What Great Product Manager Hiring Actually Looks Like: A Conversation Between Product People & Delivery Hero

Co-authored by Product People and Delivery Hero. Participants: Anela Hoti (Product Director, QCommerce, Delivery Hero), Eid Dabo (Principal Recruiter, Delivery Hero), Jon Freeman (Client Solutions Partner, Product People).

Hiring great Product Managers is one of the hardest things a tech organization does. Everyone has a process. Most processes have blind spots. And almost everyone, at some point, has made a hire that looked right on paper and didn't work out in practice.

We sat down with Delivery Hero and compared notes on what we’ve learned about hiring Product Managers well. Despite the differences in size, structure, and hiring volume between our two organizations, we landed on strikingly similar conclusions.

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What matters most, and why it's hard to put in a job description

The qualities that predict a good Product Manager hire are notoriously hard to write into a job description, because they describe how someone operates rather than what they know. For Anela Hoti, who leads a merchandising tribe of 10+ Product Managers within QCommerce, a problem-solving approach is the primary filter. It's not necessarily always about the right answer, she says; it's more about how people approach the problem. Close behind is energy: QCommerce is a fast, uncertain environment, and the people who thrive in it bring a pace and an eagerness to the room that's hard to manufacture and easy to spot when it's missing.

Eid Dabo, Delivery Hero's principal recruiter for product roles, looks for a third thing: the ability to communicate complexity simply. Assessing candidates without a deep product background himself, he's built a sharp proxy around this. If someone can explain their work to a non-technical interviewer in a way that lands, without dumbing it down, that's a strong signal of genuine mastery. If they can't, their understanding usually isn't as deep as their resume suggests.

At Product People we've arrived at a similar place by a different route. Our consultants work across clients, industries, and teams, often with a short runway to be useful, so we weigh heavily on bias for action, adaptability, candor, and ownership. None of these show up cleanly on a resume, which is exactly the point: the qualities that matter most are also the ones most resistant to self-report. You can't ask someone if they're adaptable and trust the answer. You have to build a process that surfaces it another way.

The honest answer from both sides is that the qualities that matter most are also the ones most resistant to self-report. Asking someone if they're adaptable and trusting the answer doesn't work. The process has to surface it another way.

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Theory versus practice: how both organizations close the gap

Candidates who understand product management and candidates who practice it can look identical on paper, and often in a first conversation too. Both of our hiring processes are built around closing that gap.

Delivery Hero's process is structured in two halves. The early stages, led by the hiring manager, give candidates space to talk through their experience and demonstrate their thinking. The second half shifts to a live case study in front of a cross-functional panel: product, engineering, analytics, and design all in the room. When engineering asks a hard feasibility question, or analytics challenges an assumption about the data, the candidate has to respond rather than recite. That's where the gap between understanding and practice becomes visible.

At Product People, we made a similar shift about a year ago, moving from an async case study and live presentation to a 60-minute live simulation with three progressive stages. The old format had become too gameable: with AI-generated content and enough rehearsal, candidates could produce impressive-looking submissions without demonstrating how they actually think. The new format is built so rehearsal helps less than instinct does. Throughout, we're optimizing for one question: how does this person think, not what did they prepare. Both of our processes rest on the same belief: the live, unscripted moment is the highest-signal moment. Everything before it is useful context. The live element is where you actually find out.

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Handling ambiguity: the real test

We both flagged handling ambiguity as a core skill independently, and one that's particularly revealing when tested live.

Delivery Hero's case study is deliberately open-ended: candidates are given a scenario and a choice between direction A, B, or C, with no single right answer. What Anela looks for is how the decision gets made, not which direction is chosen. The candidates who are really able to make decisions based on the assumptions they have, she says, are the ones the team is looking for. The decision itself reveals seniority: do they acknowledge the trade-offs, name the risks they're accepting, and own the direction, or hedge instead.

In our own live simulation at Product People, Stage 1 is a problem diagnosis exercise built on incomplete data. Candidates get several data sources and have to form a hypothesis, with a hidden insight unlocked only if they ask the right question. Candidates who ask good questions get more information sooner, and those who don't, don't. The green flags we see consistently are cross-referencing multiple sources, naming assumptions, and stating plainly what isn't known yet. The most common red flag is jumping to a solution before the problem has actually been diagnosed.

