Hiring and Building a Product Team
This is the craft behind the Resource Management & Hiring behavior in Team Leadership, and the highest-leverage decision a product leader makes. Every other leadership skill, whether coaching, alignment, or strategy, is a multiplier on the people you hired. Hire badly and you will spend years coaching around a problem you created in an afternoon. You cannot out-manage a bad hire.
#My point of view: hire for character first, competence second
The most important thing I have learned about hiring is that competence can be coached; character usually cannot. A skilled PM who is arrogant or a poor teammate does more damage than an unpolished one who is humble and trustworthy, and you can teach the second person the craft. Cagan's bar is competent people with character, and the order is not accidental.
This maps directly onto how I think about people in Character, Competency, and Craft:
| Layer | Coachable? | Weight it in hiring |
|---|---|---|
| Character (humility, integrity, empathy, resilience) | Very hard | Screen hardest here; it's your floor, not your stretch |
| Competency (judgment, communication, leadership) | Yes, over time | Look for trajectory and slope, not just current state |
| Craft (tools, techniques, frameworks) | Easily | Weight least; the most teachable, least predictive layer |
Most interview processes invert this. They grade hardest on the most coachable layer (craft and tool knowledge) and barely probe the least coachable one (character). I run it the other way.
#Sourcing: attract, don't just filter
The first move in the behavior is attracting diverse, high-potential candidates, which means hiring starts long before the interview. A strong product team reputation, a clear pitch for why working here grows their career, and a genuinely wide net all happen upstream. If your pipeline is narrow, no interviewing rigor saves you. You are just choosing carefully among the wrong sample. Note the words: diverse and high-potential, not "people like the ones we already have."
#Evaluating holistically
The behavior calls for holistic, evidence-based, inclusive evaluation. In practice:
- Probe for evidence, not assertions. "Tell me about a launch" is weak. "Walk me through the hardest trade-off you made and why" surfaces real judgment. Hunt for Product Sense and Judgment, not memorized frameworks.
- Structure it and calibrate. Same core questions across candidates, and a debrief that surfaces evidence over vibes. Unstructured interviews mostly measure "is this person like me," which is bias in a lab coat.
- Test the actual job. A working session beats a quiz. Watch them frame a problem and communicate a recommendation.
#Team shape: build a spiky team, not a roster of clones
The most-overlooked idea in team-building. Per my competency model, individual PMs are spiky, exceptional at a few competencies and average at the rest, and that is correct. Great products come from spiky people on a well-rounded team. So the unit of "well-rounded" is the team, not the person.
Before any hire, I map the team's collective shape against The T-Shaped PM and Knowing Your Shape. If the team is deep on execution and thin on data, the next hire is a data-spiky PM, even if a second execution-strong candidate "interviews better." Hiring more of what you already have feels safe and quietly makes the team weaker. You are assembling a complementary set, not collecting high scorers.
#Aligning structure to the work
The last part of the behavior, align org structure to needs, is the leader's version of prioritization. As a team grows, how you split product areas (by outcome vs feature, by customer, by funnel stage) shapes what gets built. Org design is product design by other means, and at the GPM and Director levels it is a core part of the job.
#How AI is changing it
AI is creeping into sourcing and screening: résumé parsing, candidate matching, first-pass take-home evaluation (How AI Is Reshaping Product Management). It is useful for volume but dangerous on bias, because a model trained on past hires will reproduce their skew, undermining the diverse-and-inclusive mandate the behavior requires. So I treat it as a logistics assistant, never a judgment substitute. The high-stakes calls, reading character, sensing potential, deciding whether this person makes this team better, stay firmly human. There is a meta-twist worth naming: as AI commoditizes the craft layer, hiring for the durable layers matters more, not less (Competencies AI Commoditizes vs Elevates). You are increasingly hiring for the things AI cannot do.
#Continue Reading
- Team Leadership for the competency this craft serves.
- Character, Competency, and Craft for the hire-for-character-first model in full.
- The T-Shaped PM and Knowing Your Shape for why you hire to the team's gaps, not for clones.
- The PM Interview and Hiring Guide for the practical interviewing playbook in the reference.
- Coaching and Feedback for what you do with the people once they are in the door.