Consider you’re tasked with hiring a data scientist to improve your organization’s data management processes. You’ve written a detailed job description and are now sorting through dozens of applications. However, as you scan the resumes, you find it hard to understand what half of the candidates discuss. Indeed, there must be an easier way to find the right person for this role. Does this scenario sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone.
Knowing how to hire data scientists is challenging even the most seasoned recruiters. But it doesn’t have to be that way. This guide will offer valuable insights to help you achieve your hiring goals, such as allowing healthcare organizations to use innovative data management.
Azulity’s solution, provider credentialing services, can simplify finding qualified data scientists and healthcare professionals. By streamlining the credentialing process, Azulity helps organizations quickly verify a candidate’s education, training, and certifications to ensure they meet your organization’s needs.
Importance of Product Managers
Product management is the business area that manages products at all life cycle stages, from development to removal from the market. Product management includes physical products and services, software, and everything that companies produce and deliver to the market. A Product Manager (PM) is the person who identifies the customer needs and the business goals that a product is going to suppress.
A PM defines what success will look like for a product and assembles a team to transform the vision into reality. Product management is the crossover between the business, technology, and user experience functions: Business The focus of product management is to optimize the product to meet business objectives while maximizing return on investment. Technology Product management must understand the technology and the level of effort involved in building the product. User Experience On the other hand, product management is the voice of the user or customer within the business, and the user’s experience should be known in detail.
The main benefits of having good product management are Delivering the products and services that best meet customer needs, having satisfied customers that generate positive references through word-of-mouth, capturing and sustaining markets in the long term through a solid product strategy, and Increasing revenues and business profitability.
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- What to Ask When Hiring a Data Scientist
Responsibilities of a Product Manager
The specific duties of a product manager can differ significantly depending on the organization’s size. For instance, larger organizations embed product managers within teams of specialists. For example, researchers, analysts, and marketers help gather input, while developers and designers manage the day-to-day execution, draw up designs, test prototypes, and find bugs.
These product managers have more help, but they also spend more time aligning these stakeholders behind a specific vision. On the flip side, product managers at smaller organizations spend less time getting everyone to agree but more time doing the hands-on work that comes with defining a vision and seeing it through. A good product manager will spend time on a handful of tasks.
A Focus on the User
Understanding and representing user needs. Product managers are often seen as the champions of the end user. They are responsible for communicating who the target users are, what they want, and why they want it. This involves creating user personas and defining use cases, which help communicate product requirements to organizational stakeholders.
Market Research and Competitive Analysis
Monitoring the market and developing competitive analyses. Product managers need not just to understand users but also how the product fits within the competitive landscape. This involves researching rival offerings, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, and determining how to position the new product against them.
Defining the Vision for the Product
Defining a vision for a product. Every product needs a clear, concise goal or a vision to succeed. This is especially true for new products or those that are significantly changing. The product manager creates and communicates this vision to all stakeholders.
Getting Everyone on the Same Page
Aligning stakeholders around the vision for the product. Product managers don’t work in isolation. Instead, they coordinate teams of people from different departments throughout the product’s lifecycle. The larger the organization, the more complex this process becomes. There may be dozens of people involved in building a product, and each of them will have their own goals and objectives. The product manager’s job is to help them understand and appreciate the product vision and how it relates to their work.
Prioritizing What’s Important
Prioritizing product features and capabilities. Not all product requirements are created equal. Some will have a far more significant impact on the product’s success than others. Product managers are responsible for identifying these critical elements and completing them first. This is especially important when teams work under tight deadlines, as there may be insufficient time to address all product requirements before launch.
Creating a Shared Brain
Creating a shared brain across larger teams to allow independent decision-making. As product teams grow in size, they can become less efficient. This is partly because people are naturally prone to work in silos, and the larger the group, the more pronounced this tendency becomes. Product managers can help mitigate this issue by establishing clear communication channels and creating a shared knowledge base that all team members can access to inform their work. This helps reduce redundant efforts and fosters a culture of collaboration that can improve overall product development success.
Azulity specializes in healthcare master data management and provider credentialing services, bringing proven expertise in implementing healthcare data solutions and credentialing across the US. Our comprehensive platform ensures consistent patient, provider, location, and claims data synchronization across all systems and departments.
Key features include healthcare MDM, provider MDM, reference data management, credentialing, and provider enrollment. We serve healthcare technology leaders – from CIOs and CDOs to VPs of data platforms and credentialing – helping them eliminate the costly problems of fragmented data systems. Book a call to learn more about our healthcare master data management services today!
