Industry Experience vs. Product Management Expertise

We’ve talked about this before, but it seems to keep coming back around.

Most hiring managers realize that it is extremely difficult to fill their open product management slot with their “ideal” candidiate. You know, the one that walks on water, worked in the same industry for others, can hit the ground running, has a fully loaded relevant address book. Unless hiring candidates from direct competitors is your thing (and they don’t have non-competes?), hiring managers will likely have to prioritize the importance of industry experience vs. product management expertise.

Hiring managers I have spoken with seem to have a strong preference towards industry experience. They believe that taking an engineer or product developer who knows the industry well is the shorter route to success.

I wonder how comfortable that new product manager will be talking with customers, creating product road maps, writing requirements documents, making executive presentations, saying no to sales feature requests when they are not priorities?

From the outside looking in, is the product manager compiling the voice of the customer or injecting personal views into the product development process? Is the product manager responsible for prioritization of features requested or dreaming them up? Could a strong process driven product manager learn a new industry and be more successful than the internal individual who has to learn about the product management discipline?