In this document I am researching product managers persona from organizational , personality and career path perspectives. I think these viewpoints are essentials to understand in order to recruit new product managers effectively. I was chairing a session on this topic in ProductCamp Helsinki event 18.4.2015.

1. Product Managers
Personality
Tatu Lund, Productcamp Espoo 18.4.2015
What traits make good product managers, how product managers
become product managers and how to hire product managers.

2. Product managers viewed from three perspectives
In this document we research product managers from three different perspectives
to form a rich picture what kind of people they are and how we can use that
information in hiring new product managers effectively. The document follows
these three perspectives in the following order.
 The organizational perspective
 The personality profile perspective
 The career perspective

3. I: Product managers as
company integrators
Company and organization from product managers
perspective or otherway round.

4. What is the real organization?
HR’s view How we really work

5. Product manager inside the organization
Board
Financing
Sales
After sales
Human resources
Production /
manufacturing
Reseach &
Development
Marketing
Product manager

6. Product managers as company integrators
Product managers role and
communication
Companies and organizations becomes
more dis-integrated as they grow. Why I
made this conclusion? I have worked in
product management positions most of
my professional career. Product manager
is characterized as being the one who
takes care of product planning and
product marketing. Therefore he sits in
the middle of everything.
In order to excel in performance, product
manager needs to be well wired for many
directions. R&D and sales & marketing
departments are obvious, since
depending on company culture, he
typically sits in either of them. Product
manager also drafts the business case,
needs to know about technologies that
are available, resources in house etc.,
which is impossible to do without good
wiring with Procurement, HR and CFO
office. That is why product managers are
often said to be mini CEO's.
Good product manager working in
entreprenial way is a person in a
company who really feels the pulse. He
becomes the integration point of the
company, where the siloes meet.
Suddenly product manager will notice
that he is jumping around organization in
countless meetings gathering and sharing
information (and functioning as generic
messenger boy). This might sound
fabulous, but it isn't, why? It is symptom
of bad communication culture in the
organizations, lack of other interaction
points in the company.
Product managers cannot fix dis-
integrated organizations alone. In small
company it may be okey, but not in larger
ones. In order to stay integrated while
growing, companies need to emphasize
openess in communication. All data
should be shared to everybody and kept
organized in company intranet and other
tools. Why?

7. Product managers as company integrators
If you are oblidged to disclose everything
you must recruit only people who you can
trust. As a worker you will feel oblidged to
deliver premium quality, since it is open
to criticism (for example your
presentation to boardmeeting). Once you
trust your colleagues and see them
delivering their best, it creates
athmosphere of continuous
improvement. And as a nice bonus
product managers have more time to
focus on value creating products.
Product managers organizational drift
For each position in the organization
there is always the predefined planned
role and then role what you actually do.
We can plan the organization assumming
certain project leadership paradigms like
scrum, PMI, PRINCE2 which define
different types of job roles for
participants. We may have other
governing paradigms for management,
matrix, pyramid, etc. which define other
roles and finally charts the reporting rules
in the organization. We augment the
missing gaps by using theoretical ideas
what product manager, account manager,
project leader, business controller, HR
manager, etc. should do.
However according to post modern
organization theory there is always real
state of the organization which only
partially reflects the planned one. Each
organization should have a tendency to
use maximally the competencies
contained in them. Besides our core
copetence we have always some side
comptencies and different personal
qualities. Especially in smaller
organizations (small companies or small
semi independent teams in a corporation)
there tends to be great flexibility and drift
away from predefined work roles. For
example it is quite natural for product
managers to do technical sales work,
support procurement etc.

8. Product managers as company integrators
There are pros and cons in this. It is good
for organizational efficiency to exploit all
competences. But if this leads off track
individual core competence development,
it may be a bad thing. Thus it is important
for the individual to recognize what your
core comptence is, and what you should
learn to master. That helps to recognize
what tasks of your job are extra
curriculum activities. Go ahead do them if
you have energy, motivation, capacity and
time, but don't drift away.

