The job of product managers is not to know, it is to learn. Far too many people have that backwards, including product managers. The best ideas rarely come from the product manager. But the best product managers do a good job of finding ideas that are out there in the users, QA department, developers, etc, and figuring out which ones deserve to be tried, how to integrate them into the product, and how to judge their success.
I remember one product manager. Her first time being a product manager in software. I handled reporting. Within 3 days I knew she was good. She knew absolutely nothing, but she asked the right questions, and put the answers together in good ways to come up with insights other people hadn't had. I was on my way out the door, but I kept in touch with the company. I was entirely unsurprised that 6 months later she had emerged as a superstar.
Still there is always a challenge in telling the difference in an interview between people who are good, and are good at BS. This seems to be particularly true with product managers. But I suspect (never having hired for the position I can only suspect) that digging into their willingness and ability at asking questions is revealing.
"The best ideas rarely come from the product manager"
Agreed. A product manager is like a jazz musician. You're a student of established patterns, and pay attention to everyone else on stage (designers, boss, customer support), but when the need arises, you can create something new to wow the audience.
Yes, I remember specifics of how Jenny Kaplan (then Roosa) impressed me. (No need to hide the name of someone I'm complimenting. :-)
She was asked to look at our lease reporting process. That was a process that was somewhat complex, under documented, and which nobody had been in charge of for some time.
Less than a day later she knew that I was a useful resource. She asked me for any information I had on lease statuses. I sent her a copy of the standard documentation we had on tables, and pointed to where in that there was a list of all statuses you could wind up in during the lease reporting page. She asked me for information about transitions from state to state. I sent her the source code that controlled the set of all possible lease transitions, and included brief descriptions on how to tell when that would trigger emails, etc. (There was no other documentation. Seriously.) She came to me, and said she was trying to prioritize the logic, and we had a brief back and forth discussion about what was available. Perhaps 15 minutes later I had a report for her that listed for each lease transition, how many people had made that transition in some previous time period.
The next day she had a diagram that listed the major lease states, the important lease transitions, gave volumes for how people flowed through, and gave how many people's leases ended at each status. She had also prioritized which ones she thought had the most room for improvement. This was by far the best view I'd ever seen on the lease report process in several years at the company.
I was impressed with how quickly she had come up with that, and I mentioned this in a conversation with the person who ran QA. Who said, "You're not the first to compliment her. Monica (who handled customer support) has been saying how happy she is to have a product manager who comes and asks questions about what problems people are asking customer support about. I'll be very interested to see what she does with her spec."
Jenny started 3 days earlier. Within 3 days of being handed a big hairball of a project, she had managed to impress 2 people in 2 other departments. And when said spec arrived, the comment I got from the head of QA was, "Now THIS is what I wish every spec looked like. Clear. Simple. Too the point. And it looks like it will work."
I remember one product manager. Her first time being a product manager in software. I handled reporting. Within 3 days I knew she was good. She knew absolutely nothing, but she asked the right questions, and put the answers together in good ways to come up with insights other people hadn't had. I was on my way out the door, but I kept in touch with the company. I was entirely unsurprised that 6 months later she had emerged as a superstar.
Still there is always a challenge in telling the difference in an interview between people who are good, and are good at BS. This seems to be particularly true with product managers. But I suspect (never having hired for the position I can only suspect) that digging into their willingness and ability at asking questions is revealing.