Hire for the PM job that exists now
The job stopped being coordination. Screen for the one who can still build.
Most companies still hire product managers against a rubric built for a job that is going away. It rewards the person who runs the process: gathers requirements, aligns stakeholders, keeps a room of specialists pointed the same direction. Real work, when coordination was the constraint.
Building got cheap. The work moved to judgment, which is two things: deciding what is worth building, and knowing whether what shipped landed. Neither one is coordination. And agents now do the read, the draft, and the check, which is most of what the coordinator carried between people. Hire against the old rubric and you are selecting for the part that just got automated.
The gap shows in the interview. Ask a candidate to walk through a launch and notice who is in the story. If it is all "I aligned the teams and drove the roadmap," you have a coordinator. Then ask the question most candidates have never been asked: how did you know it landed?
Screen for three things. A call they made when the answer was not obvious, and what would have changed their mind. A shipped thing they can mark landed, watch, or stalled from measured numbers. And what they hand to agents against what they refuse to hand over. The good answer to the third is specific: they delegate the read, the draft, and the check, and they keep the call.
Look for someone who will get their hands in the work: write the spec, look at the output, say exactly what is wrong with it. That person is worth more than one who has only ever run the room, even when the room was bigger.
There is a trap on the other side. Screen only for raw building speed and you get someone who ships beautifully and has no view on what deserves to ship. The person you want holds both halves: the judgment to pick the right thing and the hands to help make it real. Rare, and that is the point.
Titles stopped predicting value here. The best candidate for this seat may have been called a founder, a design lead, or a staff engineer. You are not filling the old seat faster. You are hiring for the seat that exists now.
Titles stopped predicting value here.