9. Product managers and intrapreneurship
Or what is the difference between the
product clerk and product manager?
How I should validate the product? What
is the best tool to handle customer
requirements, product requirements,
product data etc.? These are questions
commonly asked in product managerial
discussions. What is actually a product
manager? Is he/she a clerk to administer
product related data (PDM systems and
alike) and PMR (product marketing
requirements) documents etc. in a big
corporation. If so, is the best measure for
your work performane to assess how tidy
and orderly fashion your product data is
being handled. My answer is no. If you
feel like working as a product related data
clerk, you are doing your product
manager job only partially, something
essential is missing.
Intrapreneur is a word which refers to any
person working in a company with
entreprenial attitude. Sometimes it is
matter of personality. Some of us are pro
active, want to question things, develop
things and taken no things for granted.
You can find some intrapreneurs in every
company. According to post modern
organization theory intraprenur like
people are the building blocks of well
functioning organization. They internalize
company vision and strategy; organize
bottom up accordingly; they provide
leadership examples by their actions.
Many of them do not actively think they
are intrapreneur or leaders.
Nature of the job description of a product
manager mandates that they need to be
intrapreneurs. For many other jobs it is
personal choice. Product clerk would be
just satisfied to copy customer
requirements to product requirements,
maintain the details in the tidy order.
Product validation would be
straightforward if data is faithfully
preserved in the process, right?

10. Product managers and intrapreneurship
No, product managers drill deeper. They
seek weak signals in customer
requirments and market data, which may
indicate what the real problem is. They
ask the account managers to let them visit
the customers and observe their
operations. They look every product they
see with curiousity and assess them with
product managers professionalism (to
learn from them or if they could do
better). They think like scientist after they
have gathered all the data and form a
hypothesis (initial set of product
requirements), makes slideware and first
sell the product internally, then sell it
externally, and keeps iterating, pivots,
challenges, persuades, fights battles.
As a process it is like running lean startup
within a corporation. The difference is
that it is not personal quest. Part of the
product managers professionalism is to
execute this in accordance of the
company strategy and vision. This is a
process of creative curiosity and hence
value adding, it unfolds the product story.

11. Summary
 Organizations planned and real structure are very different. Organizations are
more dynamic we may think.
 Product managers sit between many forces and hence act as integrators. Hence
communication skills are very vital for product managers.
 One individual may have many job roles, this is why it is difficult to find product
managers who do only product management
 Well functining organizations have tendency to fully exploit comptenences
contained in them.
 Organizational drift is very common and necessary for organization’s ability to
adapt to the change.

12. Summary
 Product manager needs to think like an entrepreneur in order to be flexible within
organization and drive change.
 When hiring product manager we are filling a lot in our organization, which is may
differ from the organization lot where the product manager is coming from.

13. II: Product managers
personlity type
Small survey of product managers MBTI personality
profiles

14. Product managers MBTI types
ENTJ and INTJ were the
most common
personality
characteristics in small
survay I did in LinkedIn.
60% of the respondents
had either of these. Note
only 5-10% average
population are I/ENTJ.
50% of the types not
present at all.
5 %
0 % 0 % 0 %
21 %
0 % 0 %
11 %
5 %
0 % 0 % 0 %
37 %
11 %
5 % 5 %
ISTJ ISTP ISFJ ISFP INTJ INTP INFJ INFP ESTJ ESTP ESFJ ESFP ENTJ ENTP ENFJ ENFP

15. Diging deeper in MBTI chatacters
I/E is close to 50/50. N, T and J traits on the other hand very dominant.
I E S N T F J P

16. Product managers personality types
I have been tested for MBTI (Myers-
Briggs Type Indicator), DISC and some
other personality assesment tests many
times as well as studied those to some
extent. Hence I've been interested in the
topic with some healthy scepticism. So I
decided to run a little experiment. I am
Product Manager and interested about
what kind of people Product Managers
are. I decided to gather MBTI and DISC
data from Product Managers in LinkedIn
forum. The work is still in progress, since I
do not have much DISC data yet, but
managed to get small MBTI sample. This
is a report of the results of my small MBTI
survey. The results were interesting and
intuitive.
About the theory
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, shortly
known as MBTI is perhaps the most used
personality profiling and psychometric
method based on Carl Jung's theories.
DISC (Dominance, Inducement,
Submission, Compliance) is an another
popular Jungian psychometric technique.
MBTI assess the personality type,
whereas DISC emphasize more the
behavioral personality. They both have
become commercial standards in
personel development and reqruitment.
MBTI characterizes the personality by
using four dimensions, each is denoted
by pair of letters I/E =
Intraversion/Extraversion, S/N =
Sensing/iNtuition, T/F = Thinking/Feeling,
J/P = Judging/Perception. The letters are
thus pairs of opposites. The test result is
hence usually denoted by four letter
combination of these. Having said that,
we must remember that actually the test
gives percentage value which is
somewhere between the extremes. It is
actually quite typical that the result with
mature person is somewhere close to
middle slightly inclined to one of the
opposites.