How to Find the Best Product Managers
1. Problem-solving ability: The Essential Quality to Look For in Product Manager Candidates
Hiring a product manager is not just about finding someone with the right qualifications or experience. Sure, those factors are essential. But what you want is someone who can solve problems. A product manager’s job is to identify issues and develop solutions for them—not just within the product itself but also in the various teams working on the product and its customers. Many of the product leaders we’ve worked with have told us that problem-solving ability is the trait they value most in a PM on their team.
These executives understand that product management is a tricky role—one in which there are always many moving parts—and that driving a product successfully to the market will require plenty of creative solutions to unexpected challenges. So, when looking for a new PM, these sharp product leaders look for natural problem-solving aptitude, which often presents itself as creative thinking. Note: In most cases, the best way to identify this ability in a PM candidate will not be to throw a problematic riddle at her during the interview.
You know those riddles—like the thought experiment placing the candidate in a room with three light switches and asking her to figure out how to determine which switch operates which of the three lightbulbs in the next room before going in. Don’t do that. Don’t set up roadblocks in the interview to trip up your candidates. Let them tell you about their background, then tell them about your product, and finally, ask them how they’d manage or improve it. Have a discussion. You’ll find evidence of creative thinking and problem-solving aptitude emerging naturally from this conversation.
2. Strong Communication Skills Are Critical for Success
Virtually every product executive we’ve ever spoken with has listed communication as one of the top skills they demand in a PM. Even if a PM candidate checks all of the other boxes—solid product management background, experience in your company’s industry, strong technical knowledge—that PM is far more likely to prove ineffective if he cannot communicate clearly and effectively with professionals across a wide range of disciplines and teams in your company.
This is why we’ve written about how important it can be for a PM to learn the many department-specific dialects of English—such as Sales Speak and Developer Speak. Whatever else you look for in a product manager, communication skills should be at the top of your checklist.
3. Empathy Is Key
Another attribute that product leaders very commonly seek in a product manager is empathy—the ability for a PM to see things from his customer’s point of view truly and to build products that match up to those customers’ needs, desires, fears and other motivations, as opposed to trying to force a solution the customer isn’t asking for.
Tweet This: “Empathy is important to look for when hiring a PM. Can the candidate see things from a customer’s point of view?” This is a more difficult trait to find than you might realize, particularly in our modern era, where everyone is focused on their needs and wants. Indeed, our founder has written about the importance of empathy because, as he has discovered as a product lead at several large B2B companies, it is a skill many PMs have not fully developed.
4. Leadership and Charisma Matter
Charisma, or natural leadership ability, might not seem as apparent as the previous traits. But as many product executives have told us over the years, it is just as important for a PM. Product managers have the challenging role of coordinating and leading a large cross-functional team—but often without authority over anyone on that team. Some team members, such as a VP of Engineering, might be well above the PM in the organization’s hierarchy.
How can a product manager successfully drive such a complex initiative as bringing a product to market when she has no organizational potential over the people executing the details? With natural leadership skills. Many product leads have told us that a great PM can build chemistry and generate enthusiasm among the various teams and departments responsible for developing her product.
This will be no small task, considering the same PM often has to say no to requests from these teams or push them to work more quickly or with fewer resources. To succeed in these inevitable challenges, a PM will need charisma to make that cross-functional team feel as invested in the product’s success as the PM herself is and want to make that success happen.
5. An Insatiable Curiosity Drives Exploration
When ProductPlan interviewed Procore’s Director of Product Management, Shivan Bindal, as part of our “Product Lessons Learned” series, he told us something we’ve often heard from other product leaders. When hiring a product manager, Shivan is first and foremost looking for evidence of insatiable curiosity. “A curious product manager will never be satisfied with just one answer,” Shivan said. This tracks what we’ve heard from product executives across many industries, particularly in technology.
(Procore develops a SaaS platform for the construction industry.) Product management is a role that requires a great deal of initiative and intrinsic motivation. After all, it isn’t easy for a Product VP to tell her PMs precisely what they should be doing daily. And it can be very easy for a PM to settle for the first idea or answer they come up with.
This is why wise leaders like Shivan Bindal look for curiosity: Your PMs don’t know what they don’t know. And because the best strategic decisions will often emerge only after profound research and investigation, you want a PM who will be internally motivated to keep looking.
6. Look for Passion in Product Manager Candidates
In discussing what she looks for in a product manager, Julie touched on something we’ve heard from many product execs—not as many as those who’ve said they want excellent communication skills or problem-solving savvy, but plenty of product leads. The key trait for Julie when evaluating a PM candidate is passion. “You can see that light in some people’s eyes where they just get so fired up,” she said. “I call it the raw meat factor. You can feel from everything that they’re doing that they’re going to go after what they’re about with 110%.”
