In the world of early-stage startups, job titles are often a formality. In reality, each employee may handle a dozen responsibilities outside their job description. The choose-your-own-adventure type of work style is part of the magic of startups and often why generalists thrive here.
However, as a company progresses and the team grows, there comes a time when a founder needs to carve out dedicated roles. Of these positions, product management might be one of the most elusive — and key — roles to fill.
We spoke to startup founders and operators to get their thoughts about how and when they hired their first product manager. Some of the things we talked about were:
- Which traits to look for.
- Why it’s important to define the role before you look for your best fit.
- Whether your new hire needs to have a technical background.
- The best questions to ask in an interview.
- How to time your first hire and avoid overhiring.
Don’t hire for the CEO of a product
Let’s start by working backward. Product managers often graduate into a CEO role or leave a company to become a founder. Like founders, talented product managers have innate leadership skills and are able to effectively and clearly communicate. Similarly, both roles require a person who is a visionary when it comes to the product and execution.
David Blake was a product manager before he became a serial edtech founder who created Degreed, Learn In, and most recently, BookClub. He says that experience helped him launch the first prototype of Degreed and attract first clients.
“The must-have skill is the ability to put the team’s best wisdom in check and inform the product decisions with users and potential clients to inform what you are building,” he said. The person “must also be able to take the team’s mission and develop and sell that narrative to users and potential clients. That is how you blaze a new trail, balance risk, while avoiding building a ‘faster horse.”
The overlapping synergies between PMs and founders is part of the reason why the role is so confusing to define and hire for. Ken Norton, former director of product at Figma who recently left to solo advise and coach product managers, says companies can start by defining what PMs are not: The CEO of the product.
“It’s about not handing off the product responsibilities to somebody,” he said. “You want the founder and the CEO to continue to be the evangelist and visionary.” Instead, the role is more about day to day “blocking and tackling.” Norton wrote a piece more than 15 years ago about how to hire a product manager, and it’s still an essential read for anyone interested in the field.
Define the role and set your expectations
Product managers help translate all the jugglers within a startup to each other; connecting the engineer with marketing, design with business development and sales with all the above. The role at its core is hard to define, but at the same time is the necessary plumbing for any startup that wants to be high-growth and ambitious.
While a successful product manager is a strong generalist, they have to have the ability to understand and humanize technical processes. The best candidates, then, have some sort of technical experience as an engineer or otherwise.
“Product managers need to realize that there is a lot of janitorial work that gets done in product management,” he said. “It’s not fun or glamorous, and it’s certainly not being the CEO of the product. It’s just stuff that needs to get done.”
Distilling the primary function of a PM is key because it can help set expectations. In Silicon Valley, which has a persistent gender equity problem when it comes to hiring, adding clarity is important.
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“When the boundaries of your job are fuzzy, you can sort of end up doing nothing,” Norton said. “I’ve worked with a lot of women PMs in particular that get pushed into a role of just taking notes or doing” administrative work. As the shared vocabulary around what a PM does has changed, so has this gendered problem.
That said, sometimes, the hardest part of hiring is knowing when you are ready to bring on a specific role. At the earliest stages, a founder, lead engineer, salesperson and designer could share one chair. So how do you know?
Be flexible for when you hire
Lessonbee raised nearly $1 million in venture capital in June and has since been scaling its health curriculum platform. Like many startups, Lessonbee invested largely in engineers to focus on building a useful and flexible product.
Lessonbee CEO and founder Reva McPollom says that “the primary function of product management is to distill the business needs and expertise of the company into specifications that engineers can create.”
The need for a PM became apparent when Lessonbee closed funding as a team of three employees. The company was coming off a five-month accelerator program focused on product and she realized full-time dedication would be helpful for the business.
“It allows me to spend more time focused on things like creative direction, building strong public and private partnerships, telling our story in the press and fundraising. This is particularly important for us because I’m a solo founder, so my plate is perhaps more full than teams where there are two or more founders.” she said.
Plus, “having a strong product management function ensures we aren’t chasing the shiny object; we’re building the right things that will create enduring value for our customers.”
It’s different for every company. Snigda Sur, founder of seed-stage company The Juggernaut, said she resisted hiring a product manager for her news media company.
“Most founders I know pride themselves in having product vision though so you don’t want to outsource that so soon,” she said. “So early stage founders are usually the ‘PMs.’” Sur thinks that they will consider hiring a PM after they close a Series A.
“It’s easy to have a bunch of ideas but way harder to help an engineering team prioritize,” she said. “So maybe I’m looking for an MBA or ex-consultant with an engineering or CS background.”
I’ll end with a call back to Norton, who said that there’s been a bit of an overhiring problem within the world of PMs. He thinks that companies might hire too many too soon. The reality is, 10 PMs for a team of 50 engineers could be more unproductive than productive, because it chips away at the role’s core job: focusing on a company.
“For startups, figuring out what we’re not going to do or the nongoals are some of the hardest but most important parts of building a company,” he said.
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