When hiring product managers, should companies prioritize domain expertise/specific skills or generalist product craft and experience?

David Lieb · Sep 21, 2022

The number one failure mode when hiring product leaders is over-indexing on previous scale, tenure, and domain experience

A median PM who simply stays in the game long enough will by definition end up leading a team of 25 PMs, so scale and tenure don't signal quality — and once you hire a B-player as lead, the best people on the team leave, because A players hire A players and B players hire C players

35:40 20 Product: The No 1 Metric You Need To Look at When Building Product | Why the Best in Product Have No Domain Experience | Why You Should Not Hire From Incumbents & The Difference Between Good vs Great PMs with David Lieb, Visiting Group Partner @ Y Comb

Harry Stebbings · Dec 7, 2022

Hiring people who had never worked in the domain before produced better outcomes

34:35 20 Product: Marty Cagan on The Four Questions of Great Product Management, Product Lessons from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and eBay's Pierre Omidyar & The Difference Between Truly Great Product Teams and the Rest

Marty Cagan · Dec 7, 2022

Companies should hire product people for product skills and expect them to learn the domain, rather than hiring for domain expertise

Across the industry's history almost all innovative products came from people and teams with no real domain experience, and a strong product person can learn what they need quickly

Scope: there are exceptions — some domain hires are rock stars; some domains like medicine require more depth; teams still need to go deep on customers, financial constraints and regulations; works best where the company provides a chief domain/subject-matter expert teams can consult

34:48 20 Product: Marty Cagan on The Four Questions of Great Product Management, Product Lessons from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and eBay's Pierre Omidyar & The Difference Between Truly Great Product Teams and the Rest

David Lieb · Feb 3, 2023 · hedged

Domain experience is anti-correlated with top-performing PMs

Most of the strongest PMs on the Google Photos team came from backgrounds with no experience in the domain

Scope: 'I'd probably go so far as to say'; based on Google Photos team experience

0:07 20Product: When to Hire a CPO, The Three Different Types of CPO, How To Know What You Need, How To Structure the Hiring Process, What Are the Must-Ask Questions, What Tests and Case Studies Should Be Used, How Should Their Compensation Package Be Structur

David Lieb · Feb 3, 2023 · hedged

Domain experience is anti-correlated with top-performing PMs; the strongest PMs tend to come from unrelated backgrounds

Such people self-select for ambition and carry a chip on their shoulder, so they work harder and dig deeper into the customer

Scope: based on his experience with the Google Photos team; 'probably go so far as to say'

26:02 20Product: When to Hire a CPO, The Three Different Types of CPO, How To Know What You Need, How To Structure the Hiring Process, What Are the Must-Ask Questions, What Tests and Case Studies Should Be Used, How Should Their Compensation Package Be Structur

Scott Belsky · Feb 3, 2023

You should hire product managers for general product skill and expect them to learn the domain, rather than hiring for domain expertise.

Across the industry's history, almost all innovative products came from people and teams with no real domain experience; a strong product person can learn the domain in roughly three months.

Scope: some people who came from the domain are rock stars; assumes ~3 months of ramp to learn the domain

33:05 20Product: When to Hire a CPO, The Three Different Types of CPO, How To Know What You Need, How To Structure the Hiring Process, What Are the Must-Ask Questions, What Tests and Case Studies Should Be Used, How Should Their Compensation Package Be Structur

Kevin Niparko · Sep 29, 2023

The biggest mistake in hiring product people is overweighting specific skills and domain expertise instead of experience and the overall craft of product management

The best product leaders in the organization are generalists who apply their craft across domains, and specific domain knowledge can usually be learned on the job

Scope: there are rare cases where specific knowledge is the key input

19:48 20Product: Why Product Memes Are More Important Than a Product Roadmap, Why Writing is the Essential Skill for Product People, How AI Changes The Role of Product, Big Mistakes Founders Make When Hiring Product Teams with Kevin Niparko, VP Product @ Twilio

Kevin Niparko · Sep 29, 2023

Product leaders in product-led organizations must be fast-learning generalists who go solve the hardest problem in the company regardless of whether it is a product, engineering, or go-to-market problem

In a product-led org the product leader is on the hook for everything — if the product doesn't sell, if support is flooded, if margins or scaling break — and is uniquely positioned to solve issues that aren't traditionally product problems

20:50 Product led org leaders must be versatile generalists solving any business problem