Hiring PM for API roadmap

Hiring a product manager Hiring practices
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Hey all,
I am likely going to be hiring a PM to just focus on our API roadmap. As this is a net new role for us, I am looking for something to help guide the job description of this… anyone here in this role, or worked with this role that could help me define it a little more? We know the obvious surrounding our new and existing API’s but want to make sure we cover our bases on R&R before going out to hire.

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Is your API a product on its own or is it supporting other products? If you don’t mind sharing your draft description, I’d be happy to give some feedback.

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@Marco I am in the process of putting that together. I will share when I am there for sure. right now it is doing both - support and on its own.

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The goal is to make it more on its own. Isn’t it?

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Hmm interesting! So you have a role that requires backend / platform experience as well as ideally some zero to one experience? That’s a kind a rare combo! Generally speaking you want to highlight what makes this role unique and why that is interesting. For this role it might be a backend + zero-to-one and talk about why that’s so cool and what opportunities exist. So in my prior role at Dropbox I was looking for several platform PMs to support things like the Dropbox sync engine. Some things we highlighted were:

  • Needs to enjoy technical complexity. Not just tolerates it, not just “capable.” We wanted a PM who really enjoyed this stuff
  • Ideally has experience with critical systems at scale. We originally thought of scale as systems with lots of users and lots of data. But eventually we simplified our definition to a system with “tens of millions of users or more,” which was much clearer of a recruiting profile
  • Strong business acumen. We wanted to more directly align our platform investments with business impact. We had great engineering capabilities but we didn’t always do a good job of tying that back into Dropbox as a business and we saw it as PM’s job to help us get better at this.
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