What skills are necessary?

In my last two posts, I began discussing questions you need to ask when determining what person to bring into a given role.

The first step, discussed in the last post, is to clearly define not just the goal(s) for the role, but the variance and risk associated with that goal that you and your company are willing to tolerate.

Now that you understand what you want the role to achieve, and how much certainty you need in that achievement, you should start focusing on the skill set necessary to nail the given goal with the given level of risk.

So, what skills are necessary to achieve said goal?

Be specific.

“Good organizer”, “Leader/Manager”, “Good communicator”, “Works well in teams”, “Good problem solver” are too generic, and while necessary, are not sufficient for any role with a serious goal.

Having a skill set around “managing people to achieve goals” is quite generic. Can they manage 10 people, or 100? What kinds of goals?What kinds of people? And so on.

Much more to the point are:
“Highly skilled C# developer”,
“Can build, manage, and operate a 20-50 person direct inside sales team to sell software”,
“Can create a process from scratch to achieve x, y, and z”,
“Can run product management life cycle from requirement idea through product release”,
“Can create and implement a highly effective product management process”,
“Can provide technical IT support for complex infrastructure applications for teams of 50-100 people”.

Understanding the exact skill set you need will help you understand what experience set you need, and ultimately what your ideal candidate looks like. 

I’ll discuss experience in the next post.