What you should be looking for in a product person

These are the people that like to know the UX trends and design patterns of what’s out there. They enjoy the design iterations and maybe designing instead of creating mockups. 

They try to have a better feeling of what design would do to the user when there is no data or the user can’t really explain it. Their comfort zone is among designers. They feel better talking about features and ideas when they are designed rather just wireframes.

These are the people who are really interested in how the users feel. They enjoy listening (most of us don’t). They enjoy and get a lot out of user testing and watching users interact with the product. 

They feel comfortable digging into support and being one themselves, and they like to be involved in community management or marketing.

These people will always try to understand and quantify the impact of product features or progress. 

They truly care about understanding how the numbers show the interaction with the product. Decisions not driven by data are useless. They like to open the day with the dashboards.

They care about the process of doing things, whether it’s lean enough, something’s missing, or there’s not enough. 

They look at features and ideas as a sum of small steps and try to breakdown in their minds how to get from point A to point B as you speak to them. They care about prioritization and its methodology.

Wackiness means there are people who just think differently. They have ideas that would raise an eyebrow when they talk about them. It doesn’t necessarily mean that these are the best ideas — they’re just different. 

But different ideas are easy to come up with, and these people can understand how this weird, wacky idea can be created, and what the logic is behind it.