Bill Corrigan

To me, every single product or new idea requires a Lean Canvas or Business Model Canvas to be filled out in order as part of the overall strategy. You might not have all the answers to start, but you should have the basics about the Problem, Solution, Unique Value Prop and some basics about the cost structure. Once you start to fill those in, you can quickly determine whether an idea or product has potential and therefore can continue along in the Product Vision and Roadmap. Additionally, a basic Competitive analysis, either in the form of SWOT (for you and your prominent competitors), is a requirement, early in the process.

There are always more opportunities than your product and sales team can deliver against. So a good product manager has the skills to artfully craft a prioritized and quantified roadmap / backlog for the team to pursue. This requires bi-directional communication skills, with the ability to understand the corporate strategy and then align the product and GTM strategy to help achieve the goals set by the C-suite. It also requires strong analysis and presentation skills to effectively use the tools to analyze the data (tableau, Excel, PowerBI) and then present the findings to a variety of of audiences, ranging from the senior executives to the engineers / data scientists to the sales / marketing teams that will bring it to market.

To me, understanding the customer and competitive landscape and being able to translate this into a navigable route to a profitable segment of that market is the #1 job of a product manager. There are a million “great ideas” that smart (or sometimes not-so-smart) people dream up, but the key questions are, (1) “will customers pay for this?”and (2) “how difficult is it to carve out a segment, among the competitive landscape?”. A strong product manager can utilize a variety of methods to capture input data and then synthesize this into a coherent set of product features and routes to market to establish a real revenue stream.

I completely disagree with this. The software developers code and product managers will never understand the nuances to build the product. A software product manager who knows just a little coding might actually be less effective because they could second guess the engineers, which would lead to trust issues. I think a far better use of a product manager’s time is to invest in understanding more and more about your USERS, especially if they are technical users. For example, if you are delivering DevOps solutions, invest in understanding DevOps processes, tools and the challenges the DevOps engineers face. This type of knowledge will be valuable as you start to engage engineering in the problem-solving / solution development phase.

Finally, I would drill into specific technologies if the person is applying for a technical role. What IoT platform did you use? Why did you select it? What is the benefit of using MQTT for transport? Explain the types of physical sensors you might use to measure efficiency in a manufacturing plant? What about a smart office building?

Additionally, I would ask them to describe the overall technology stack required for their IoT solutions they’ve worked on. What I am looking for is someone who understands that that are many layers to the solution, from the devices and sensors to the connectivity and networking to the various layers of software and integrations into existing on-prem and cloud systems, various UX requirements and devices, etc. No one is an expert on ALL of these areas and if they claim to be, they are probably not being 100% truthful. Instead, I want someone to share what their role was within the broader solution set and explain how they interacted with the other teams or individuals to deliver a solution on time.