Product Management is not a job that people can go out and get a degree in. You can get a degree in Computer Science that covers the knowledge you need in order to start out as a programmer. You can get a degree in Marketing that gives you the basic foundation to get started in Marketing or Advertising. But there’s no college level degree that I know of out there in Product Management.

This makes it a real challenge to find, evaluate and hire good Product Managers. With so few objective external indicators, you have to define the Product Manager position very clearly and scrutinize candidates to see if they are a good match.

So what do you look for when you want to hire an ace Product Manager to champion your product and move forward relative to the competition? After some years doing Product Management and many more before that doing things that all tie in to Product Management, I see the ideal candidate as having a combination of four critical elements.

Read on for a discussion of what to look for to find a good Product Manager, and questions to ask to better judge whether they’re Product Manager material.