Purple Squirrels and Your Product Team

February 22, 2018 / Steve Johnson

Many product management and marketing job postings are impossible to fill. The idea is to find someone with many years of experience in product management… with a similar product… built on similar technology… in a similar domain… serving a similar market.

They’re looking for a unicorn.

Recruiters use another term for this: The Purple Squirrel. They’re asked to find the perfect candidate, preferably local, with a technical undergrad plus an MBA, with experience in business and technology as well as domain and industry expertise.

Who will work for peanuts.

I wonder whether most product managers would get selected to interview for their existing jobs.

(I read one posting for a product marketing person with 15 years of social media experience. Facebook was founded in 2004; Twitter in 2006—so it’s unlikely there are many people who meet the “15 year” requirement. I’ve been blogging since 1999 so I probably qualify... for this junior role.)

Instead of searching for the unicorn or purple squirrel, instead of looking for an impossible-to-find individual, seek to build a team with the requisite business, technology, and market skills.

This diagram is a variant of a popular view of the product manager. It’s a helpful reminder that product management embraces three types of expertise: business, technical, market. Most organizations add domain as a required expertise. (For more see, "Expertise in Product Management.")  

Domain experience is sometimes difficult to define. Domain is the science upon which your product is built while market expertise relates to where you deploy it. Higher education, such as colleges and universities, is a market; internal training for employees is another market. “Adult learning” is a domain or discipline that could be leveraged in both markets.

Experience and expertise in domain, market, business, and product are hard to find in an individual. However, you can more easily build up these skills in a product team. Maybe one person has market and business while another has domain and product.

Domain expertise is probably the requirement most often desired by hiring managers. And there’s logic to that. We’ve all seen cases of employees who simply don’t understand the domain well enough to make rational decisions. However, expertise in domain may not always necessary; it may already exist elsewhere on your team or it can be learned by engaging with customers.

In fact, for many teams, a fresh set of eyes may see things that the in-house “experts” cannot see.

Here’s another domain expertise that you may not have considered: product management. Product management uses methods and models to take a product from a simple idea through validation and development and into the market. How many on your team have this expertise?

(That’s what we do at Under10—empower product teams with proven methods, outcome-oriented workshops, and collaboration software—to get ideas into market.)

One friend proves that she could learn the market and domain using her product management skills—an area of expertise that was otherwise lacking in her company.

WHAT’S NEXT

Do a quick profile of your team. On a scale of Low, Medium, High, rate each person for expertise in Business, Product (or technology), Market, Domain plus one more: expertise in product management. You’ll be able to see if you have the needed skills across the team and you can see areas where individuals need professional development.