[alphazard]

Hiring in the open market is unlikely to get you good PMs. It's too easy to hire an imposter, who doesn't or can't understand the problem and solution domains. The best talent pool would be engineers at your company who are looking to transition.

The best product managers are engineers who care about what customers think, and have enough soft skills to talk to them. Even selecting from that pool, it's likely they will add less value as a PM vs as an engineer. In the case of hiring internally, at least they can fallback to being an engineer. Compare that to an imposter from the open market with poor domain knowledge, and no technical skills.