Julie here was hitting on a critical insight. Product development can be a long process—often months and sometimes even years—and is frequently punctuated along the way with setbacks and disappointments. If the product manager responsible for driving that long, setback-ridden development isn’t passionate about seeing her product through to a successful market launch, then the whole effort can slide off the rails at any point. Tweet This: “Don’t overlook natural passion when hiring a product manager.” Don’t overlook natural passion as a key trait when you’re trying to hire a product manager.
7. Comfortable with Failure
Really? Yep. Innovative, visionary product leaders take the long view. They know that any single product in a line, or any specific market launch, might fall flat for many reasons. These executives have repeatedly told us they want to know that any PM they hire won’t fall to pieces at the first product disappointment. Instead, they want a product manager who will be able to react appropriately, take a moment to grieve, and then start gathering valuable learnings that can propel the next launch to success.
This could make for an interesting interview question: “How would you react to an underwhelming product launch or a new product that received a negative reaction from the market?” Just make sure you can resist the temptation to penalize those candidates too harshly who tell you they’d be devastated by product failure. It would be a tricky question, and some PMs who might indeed take the long view in the real world might answer incorrectly in a job interview. Still, posing such a hypothetical in your interviews might help you when your goal is to hire a product manager who fully understands the value of the learnings that can come only from failure.
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12 Best Recruiters for Product Managers
1. Azulity: Healthcare’s Data Staffing Experts
Azulity focuses on master data management and provider credentialing services in the healthcare industry. Their expertise in implementing healthcare data solutions helps organizations eliminate the costly problems of fragmented data systems.
Azulity serves healthcare technology leaders – from CIOs and CDOs to VPs of data platforms and credentialing – with a comprehensive platform that ensures consistent synchronization of patient, provider, location, and claims data across all systems and departments. Key features include healthcare MDM, provider MDM, reference data management, credentialing, and provider enrollment.
2. Alpha Apex Group: A Strategic Approach to Recruitment
Alpha Apex Group is a premier recruitment and staffing agency specializing in sourcing and placing top-tier product management talent. Their dedicated approach focuses on identifying individuals with exceptional technical skills and exhibit strong leadership and strategic thinking capabilities essential for product management roles.
Key Services
- Specialized recruitment for Product Managers and Heads of Product
- Comprehensive candidate assessment and vetting
- Tailored executive search and placement
- Onboarding and integration support
- Ongoing follow-up and consultancy to ensure successful placements
3. Redfish Technology: Innovative Product Management Recruiting
Redfish Technology is renowned for its innovative approach to product management recruiting, significantly contributing to business growth across major U.S. tech hubs since its inception in 1996. Their specialized recruitment process aligns deeply with companies’ technological and business needs, helping bridge critical gaps in product management roles. Redfish expedites the hiring process through an engaged search strategy and maintains a robust retention rate, underscoring the effectiveness of its candidate placements.
Key Services
- Product Management Recruiting
- Executive Search
- IT and Tech Recruiting
- In-depth Candidate Screening
- Personalized Hiring Strategies
4. Torch Group: Experts in Executive Search
Torch Group is a distinguished executive search firm, established in 1990, specializing in senior management, executive, and C-level roles across various industries focusing on product management and innovation. They are known for their deep expertise in sourcing and placing exceptional talent in mission-critical positions. Torch Group’s approach is highly specialized, using competency-based behavioral interviews to ensure candidates are skilled and a perfect cultural fit for their client’s organizations.
Key Services
- Executive Search
- Interim Executive Placement
- Product Management & Innovation Recruitment
- Marketing and Sales Executive Search
- Leadership and Organizational Consulting
5. Producto Talent: A Focused Approach to Product Management Recruitment
Producto Talent specializes in product management recruitment, adeptly navigating the complexities of the industry to connect companies with top talent. Established in 2022 and based in Hook, Hampshire, the company has quickly established itself as a focused player in the recruitment scene, precisely honing in on the nuanced needs of product management roles.
The company’s approach is characterized by a deep understanding of product management’s technical and strategic facets, enabling it to effectively match candidates with companies seeking specific skill sets and experiences. Directors Hollie and James Jordan lead the team, emphasizing a personalized and detail-oriented recruitment process that prioritizes candidate and company requirements.
