The 5 Personas of Product Management (and How to Hire Them) by Jason Shen
By Katsiaryna Drozhzha on January 19th, 2018.
Product Manager is one of the toughest roles to define and hire for, in part because depending on the company and the project, they perform a wide variety of activities. It can be helpful to think of the role as five characters — the Explorer, the Analyst, the Planner, the Advocate, and the Sherpa. On stage of PRODUCTIZED, Jason Shen from Headlight is guiding us through thinking of what a valuable PM can be.
This post will help you to define what each of the five characters does and why they are important; bring some real-case examples into action; discover specific techniques to hire the right character, and explain how these five characters can help your organization work better with Product Managers.
Who is the Product Manager?
Different people have different definitions of what the PM does. In fact, even for product people themselves, it is hard to provide a clear definition of their role. Josh Elman, a former product consultant at Facebook Connect and Twitter, suggests the following formulation:
Jason Shen illustrates the PM’s role on the example of a diagram created by long-time Product Manager, Martin Eriksson.
Martin puts a product in the center of user experience, engineering and business. The Venn diagram helps to define the orientation for the product and at the same time proves that the role of the PM is still pretty vague: sometimes he has to be a UX designer, sometimes he is an engineer, and sometimes he is more a business person than anybody else. This kind of approach leaves a lot of space for what a PM really looks like.
An Alternative to Martin’s Diagram
Jason is proposing a framework that has two accesses. The first access is the head and the heart access. The head is really about thinking things through. Operating more logically and rationally with data, the head 🧠 PM is more disciplined about the decision-making. On the other hand, the heart ❤️ PM is more about understanding people, their stories, emotions and feelings. Jason claims that a superhero PM has to succeed on both of these fronts. They care a lot about the decisions that are driven by data, but at the same their emotional approach makes work more effective.
The other spectrum here is the forest 🌲🌲 and the tree 🌳, that metaphorically signifies the high level of a big picture as well as the tactical and more detailed orientation of the day-to-day. If we plot this in a two-by-two chart, we can get four cross-sections.
- The Advocate PM is looking at the big picture, but still takes a deeper understanding of emotional needs of both users and stakeholders. He is a superhero who brings a bigger vision, thinking about the people and the stories to the highest level.
- The Explorer PM is someone who is going into the market place to observe other competitors, look what are the big trends in market and let people know what is happening at the macro-level
- The Organiser PM is more internally focused, thinking again and again about people and their emotions (within the team, within the specific user, within the specific meeting and retro). Recognising that those personal aspects are important for the product at its core.
- The Technical PM is using his head and is also focusing on the details: so-called tactical problem-solving. Something is going wrong? Is there a fire? How do we reconnect things, figure problems out and move forward?
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Exploring the personas
The Explorer
The biggest challenge for the explorer is to look at the trends in a market, find a bigger picture and think about the data that can justify important decisions. Jason sees the explorer as a PM that is:
1) focused outward on how the product fits into the market and underlying trends;
2) helping inspire a team around a vision.
Jason brings his experience as a PM at Etsy. About a year ago, Etsy was launching a new craft supplies marketplace. Jason recalls the director of the project, who made a leading effort in that fight. To launch a successful product, Jason’s colleague had to deal a lot with the teams outside of his core team, expanding and exploring why all the teams should support each other and create a common understanding of a great product. A PM who goes into the wildness and then comes back to his team and tells to everybody “here is what I’ve seen and let me tell you about that” is a great explorer.
How to hire for this profile? Jason recommends HRs to ask candidates at the interview the things that are super specific to the job.
Give people 2–3 hours to work on the problem together, or ask them such questions as: what major trend — cultural, economic or technological — are you excited about and how will society be impacted by its development?
The right explorer persona is someone who will be really excited to talk about the topic. The more “visionary”, they are researching, they are thinking about the topic. They got something they care about.
The Advocate
The advocate cares about the picture, but from the story prospective. They are:
1) strong listeners who understand their customers, teammates and executives;
2) great communicators, who will speak up and fight for stakeholders. Listening to customers, understanding their needs.
Communication is an important part of this role. It is not only about whether you can understand the needs, but more about how you, as a PM, can articulate those needs and concerns in a valuable way.
How to hire for this persona? An example question you can ask the candidate at the interview could be: “your new product is coming up, and a week before the launch a small number of users start reporting serious bugs. How would you react on that?”
It all depends if this person is going to think about all of the different roles and the players in the proposed situation (How bad is the bug? What is the pain point? Can we contain it? How this is going to affect the marketing launch? etc). The Advocate sort of jumps into the problem and starts diagnosing it.
