Transition to the TPM is often considered as a next career step for technical roles. How to source for such candidates granting that their profiles often lack relevant details? What job titles, qualities and skills would you recommend to look for?

I love this question. Typically one does not boot strap their career as a Technical PM, at least not until recently (Some companies including Meta are hiring Technical PM interns now who start their career as a TPMs which is great). So the most common TPM career progression stems from Engineering, Data Science, Product Operations, Partner Solutions Engineering etc. I’ve seen so many people from those backgrounds be immensely successful as a Technical PM. And there are people with many more backgrounds who could be equally successful too.

I never look at job titles. You might even be surprised to hear that I never look at an interviewee’s resume. I do a lot of Solutions design (which is all about hypothetical problem solving anyway), partnership and leadership focused interviews, so what’s on the resume hardly matters in terms of the signals I want to gather during the interview. I focus on behaviors such as Strategic influence, Collaboration, Conflict resolution, Motivation, Product Intuition, Program Management etc. and I want to see examples rooted in tech as much as possible. In technical deep dive interviews is where past work matters (therefore resume) and I want to see candidates demonstrating strong E2E technical understanding, and the ability to deep dive into a few areas of their past work.