Hiring product managers for your SaaS company isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. Whether you’re building a horizontal platform that serves multiple industries or a vertical solution designed for a specific sector, the type of product manager you need will differ significantly. Understanding these distinctions can save you months of misaligned recruitment and help you find someone who truly fits your business model. At Nobel Recruitment, we’ve seen how getting this right from the start makes all the difference in building successful product teams across the Netherlands, DACH region, and the Nordics.
Understanding horizontal vs. vertical SaaS product management differences
The fundamental difference between horizontal and vertical SaaS shapes everything about how product managers work. Horizontal SaaS products serve broad markets across multiple industries. Think of tools like Slack, HubSpot, or Asana that work for marketing teams, engineering departments, and sales organisations alike. Product managers in this space deal with incredibly diverse customer needs and must balance feature requests from healthcare companies, financial services firms, and retail businesses simultaneously.
Vertical SaaS takes the opposite approach. These products go deep into a single industry, addressing specific workflows and regulatory requirements. A property management platform or a construction project management tool exemplifies this model. Product managers here become industry specialists who understand the nuances of their sector inside and out.
The day-to-day priorities shift dramatically between these two models. Horizontal SaaS product managers spend considerable time on broad market research, identifying patterns across different use cases, and building flexible features that work for everyone. Their vertical counterparts focus on mastering industry-specific terminology, staying current with regulatory changes, and building relationships with a concentrated group of customers who often know each other.
Critical skills and experience for horizontal SaaS product managers
When you hire product managers for horizontal SaaS, you’re looking for generalists with exceptional pattern recognition abilities. These professionals need to conduct user research across wildly different contexts and extract common threads that inform product development.
The most successful horizontal SaaS PMs possess several key competencies that distinguish them from their vertical counterparts:
- Balancing competing needs across customer segments – They must evaluate feature requests from healthcare, finance, and retail simultaneously, determining which requests reveal universal needs versus niche requirements that would add complexity without broad value
- Platform thinking and scalable architecture – Rather than building point solutions, they design systems with APIs and extensibility that allow different industries to customise functionality without requiring constant engineering intervention
- Pattern recognition in diverse user behaviour – They analyse usage data across sectors to identify common workflows and pain points, translating disparate feedback into cohesive product improvements that serve the entire customer base
- Decision-making with incomplete information – Since they cannot deeply understand every industry they serve, they develop frameworks for making sound product decisions even when they lack complete domain context
- Technical depth for API-first approaches – They understand how integrations, webhooks, and developer tools enable customers to bridge gaps between the core product and industry-specific needs
These competencies create product managers who excel at building flexible, scalable solutions rather than deeply specialised tools. They think in terms of platforms that empower diverse users rather than prescriptive workflows for specific industries. This generalist approach, combined with strong analytical capabilities, allows them to serve broad markets effectively while maintaining product coherence. These candidates often come from larger tech companies or other horizontal SaaS businesses where they’ve learned to manage complexity at scale, bringing valuable experience in shipping features that successfully serve multiple customer types simultaneously.
What vertical SaaS product managers need to succeed
Vertical SaaS product management requires a completely different skill set centred on depth rather than breadth. Domain expertise isn’t just helpful here; it’s essential. The best candidates often have work experience in the industry they’ll be serving, whether that’s healthcare, logistics, real estate, or manufacturing.
These product managers need to speak the language of their customers fluently. When a construction company talks about submittals, RFIs, and change orders, your PM should understand immediately without needing translation. This deep industry knowledge allows them to identify pain points that customers themselves might not articulate clearly.
