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The "5 to 9 Product Manager"

by Aditya SudhakarJuly 27th, 2022

Too Long; Didn't Read

Hiring Product Managers can be challenging. On the flip side it can be challenging for a Product Manager to stand out. Demonstrating habits and a growth mindset makes the decision easy.

Company Mentioned

featured image - The "5 to 9 Product Manager"

So you're looking for a Product Manager and 3 candidate profiles come by your desk:

FAANG experience- feature shipped to millions
Grew late stage venture from $X0M to $X00M
Grew seed venture from idea to first 10 customers

You hop on calls and are looking for all the signals: creative vision, has used data, understood user needs, motivated teams, conducted market research, navigated complexity, delivered results, asked clarifying questions, explained thought process, isn't stuck on a position, is succinct...

The candidates have come prepared. They’ve all read the tutorials and are about to drop some creative vision on you with suggested phrases like "sharing economy", "context awareness", and "conversational UI". Porter's 5 Forces have been memorized and the BUS framework is down pat.

The interviews are done. They went blazingly fast. Now you need to pick. So who do you pick? They all did well. They’ve all solved uniquely hard problems. How does one figure out if one is better suited than the other? Is unconscious bias for your tribe leading you? Maybe it’s easier to punt and do nothing.

What if there was a more objective predictor of success that can get you to a decision faster. I call it the "5 to 9 PM”.

One way of characterizing the role of a PM is that they exhibit and instill increasingly better habits for themselves and the team. You may disagree with some of the frequencies below, but you’ll probably agree there is some frequency.

Listen to users daily
Exhibit good product sense daily
Exercise execution judgment daily
Ship biweekly
Summarize market trends weekly
Test roadmap assumptions monthly
Align your remote team daily
Bring good vibes daily
Etc

However interviews don’t reveal habits. They test for point-in-time knowledge. Point-in-time is easy. Habits are hard.

You might be thinking "but isn’t a PM practicing these habits daily on the job?". I play tennis so here's a tennis analogy. On match day, you aren't practicing, you're just demonstrating habits good and bad. Practice happens between matches.

Back in PM world, 9 to 5 is when the match is played. 5 to 9 is when habits are practiced. Some call it a growth mindset. From our 3 candidates above, the “5 to 9 PM” is the one I'm picking.

So how can one become a 5 to 9 PM? Some examples:

Question	Practiced answer	5-9 answer (Everything in the Practiced answer +)
Pick a product, how would you improve it	Google Maps knows I go to work at 9am daily. It could....	I look up PH's #1 product weekly, test it, think of an improvement and jot it down. You can find it here ____
Tell me about a book you recently read	From Good to Great because...	I've put down my reading list + impressions here _____
Would you say you're a curious person	Yes, I can give you an example from...	I'm curious about ___ and write about it here _____
Have you picked up a new skill	Yes, I recently learned to ____	I've been tracking how I've been improving at _____.
Tell me about a product you shipped	We shipped ___ feature because __ and it generated ___ of usage and $	Outside of work I write/ have a podcast/ build small apps. You can see more ____.