17. Product managers personality types
So I gathered the data in Excel and
started to crunch it. There are clearly two
MBTI types peaking out INTJ and ENTJ as
you see in the graph. These two types
cover close to 60% of all sample. (Note: In
average US population ENTJ + INTJ share
varies between 5-10%) Another striking
observation is that half of the types are
not presnet at all. I anticipated a bit more
diversity, since my own experience as
Product Manager tells me, that it is quite
a versatile job, and one could think that
many types of persons could perfom well
in it.
Since my data set was small, I did analysis
of each type preference pair individually;
I/E, N/S, T/F, J/P. When I try to open each
one from Product Manager's job
perspective, it starts to make sense. Next
I explain each of the four pairs one by
one using reflections from my own
product manager experience.
I/E (Intraversion/Extraversion)
This character is closest to 50/50 tie.
Product Manager needs to have
particularly strong communication skills.
Extreme introverts and extroverts are not
usually good at this. Both good listenning
and presenting is needed. As extremes
these seem to be incompatilbe. The
tendency to be closer to middle in I/E axis
is the propably good starting point. Some
studies have shown that with age the
extremes in introversion and extroversion
tend to soften.

18. Product managers personality types
S/N (Sensing/iNtuition)
The data shows very strong preference,
which means tendency to intuitive
thinking and decision making. Product
Managers are important decision makers.
They need to be able to see big picture
and make risk decision based on
heterogenious data (facts, factoids and
opinnions from different sources). N
(Intuition = big picture over details)
preference is also connected to futures
thinking and will to explore possibilities.
Eventually each new product is a
hypothesis, which tries to test if the
decisions made were correct, the
customer says the final verdict.
T/F (Thinking/Feeling)
According to the MBTI framework T
(Thinking) tendency is connected to
objective thinking. I interpret this to
customer centric tendency to
objectivism. The product is not a personal
agenda. Product Manager's function is to
act for customers behalf inside the
organization, therefore PM needs sense
of objectivity and sort of empathy for the
end user. Product Manager needs also
critical thinking in order to challenge both
the engineering and customer.
J/P (Judging/Perceiving)
From Product Manager perspective, each
product is a customer promise that needs
to be delivered. I think this explains why
there tends to be J (Judging = well
organized, planning, stick to the plan)
preference amongst Product Managers.
With J there lives a small Project
Manager inside each PM, who wants to
put customer promises and deliveries in
the timeline, do good planning and
internal checkoing, as well as the fights
inside the organization in order to keep
those promises.

19. Product managers personality types
Summary & Notes
According to this sample I/ENTJ type is
the most common amongst Product
Managers and there are some intuitive
explanations why is so. It must be noted
that naturally only small portion of
I/ENTJ's end up be Product Managers and
vica versa, some other personality types
exists amongst Product Managers. In
addition to personality type, generic
interest and will to learn this profession
means a lot. Perhaps this finding is
indication that for I/ENTJ's it is slightly
easier than average, and hence higher
concentration. It would be also
interesting topic to study I/ENTJ
personality type's connection to
intrapreneurship, which is benefial for
Product Managers
Aknowledgements: Thank you for
everybody who supported this study by
sending your personality profile to me.

20. Summary
 Product managers seem to have strong concentration of I/ENTJ personality type,
despite they are relatively small group in general population.
 Since communication skills are vital for product managers being in middle of the
I-E axis seem to be beneficial.
 N: Product managers needs intuition to make decisions based on different types
of data.
 T: Product managers need to excercise objectivity to achieve customer
perspective
 J: Product managers are also disciplined project managers needing skills to
organize and pursue goals.

21. How to read and analyze MBTI chatacters
Sample of real MBTI profile. The personality trait pairs are biased slightly in one of the
directions, but not in the extremes.

