Should sector experience be a must-have for product roles?
Now that I’m back on the job market (following an unfortunate redundancy) I’ve been looking at a lot of job adverts recently. I’m making the move from product designer to product manager and therefore have been focusing on product manager jobs. Reviewing the various job descriptions has made for some pretty interesting reading.
Whilst I’ve not been surprised that the vast majority of job adverts ask for a number of years of product management experience (it would seem that entry-level product manager roles are extremely rare), I have been surprised that a lot also ask for specific sector (a.k.a. domain) experience. Prior experience working within a specific sector, such as finance, education, healthcare or ecommerce is a not just a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have for an awful lot of product roles these days.
Should sector experience be a must-have for product roles? I certainly don’t think so. As a hiring manager I’ve always advocated for sector experience to be a nice-to-have when hiring product roles. Here’s why.
Requiring sector experience reduces your talent pool
If you’re asking for someone with sector experience it means that you’re excluding all those potentially brilliant candidates who haven’t previously worked in that sector. Your talent pool is now probably less of a pool, and more of a small puddle. Finding a candidate with the right capabilities can be hard enough, finding a candidate with the right capabilities and sector experience can be nigh on impossible.
Requiring sector experience reduces your diversity
Diversity is a good thing. It’s a good thing within society, it’s a good thing within an organisation and it’s a good thing within teams. A sure-fire way to reduce diversity and to unwittingly encourage group think is to hire people that have already been indoctrinated within a sector. Fresh ideas and perspectives can come from those who have already worked in a sector for years, but more often than not they come from those who are not blinkered by how things are usually done.
Requiring sector experience reduces career pathways
As I’ve outlined in a previous article (see Let’s give junior designers a chance) if tech and product professionals are not given a fair chance at the start of their career, there won’t be a steady stream of talent coming through within the industry. It’s hard enough for those with limited experience (but bags of potential) to get a product role, it’s even harder if sector experience is also required.
Requiring sector experience can bias against good candidates
In my previous incarnation as a design lead, I was frequently a hiring manager. Whilst I was always very particular about who I recruited, one thing that I never asked for was sector experience. Some of the best hires I made were people who had never worked in the organisation’s sector, they were simply very good candidates.
I would always hire a good candidate with no sector experience over a so-so candidate with lots of sector experience. Requiring sector experience can not only bias against those candidates lacking sector experience, it can mean that they never make it to the shortlist in the first place.
Roles rarely differ between sectors
Think about the role of a product manager, product designer, or engineer across different sectors. How different are those roles? Is a product manager working in finance very different from a product manager working in education? Is a product designer working in healthcare very different from a product designer working in travel? My experience tells me that the differences are smaller than you might think. I’d say that about 90% of the work of a product manager, product designer or engineer is the same regardless of the sector they work in. The fundamentals of the role, the capabilities required, the approach taken is often the same, they are just being applied within a different sector. In fact an organisation’s size, culture and structure usually influences a role much more than the sector.
If someone can excel in one sector, it generally means that they can excel in a different one. It therefore doesn’t make sense to allow the 10% of a role that might differ between sectors to so significantly influence the hiring process.
It’s easier to learn a sector, than to learn a role
Within a product role, how much do you need to know about a sector to be able to work in it? Not as much as you might think. Sure, you need to know enough to understand the basics, but you certainly don’t need to be an expert. For example, I spent many years working in the database tools space, and I’m certainly no DBA or database expert.
In my experience it’s always quicker to upskill a talented individual in a specific sector than to teach them how to excel in a product role. Learning a sector can take months, learning a role on the other hand can takes years.
Domain experts can make up for a lack of sector experience
Rather than expecting everyone to be an expert in their sector it’s more effective to provide pockets of expertise within a team or organisation. As I’ve outlined before (see Unlocking complex problems with domain experts) domain experts can provide these pockets of expertise. I’ve experienced this first hand when working with experienced DBAs. I could lean on their decades of experience to answer my questions, to get a better understanding of DBAs and to collaboratively explore ideas and concepts. In fact, having a domain expert work with a product expert can make for the best of both worlds. The domain expert will bring their domain know-how to a problem and the product expert will bring their product know-how.
In summary
Should sector experience be a must-have for product roles? Only if absolutely necessary. There will always be very niche product roles that will require sector experience, but the vast majority shouldn’t. Making sector experience a must-have requirement for product roles unnecessarily narrows the talent pool, stifles diversity, restricts career pathways and biases the hiring process against candidates who can bring fresh perspectives and ideas to an organisation.
Most product roles are fundamentally similar across different sectors. Rather than focusing on sector experience, a good hiring process should focus on a candidate’s capabilities and potential for a role. After all, it’s quicker to upskill a talented individual in a specific sector than to teach them how to excel in a product role. Sure, sector experience will always be important, but don’t make it more important in the hiring process than it needs to be by making it a must-have, rather than nice-to-have requirement.
See also
Image credits
Interview photo by The Jopwell Collection on Unsplash
Originally published at https://www.uxforthemasses.com on August 19, 2024.