Key attributes that separate successful vertical SaaS product managers include:
- Industry experience or rapid domain mastery – They either bring years of working in the target sector or demonstrate exceptional ability to immerse themselves in industry nuances, attending conferences, shadowing users, and building genuine expertise quickly
- Fluency in industry-specific workflows and terminology – They understand the operational realities of their customers’ daily work, recognising how terminology, processes, and pain points differ fundamentally from adjacent industries
- Regulatory and compliance knowledge – Whether it’s GDPR in healthcare, financial reporting requirements, or industry-specific certifications, they build these constraints into product architecture from the beginning rather than retrofitting compliance later
- Relationship-building in concentrated markets – Since vertical markets are smaller and more interconnected, they cultivate deep relationships with key customers, industry associations, and thought leaders who influence broader adoption
- Vision for vertical integration opportunities – They identify adjacent problems within the industry value chain, spotting opportunities to expand the product into complementary workflows that increase switching costs and customer value
This specialised skill set creates product managers who become trusted advisors within their industry rather than external vendors. Their deep expertise allows them to anticipate regulatory changes, understand unspoken customer needs, and build products that feel purpose-built rather than adapted from generic tools. While they may lack the breadth of horizontal product managers, their depth enables them to create solutions that truly transform industry-specific workflows and establish strong competitive moats through specialisation.
Tailoring your recruitment process for each SaaS model
Your interview process should reflect the different requirements of horizontal versus vertical product management. For horizontal SaaS candidates, present case studies that involve conflicting customer needs across different industries. Ask them to walk through how they’d prioritise features when a financial services client wants one thing and a retail customer wants something completely different.
Portfolio reviews for horizontal candidates should focus on breadth. Look for examples of products that successfully served multiple customer types and ask detailed questions about the trade-offs they made.
When interviewing for vertical SaaS positions, test domain knowledge directly. If you’re hiring for a healthcare product, ask candidates to explain specific healthcare workflows or regulatory requirements. Present them with industry-specific scenarios and evaluate whether they can identify the real problems beneath surface-level requests.
Red flags differ between the two models as well. For horizontal SaaS, watch out for candidates who get too attached to specific use cases or struggle to think abstractly. In vertical SaaS, be cautious of candidates who lack curiosity about the industry or seem unwilling to build deep relationships with customers.
Common hiring mistakes and how Nobel Recruitment ensures the right fit
Many companies make critical errors when hiring product managers without considering whether their background matches the SaaS model:
- Hiring vertical specialists for horizontal products – Brilliant vertical product managers often struggle with the ambiguity of serving multiple markets, becoming frustrated when they cannot develop deep expertise in any single customer segment or when feature decisions require satisfying conflicting needs
- Placing generalists in vertical SaaS roles – Talented horizontal PMs may never develop the deep domain expertise needed to truly understand customer problems, remaining perpetually dependent on customer feedback rather than developing the intuition to lead product direction
- Undervaluing technical depth – Both models require solid technical understanding, but companies often miss that horizontal PMs need platform architecture and API design knowledge, while vertical PMs must understand industry-specific systems integration and data standards
- Ignoring cultural fit around customer interaction – Vertical SaaS typically demands more direct customer engagement and relationship building, which doesn’t suit every product manager’s working style, leading to friction when PMs avoid the customer immersion their role requires
- Compensation misalignment – Companies often benchmark salaries incorrectly, not recognising that vertical SaaS PMs with deep domain expertise command different compensation than horizontal generalists, or failing to account for regional market variations
These mistakes stem from treating product management as a uniform discipline rather than recognising how fundamentally different horizontal and vertical models are. Companies waste months onboarding talented professionals who are simply in the wrong context, damaging both product momentum and team morale. The consequences extend beyond individual hiring failures, often creating patterns where companies repeatedly select candidates with impressive credentials that don’t match their actual business needs.
At Nobel Recruitment, we’ve developed specific assessment methodologies for SaaS product management roles that address these pitfalls directly. Our team understands the nuances between horizontal and vertical models because we specialise exclusively in SaaS talent acquisition across Europe. We evaluate candidates not just on their skills and experience, but on how well those capabilities align with your specific business model. Our network gives us access to product managers who’ve succeeded in both horizontal and vertical contexts, and we can help you identify which background truly serves your needs while providing market intelligence specific to product manager recruitment in your region and SaaS category.
Finding the right product manager makes an enormous difference in how quickly your product evolves and how well it serves your market. Whether you’re building for breadth or depth, understanding these distinctions helps you hire product managers who’ll thrive in your specific context. If you’re navigating this decision and want guidance on your PM hiring strategy, our team at Nobel Recruitment brings deep expertise in matching SaaS companies with the product management talent they need to grow.