The underlying principle, for both of us, is the same: ambiguity isn't the obstacle; it's the test. A Product Manager who can only operate with complete information won't thrive in most real product environments.

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What gets someone over the line

But what makes hiring teams genuinely excited about a candidate by the end of the process? And here, both Anela and Eid describe something more holistic than a single skill.

For Anela, it comes back to the energy that signals someone could navigate a genuinely dynamic landscape, along with something more specific: whether the candidate asks good questions of their own. A surprising number of people don't ask a single question when given the chance, which is itself a bad sign. Curiosity, engagement, and a real desire to understand the environment they'd be joining tend to show up in the questions candidates choose to ask.

Eid frames it as balance across every dimension. When the hiring manager and the cross-functional panel all come back independently feeling that a candidate can add impact, that consistent signal across multiple evaluators is what builds real conviction, more than any single answer or moment.

And at Product People, we've found similar markers too. We love the candidates that reason out loud rather than simply arrive at conclusions. The candidates that push back on assumptions and engage with interviewers as colleagues rather than assessors. And as with Anela's read, asking good questions is a positive signal in itself: it shows the candidate is thinking about fit, not just performance.

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The most common reason a strong-looking candidate doesn't get the offer

We know this happens, and that’s why we deliberately included this topic in our conversation.

Eid is direct about it: some of the strongest-looking candidates, technically sharp and deep on domain knowledge, come up short on the interpersonal side. Stakeholder management, collaboration, communication. Where a few question marks appear there, that's usually where candidates get rejected. Anela echoes this: the imbalance between craft strength and interpersonal weakness is the most common failure mode she sees.

Our live simulation surfaces the same gap in a different format. In Stage 2, the stakeholder management role-play, technically capable candidates fall short when they avoid making a recommendation, over-promise to relieve pressure, or dismiss a stakeholder's concern without genuinely engaging with it. The product thinking is there, but the judgment about how to move a room isn't.

And that’s because interpersonal skills aren't soft. They're a core part of the Product Manager craft, arguably the most important part at senior levels. There's room to develop them with support in junior roles, but the further up the seniority curve you go, the less negotiable they become.

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One question worth stealing

Toward the end of our conversation, Anela shared one interview question she regularly asks that hadn't come up before: in what kind of environment or situations do you not feel comfortable?

It's a deliberately open question, and a smart one. The answer reveals self-awareness: does this person know where their edges are, honesty, are they giving a real answer or a safe one, and fit, does the environment they describe match what the role actually looks like.

For a QCommerce team that moves fast, changes constantly, and rarely has a quiet week, that self-awareness matters. A candidate who thrives on stability but frames it as simply liking clear priorities is a different hire from one who says directly that they find it hard when the roadmap shifts. Both might be excellent Product Managers. Only one is lik

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Conclusion

Across different company sizes, structures, and hiring volumes, the principles remain the same:

• Process over answer. The thinking matters more than the conclusion. A candidate who reasons clearly toward a defensible position outperforms one who lands on the right answer by intuition.
• Live beats async. The highest-signal moment in any process is when a candidate has to think on their feet, respond to challenges, and make decisions without preparation time.
• Balance is non-negotiable. Product craft and interpersonal skills aren't in tension; they're both required. The most common rejection story is a candidate who is strong on one and weak on the other.
• Curiosity is a signal. Candidates who ask good questions about the role, the team, and the environment show they're thinking about fit, not just performance, and that mindset tends to predict how they'll operate on the job.
• Ambiguity is the test, not the obstacle. Both processes deliberately create conditions of incomplete information. How a candidate navigates that gap tells you more than anything they prepared in advance.

Delivery Hero is hiring!

• Principal Product Manager, Affordability - Quick Commerce: https://bit.ly/4fAEdfk
• Senior Technical Product Manager, Agentic AI IDEs (Developer Tools) -Tech Foundations: https://bit.ly/4feRrNs
• Group Product Manager - (Logistics, Payments, and Incentives): https://bit.ly/3T02LFP

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Product People is a product management consultancy that places interim and fractional PMs with tech companies across Europe. Delivery Hero is a global food and quick commerce platform operating in 70+ countries. This post reflects the personal views of the participants based on their hiring experience.