The Organizer
As we remember from the definition above, the organizer is a person caring about the details, making sure that everyone from the team is invited for the kick-off meetings or that the meetings don’t overlap with somebody else’s important commitments.That might sound as a detail, but how many times have you been upset when a meeting didn’t get put together and the dynamics in the rooms were all wrong?
According to Jason, the following are the most important features that a strong organizer will think about:
1) ability to track people, projects and priorities of their own team and other teams;
2) making things running smoothly while making sure everyone feels supported.
As an example, Jason brings the commitment of his former Etsy colleague Joanna. As a PM, Joanna had to be in so many meetings because her team had to interface with two or three other teams. They were all making changes, so she had to be all the time there, listening to what was happening, asking the right question and then relaying that back to her team to make sure that the right information was in the room.
How to hire for this persona? One way to do find an organizer PM, says Jason, is to ask about the ideal team process (planning, stand-ups, demos, etc.) and how it might evolve over the course of a project. There are always some things that the organizer PM, who is strong in this organizer role, would have a set of the things that they think are effective and at the same time a lot of questions.
The Technician
A superhero PM-technician should know how to:
1) diagnose the problems that are actually unpacking situations and that are focused on the critical details of the product-tech, design, metrics, bugs.
2) help the team solve thorny issues by doing the research and wrestling with the problem.
As an example, Jason shares his own experience of a PM at Etsy. When he and his team had a challenge, Jason had to make sure that everyone in the team jumps into a situation and puts hands on the solving the problem. Whether it is running good bug tracking sessions or experimenting with the design, a great PM will never stay away from performing the tasks that are beyond of his scope of responsibilities.
How to hire for this persona? Someone who is strong in the technical role can not only think about what makes them so good, but also what is wrong with them. The technician is someone who can put the things together and see how it all can be improved.
For the job interview, choose a product you use frequently and ask the candidate what makes it great? Or: “if you were the PM, how would you improve it? What metrics would you track?”
Internal tools
Every PM has to bring all of the four skills and perspectives into the role. In the meantime, every situation is individual and requires a specific approach. For example, if you have a PM who is building the internal tools then they might really need to be strong as technicians and it may be not that important for them as to be a visionary.
And alternatively, you might have somebody who is leading a new market line, and there you might need someone who is a strong explorer, an advocate and a speaker of the needs that the users and all the different stakeholders have in the market.
It is also important to think about the makeup of your team. Some teams are full of people who are former engineers and designers. Maybe you do need someone who comes from a marketing background, someone who can bring that landscape thinking. Your goal is not to find the “right” makeup of your team, but to make sure that it is well-rounded and acts as a whole.
Race it to the Top!
We have just talked about the four personas. But what about the 5th persona? The 5th persona comes in the way that doesn't fit into the framework. Imagine someone who is strong enough in all the four fronts. They can be a visionary, they can speak to customer needs, they can organize things very well and they can problem solve it. But they still might not me that PM that you count on.
So, who is it?
Jason draws an analogy between Product Management and climbing a mountain. As a product leader, you are supporting a group of people that is climbing the mountain. You start out as a helper, or as a support player, who is trying to be useful and, sometimes, stays out of people’s way. Sometimes, you will hear the designers and the engineers putting the PMs out of their way, preferring to work independently. That speaks to the fact that doing a product is a hard, so sometimes you just need to be a helper. With a course of the time you graduate to be a partner. You are the core of the team, you are respected, your part is helping to climb this mountain.
The 5th persona is really about being a sherpa. Imagine you are climbing Mount Everest. You need this team of expert climbers, captain and the leader who have been training for years. And then, after months of preparations, you go to a local area and you hire a guide- sherpa. Even though you have a captain, but the sherpa becomes a de facto leader. The teams’ lives are in the hands of that sherpa and his knowledge of local area.
How to hire for this persona? You cannot screen for the Sherpa, there is no interview question that you could ask. But this is an ideal, that all the project managers can strive for.
As a sherpa, try to guide your team to the top!
Access Jason’s PRODUCTIZED presentation below:
About Jason Shen
Jason Shen is the co-founder and CEO of Headlight — a skills-based hiring platform. He was previously a product manager at Etsy and a Presidential Innovation Fellow under the Obama administration. TED speaker and serial entrepreneur working to create a world where talent can shine. History of leading teams to launch high-impact products and programs across private and public sectors.
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About the Author
Katsiaryna works at Productized as a content strategist. After spending some years traveling the world, she moved to Lisbon to discover the secrets of Western Europe. In her “free time” she enjoys surfing the waves of the Portuguese coast.
