Here's a list of attributes that I use to evaluate product people in an interview, and in performance reviews.
I'm also avoiding all the standard flub like "team player".
Here's the list:
Empathy: Can this person do a Vulcan mind-meld into someone's head and figure out what they're thinking? Empathy helps you zero in on what matters to a consumer that will use your product, a salesperson that has to sell it, an engineer that has to build it, and so on. In an interview, I usually ask my empathy questions by getting the person to talk about a user they've built products for. If they can't make that user sound like a living breathing human being, someone they really know... this product person might be building stuff that doesn't fill the right need.
Intuition: Can this person read the tea leaves to know the answer to a question without having to test, research, poll, calculate, pontificate, etc.? No one knows everything. But great product people have an internal crystal ball that they'll use to predict an outcome. Good intuition also helps a product person predict what will go wrong - very valuable in making sure use cases are covered. Intuition is hard to get to in an interview... but strategy / consulting-ish kind of questions seem best at surfacing it. Example: "Would you enter this market and why/why not?" kind of questions.
"Spock": Can this person produce beautiful, simple solutions to complex problems with logical, rational thought processes? Spock can. Spock can make fact-based arguments ("I think it therefore it must be true" perspective is grounds for immediate disqualification). Spock is about knowing what the important levers are. A Spock can produce usable insights from big nasty datasets. You can get to a person's Spock rating with questions on something you know the person isn't familiar with. Example: a product person who hasn't worked much with email marketing products should be able to list out the basic levers without much problem: number of subscribers, delivery frequency, open rate and CTR.
Mojo: Does this person have an aura of confidence, humility and smarts? Great product people are confident but not arrogant, assertive but not arrogant, and smart but not elitist. They're mature in their thinking. They make direct eye contact. They've stood in front of the room of important people, taken the hard questions, and answered them. They ask "why?" when the rest of the room wants to but doesn't. They're comfortable stating that the emperor has no clothes on. Their autopilot is off. When there is a problem, they are the one that people look to for answers. You can gauge presence in an interview by pressing the person on a point where your opinions differ.
Drive: Can this person find a way to make things happen? Great product people don't rationalize failure - they recognize failure and then intercept it. Great product people don't explain away bad product launches by saying that QA didn't catch this bug or that bug. Instead, they reviewed the test cases, did plenty of testing alongside QA and went through the test case results line by line. Great people don't explain away scope misses by saying that engineering didn't build what was in the PRD. Instead, they walked engineering through the entire PRD and tested the product in the development environment to make sure it was doing what it should. I try to get a sense for this trait by looking for examples of the person playing out of position ("the QA person got sick the week of the release, so I stayed up all night and did the QA myself").
Curiosity: Great product people like to try new things and understand how things work. They like to comment on why a business model is good or bad, or how the design of an elevator could be improved. They have suggestions for the latest Apple product. They have a natural curiosity to learn and explore. You can gauge curiosity by the questions that the person asks you. No matter what company, some smart person who doesn't work there but is considering it should have questions about how you do business.
Trust: Absolutely most important quality. If you can't trust someone, don't hire them. Ever. Every non-trustworthy person in your org is sucking away productivity from good people. Beware the schemers and those who'll spend their time in closed-door conversations trying to jockey their position. In an interview, look for transparency as a good first signal of trust.
In my experience, great product people score really well on these attributes.