22. Are personality tests uselful at all?
Recently I have been introduced to the
world of personality tests. It started
about two years ago when I left Nokia. I
got extensive personality profile (OPQ32)
as a farewell gift. As I have been seeking
new career I have studied business and
administration. Personality profiling has
become more and more familiar with me.
Within a year I have undergone MBTI and
DISC testing. Since those were part of my
studies, I have got some briefing on the
theoretical background of those.
I have read both praising and critical
articles about the topic. Personality has
been a scientific mystery long time, yet
we all have some intuitive understanding
about it. Early scholars from Hippocrate
to Carl Jung have been studying it. Their
efforts cannot be claimed scientific in
modern days terms. Still even today
many common place methodologies are
based on Jung's theories (DISC and MBTI
for example). By the way creators of MBTI
test didn't have formal background in
psychology. Are these tests reliable and
useful in any means
It seems that there are still many open
questions to be scientifically studied. Is
there permanent personality character in
us that remains thru our lifes and is
persistent both in our job and personal
life? Intuitive answer is that it seems so.
We all tend to say that some of our
relatives or colleagues are like this and
that. However it is very difficult to create
scientfic method to prove that. Also some
opposites seem to be true also. We all do
have some distinct roles in our lifes,
which affect our personality. Our
behavior within the family, job, etc. tend
to vary. We have also wide set of
vocabulary to describe how we mature
thru our lifespan. So it seems that it is
intuitively clear that we have permanent,
termporal and contextual personality
character that are either in our biology
(genetic) or learned.

23. Are personality tests uselful at all?
What is particulary clear with tests like
DISC and MBTI is that they are based on
small set of questions and test subjects
are forced to make yes/no type answers
(or select between two words, which
both may describe them a little bit). This
has two consequences. The other is that
their scientific power is decreasing by
this kind of simplification. Also the tests
are being executed in different ways,
especially what comes to briefing of the
test subjects. Do you answer the
questions as an employee or in more
general context. Are you thinking about
your wife or boss when answer, are you
being briefed to focus to questions in
certain manner. The second conseuence
is that being simple makes them good for
making business. Complicated test would
be too expensive to execute and would
require testers to be well educated
psychologists. Also the results would be
complicated to understand. Beauty of
DISC and MBTI seems to be in their
simplicity. They are easy and affordable
to execute, and produce results that are
intuitive to understand.
So are they useful? There seem to be
some mathematical correlation between
the results. The results of the three tests
I have taken seem not to be awfully
contradictory. DISC and MBTI are also
known to give slightly different results
when repeated. On the other hand we
know, that if you indeed grow and
mature your results at 20 years of age
and 40 years of age should be different.
Indeed there are some evidence that test
results tend to converge towards the
center when we grow old. However the
tests are over simplified and correlations
are too weak to be scientifically useful.
That doesn't make them complete crap
though.
For those who are interested to entertain
with idea of selfimprovement these tests
are somewhat useful used as mirror of
self awareness.

24. Are personality tests uselful at all?
Let us assume that we indeed have both
permanent and learned personality
character. Said that, we should have
plasticity to reshape us in some ways.
These tests can help us to think about
ourselves slightly more objective manner.
Also we should read the results more
carefully.
I have noticed lot of of criticism stating
that these tests are putting you in four
letter corner, or over characterize,
creating a stereotypic picture of you. I
think this is again due the way these tests
are being used. Apparently the trait
which makes these tests useful for
business goes sometimes too extreme.
The tests are done without much
supervision and the results are not being
properly explained to subjects. Luckily my
experience as subject has been as part of
my studies, under well guided experts
and included discussion about pros and
cons.
When properly excericed there is some
limited value in personlity testing mainly
in self development. It seems that they
are a bit overhyped and there is place for
cricism in order to make people more
aware of their weaknesses how they are
practically used and their limited
scientific background.
Back to the science. What is the future of
personality testing? If there is any
permanent personality character in us,
that should be found in genes. And
indeed there is already some first
findings of genes that are linked for
example to conservative thinking. I am
quite confident that more findings will
follow and in the future DISC and MBTI
will be replaced by genetic profiling. But
before that we who are interested in self-
improvement, lifehacking etc. are resort
to less perfect methods like DISC and
MBTI.

25. Summary
 Commercial psychometric testing is not absolute science.
 Tools like MBTI and DISC are helpful at best in recruitment and hiring cannot be
based solely on them.
 We have both static and plastic personality traits.
 Extremes tend to soften while we age.

