Hire your first product manager when you have at least five engineers. Look for someone hands-on who talks to customers daily, has strong opinions held loosely, and obsesses over product quality across technical and business dimensions. Startup PMs must be builders, not chiefs of staff.
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How do you advise founders think about hiring their first PM and do you have any tips for doing so? Yeah, definitely. I think product has been going through an interesting thing recently where, you know, some companies have been talking about either getting rid of or reducing their product managers considerably. And so there's some, I think, angst for people that have built a product career. I think one of the things that is true is that A company may not need product managers, but it absolutely needs product management. And so this is something that startup founders are very familiar with. When you start a company, it's critical that you have a really good product management discipline. And if we think about product management as a discipline, there's really 3 core activities. One is understanding what customers want. 2 is turning that into a working product that serves those customers. And 3 is translating that product into value for the business. So those 3 things are critical from the day a company is founded all the way through the entire company lifecycle. For pre-PMF startups, it's usually the case that founders and early employees are doing that product management work, and so you don't need a dedicated product manager. And the question, I think the first question to ask around hiring your first PM is, Do we have enough of that work? Do we have enough of that customer discovery work, that implementation work, that strategy work that now we need a full-time person dedicated to this? And if you do, then it can make sense to hire a PM because that person will have more than enough things to do. If you don't, then, you know, it's too early to hire a PM. And as like a very, very rough benchmark, I think that that starts to happen when you have about 5 engineers. That is the minimum, I think, number of engineers engineers where you can support a full-time PM. Ideally, it's more than that. A lot of companies have sort of a PM to engineering ratio of 7 or 10 or higher, but 5 is sort of the minimum to hire a full-time PM. And so if you feel like the team has grown well enough that you've got enough product management work to do that you can support a full-time person, and it would be advantageous to have someone who's like really dedicated to the craft, then it makes sense to hire a PM. But I think that PMs for early stage startups look very different than PMs for established companies. The work is very different. If you're a PM at Facebook, a lot of your day is spent around process and stakeholder management and just the internal complexities of organizational Communication and implementation. But a PM at a startup has a completely different job. The first thing I think it's really important to look for is a PM that has some builder skills. So ideally someone who's either deep in engineering or design or analytics that can really get their hands dirty. So they can be hands-on, they're not afraid to get their hands dirty, they're able to talk directly to customers and willing to do that. You know, a lot of PMs at big tech companies talk to customers once a quarter and they get really excited about it because it's like a unique thing that they get to do versus at a startup, you need to talk to customers every single day and you need to be really like bold and extroverted, right? You gotta be able to pick up the call, do a cold call to a customer and get really good data and be really helpful to them. I think it's important that that person have an opinion and a vision about the area that you're building your marketplace in. They don't necessarily need prior experience, but it's helpful if they have good product sense and it's helpful if they have strong opinions. And so I think a principle there is to hire people that have strong opinions, weakly held. So they have strong opinions, but they're willing to listen to others. They need to be really business-minded. So not just committed to building a product, but really helping your company flourish. And then they need to be really empowered. So, you know, sometimes I think early founders make the mistake of hiring a PM that's essentially a bird dog for them. They're hiring an assistant or a chief of staff rather than a PM, a really full-fledged PM who's great at the things that we just talked about will be someone who benefits from having autonomy and someone who is enabled and empowered within the org rather than someone who's just doing implementation work. That can be, that doesn't need to be a product manager, that can be a project manager or someone else. And then the last thing, which I've kind of learned over the years is the first PM should be obsessive about product quality because there is so much about whether you win or lose in the early days that is about does your product work well for customers? Certain PMs are very strategy focused and they're about the big picture. Others are much more in the details and they are obsessive about making sure that they're testing, that the right things work in the right way, that something is high quality from a technical standpoint, from a customer standpoint, from a business standpoint. And that person will be much better equipped to help you get to where you need to go than someone who wants to kind of stay at the high-level details and thinks about quality as a QA person's problem or the engineer's problem or something like that.