Key Services
- Product management recruitment
- Talent acquisition and placement
- Career guidance for product managers
6. AC Lion: Digital Sector Recruitment Firm
AC Lion, established and headquartered in New York, is a prominent executive recruiting firm with over 25 years of experience specializing in product management and other executive roles within the digital sector. Known for its extensive network and deep understanding of digital transformation, AC Lion excels in placing high-caliber candidates in key positions across emerging technology, fintech, e-commerce, and more. Their recruitment strategy involves a consultative approach that aligns closely with their client’s unique business needs and culture, ensuring the placements have the right skills and fit well within the companies.
Key Services
- Executive search
- Product management recruiting
- UX/UI design recruitment
- Digital transformation consulting
7. Ari Agency: Digital Recruitment Experts
Based in Toronto, Ari Agency has established itself as a digital recruitment and executive search leader, specializing in identifying and placing product management talent. With a notable % success rate of 95%, the agency is distinguished by its effective matching of candidates who often exceed their first year with hiring companies, well above the industry norm. Ari Agency’s approach combines rigorous vetting processes and a deep understanding of both digital market demands and the specific needs of its clients, ensuring long-term employment success.
Key Services
- Executive search
- Digital recruitment
- Product management recruitment
- Project management recruitment
8. Storm3: Connecting HealthTech Companies With Senior Talent
Storm3, founded in 2020, has quickly established itself as a leader in HealthTech recruitment. The firm connects organizations with senior HealthTech talent, specializing in product management, engineering, sales, marketing, and data & analytics.
With a deep commitment to transforming the health tech talent industry, Storm3 supports a range of clients, from startups to established companies, leveraging their expertise to meet the evolving demands of the sector. The company is known for its targeted approach in the recruitment process, emphasizing diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Key Services
- HealthTech Executive Search
- Specialist Recruitment in Product Management
- Strategic Talent Acquisition
9. Martyn Bassett Associates: Experts in Product Management Recruitment
Martyn Bassett Associates, founded in 2016, has developed a strong reputation in product management recruitment, now its largest practice area. The firm specializes in identifying and recruiting top-tier product talent for early to mid-stage tech startups. They offer a deep understanding of market conditions and the ability to communicate an opportunity’s value to potential candidates effectively. The firm emphasizes a detailed and rigorous recruitment process to ensure the alignment of candidates’ capabilities with the company’s strategic goals.
Key Services
- Product Management Recruitment
- Executive Search
- Salary and Market Condition Insights
- Recruitment Strategy Consultation
10. Product Focus: Specialized Product Management Training Firm
Product Focus is a specialized training provider that excels in product management education, serving new and experienced professionals in the field. They offer comprehensive online and in-person training courses across various global locations, including major European cities and the United States. Their courses equip product managers with the best practices and tools necessary to excel in their roles, focusing on real-world applications and current market demands.
Key Services
- Public and private product management courses
- Certification programs for product managers
- Customized training solutions
- Free resources and tools for product management professionals
11. CulverCareers: A Trusted Name in Product Management Recruitment
CulverCareers is a distinguished executive search firm specializing in product management recruitment. Established over 30 years ago, the firm prides itself on its ability to fill multi-tiered product management roles ranging from Associate Product Managers to Chief Product Officers. CulverCareers’ comprehensive approach focuses on finding talent and ensuring a perfect fit that promotes initial integration and long-term retention.
Key Services
- Executive Search for Product Management
- Detailed Candidate Evaluation
- Strategic Talent Acquisition and Retention
12. Insight Global: Large Staffing Agency With Product Manager Expertise
Insight Global is a prominent staffing agency known for its comprehensive recruiting services, including specialized recruitment for product managers. They boast a vast database of over 5 million pre-screened candidates, including thousands of product managers with niche skills tailored to meet diverse industry needs.
Insight Global offers a no-fee structure until a candidate is hired, emphasizing a cost-effective approach for businesses. Their rapid delivery promises a curated list of candidates within 24-48 hours, expediting the recruitment process significantly.
Key Services
- Product manager recruiting
- IT staffing
- Contract, contract-to-permanent, and permanent placement
- Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO)
Book a Call to Learn More About Our Provider Credentialing Services
Azulity specializes in healthcare master data management and provider credentialing services, bringing proven expertise in implementing healthcare data solutions and credentialing across the US. Our comprehensive platform ensures consistent patient, provider, location, and claims data synchronization across all systems and departments.
Key features include healthcare MDM, provider MDM, reference data management, credentialing, and provider enrollment. We serve healthcare technology leaders – from CIOs and CDOs to VPs of data platforms and credentialing – helping them eliminate the costly problems of fragmented data systems. Book a call to learn more about our healthcare master data management services today!