26. III: Product managers
growth paths
How product managers career paths develop inside
companies. How to understand their CV’s and
understand the future potential.

27. Product managers growth paths
Engineering path Marketing path
Senior SW Designer
SW Project Leader
Product Manager
Learns project leadership
Learns marketing
Senior Product Manager
Goest to new industry
Codelinespermonth
Product Marketing Manager
Product Manager
Senior Product Manager
Learns domain knowledge
Goes to new industry
Focusonmarcoms

28. Product managers paths
I've worked in various kinds of
organizations and observed how people
become product managers. If I simplify a
lot, I can say that there is two equally
good tracks or paths which grow product
managers.
Engineering path
First track I call engineering path. This is
fairly common in SME and startups, since
it follows their organic growth as
organizations. It is very typical that a
Company is founded on basis of
technological innovation. The team needs
to get organized and start to learn
marketing and product management.
Some of us are "naturally" more
marketing savy and get interested in
learning those skills. This interest
provides natural learning path towards
product manager role.
The difficulty in small company is that
everybody has multiple roles and the
team dynamics matter a lot. There needs
to be a very good understanding within
the team what is the key focus of the
each stake holder and which role each
one should develop first. The emerging
organization needs to develop various
functions into excellence, including
product management. In the beginning a
startup is a group of generalists and once
the startup phase is over, it is group of
specialists. Hence some day, the product
manager stops coding, perhaps he or she
has even lost the drive for it. And that is
ok.
The engineering path can be also learning
curve in a corporation. In corporation
there are constantly personel changes,
which provides possibilities for internal
job role transfers. Many positions are
tried to be filled by internal talent
acquisition first. This is also what
happened to me.

29. Product managers paths
Product manager works both in the
solution and problem space. The
background in engineering, like computer
science serves well the solution space.
However operating in problem space
requires marketing and business
management skills.
Marketing path
That is why I call the second track
marketing path. It is slightly more
common in corporations than startups,
but again can happen in both. Typically
MBA and business school graduates have
good skillset to start in junior marketing
positions. These are more focused on
marketing communications and
advertisement etc.
Some of the people with marketing
background have natural interest towards
technology than advertisement for
example. This drives them to obtain
necessary domain knowledge used in the
products or services provided by the
company. Since product managers are
good communicators, they are good
learners. That is why regradless of their
background (engineering or marketing)
they can learn other subjects fairly easily
when motivated.
As we see with both backgrounds
substantial amount of in job learning,
opportunism and curiosity is required.
This related to product managers optimal
personality.

30. Product managers paths
Achieving seniority
In both cases the seniority is achived by
working on different types of products.
The true test of seniority is to take the
leap to other industry, perhaps adjancent
one, and test how the learned product
management methologies apply there.
This leap also provides the opportunity to
learn domain knowledge of other
industries, widen the product
management toolbox etc. Intangibles
(services and software) are different from
tangibles (consumer electronics and
FMCG), consumer businesses have
different aspects to business to business
world. I've been lucky to have
opportunity to work in all these worlds.
Implications to hiring product managers
So what are the learnings when you
decide to recruit a product manager.
Which track to prefer? My advice is that
you should have both. If your first product
manager was from eningeering path, take
the second from marketing path. They
learn a lot from each other. Assess that
person is passionate to learn, curious,
open minded and excellent in
communication. Ask how the candidate
has demonstrated these and entreprenial
attitude during their career path. Make
also sure that he or she has discipline to
run small projects in orderly fashion. I
strongly recommend to mix industries.
This will provide influx of fresh ideas and
increase seniority of the product
managers. When interviewing a candidate
value high challening attitude, courage to
ask "why" questions? Product managers
task is to push your organization into limit
in providing quality in promised schedule.
He or she cannot always be nice. Do not
just assess superficial knowledge and
problem solving skills, but also try to find
out the candidates problem formulation
skills.

31. Summary
 Product managers can have technical or marketing background. They are
graduates from different types of schools.
 Product managers have often interdiscplinary career. This is often seen negative
amongst technical specialists, but for product managers it is a virtue.
 Good candidate could be good in teaching or selling too.
 Career path of the product manager candidate gives us hints their potential and
ambitions.
 Look for challenger attitude and tendency ask ”why?” questions.
 Look for problem formulation skills.

32. Thank you
Productcamp 18.4.2015, Espoo