years of experience in the industry", hiring managers should focus on the facilitation and analytical skills necessary to be an effective product manager. Experience in a particular industry is little more than a crutch.

Comments

Adam said…
Great post, Roger. I 100% agree with your points here.

My feeling has always been that a Product Manager needs to be good at the fundamentals of being a Product Manager, not a PM tied to an individual product or market.
TxnByBrth said…
Could the same be said for a recruiter? With the exception of having a "Rolodex" (I know...I'm dating myself) of talents, shouldn't hiring managers who go outside to recruiters look more at the recruiter's understanding of the processes necessary to find then attract the winning candidate rather than the "Rolodex"?
Roger L. Cauvin said…
TxnByBrth, I do think there are some similarities to the skills needed by recruiters. I'm glad you raised the "Rolodex" factor, as it's important in both realms.

Much of a product manager's value comes from access to prospective and existing customers. A product manager obtains much of her knowledge of the market from these people. If no one else at the company has the contacts and is able to facilitate access to them, a product manager's prior connections to them could be of great value.

This factor may be even more important in recruiting. Typically, a hiring manager doesn't have access to a lot of prospective employees. A recruiter's prior connections may be quite valuable.

However, as you wrote, the understanding of, and ability to carry out, the processes necessary to achieve the goals is what's most important for product managers - and, I suspect, for recruiters.

Popular posts from this blog

What Product Managers Can Learn from the Apple iPod

The Story When Apple unveiled its iPod digital music player back in October 2001, I dismissed it as a  parity product . I already owned the Cowon iAUDIO CW100 MP3 player, loaded with my favorite tunes. There was Apple, generating great hype over the iPod as if it were a breakthrough product. The idea of a portable digital music player was nothing new. The first mass-produced MP3 players came out in 1998. In late 2001, the concept may have been new to a lot of Apple customers, but it wasn't new to me. I proudly showed my MP3 player to friends when they gushed about the iPod. Thus Apple's iPod was not an innovative product in and of itself. Years later, however, I realized the significance of ecosystem of which the iPod was a part. Apple had released iTunes (with technology purchased from  SoundJam MP ) and created the iTunes Store for finding and downloading music. Unlike Napster , it was a safe and legal way of distributing and acquiring music. The prior way of playing

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri  makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos

Interaction Design: the Neglected Skill

Your product development organization has a big, gaping hole in it. (Be prepared to feel defensive as you continue reading.) One of the most important roles in product development is the role of interaction designer. An interaction designer designs how the users will interact with the product and conceptualize the tasks they perform. He decides whether, for example, the user interface will be command driven, object oriented (clicking on objects then specifying what to do with them), or wizard based. The interaction designer decides the individual steps in the use cases. Every company has one or more people that play the interaction designer role. Usually, those people have little or no expertise in interaction design. Sadly, they typically don't even realize how unqualified they are. Let's see who typically plays the role at companies. Engineer . An engineer is an expert on building what is designed. Yes, an engineer may know how to design the internal structure of the hardware