How do you approach your first Product Manager hiring?

At EventHQ, we have been interviewing product managers to join us as part of the founding team and one make or break factor for us is - how people oriented are they. Apart from the regular analysis they have done of usage numbers and feedback, we are also curious to know how many hours they have spent talking to a customer/hours spent going through recordings of customer conversations and in most cases, it is minimal to none. On the other hand, time spent with customers is as equally important as analysing numbers. One experiment that I wanted to try is, hire people from pre-sales background. Few advantages that I have see in this - They have spent thousands of hours with customers understanding their pain points - They know the implementation and discovery in and out, this helps them anticipate customer problems better - The culture of putting customer first and obsession about making the customer successful My personal observation has been that enterprise PMs are very number focussed and they are not having the customer first approach.