We see three scenarios for hiring a first PM. At one extreme, the hire is delayed until the venture has product-market fit and is scaling. At the other extreme, the PM is one of the startup’s first employees.  In all scenarios, we assume that the venture’s founder/CEO initially serves as product leader, providing vision and direction to the engineering team. As explained below, the right timing for the first PM hire depends largely on the founder/CEO’s skill as a product leader; their preference for working with a thought partner; and the extent to which other demands of the CEO role pull them away from product development.

Timing mistakes can have serious consequences. If the PM hire is delayed too long, a busy founder/CEO may be unable to provide adequate direction to the engineering team. The team may set the wrong priorities and fail to communicate about bottlenecks. Deadlines are missed, and the team may ship a flawed product. If it does, the need to pivot will exacerbate delays.

Likewise, hiring a PM too soon can also hurt a startup:

• A capital-constrained startup cannot afford to pay an employee who isn’t yet needed.
• The PM might slow down product development by adding another layer of communication and by introducing processes that aren’t yet needed.
• The engineering team may bristle at the premature introduction of product management processes, and distracting conflict may ensue.
• If the PM wants to play an active role in formulating product vision, and the founder/CEO doesn’t want or need help on that front, distracting conflict may ensue.

In addition to timing, the type of PM that should be hired varies by scenario—and hiring the wrong type can really hurt a startup. For example, a process-oriented PM may be flummoxed by the constant shifts in direction that often occur before a startup achieves product-market fit. 

In two of the scenarios described below, the venture’s first product hire should be a “full stack” PM: one who can both craft product strategy and execute that strategy. In the third scenario, the startup’s first product hire should be a process-oriented “executor” PM: one who lacks the ability to formulate product strategy but can reliably deliver solutions provided by a founder/CEO playing the product leader role.

SCENARIO 1: FULL-STACK PM HIRED AFTER ACHIEVING PRODUCT-MARKET FIT

In some early-stage startups, a product-focused founder/CEO and their engineering team will work together efficiently and effectively—without the help of a PM—beyond the point where they find product-market fit. This is most likely to happen when some of the following hold true:

• The founder/CEO has prior experience with managing product.
• The founder/CEO has ample time to work with engineering -- perhaps because: 1) they have raised plenty of capital and they aren’t distracted by fundraising; and/or 2) they have co-founders who can focus on tasks not related to product development.
• Engineering is led by someone able and willing to do work that would normally be done by a PM, e.g., prioritization; translating the founder’s product vision into user stories; etc. 
• Through some combination of luck, brilliant intuition, and/or a rigorous design process, the startup quickly finds product-market fit.

After they achieve product-market fit, the venture starts to scale rapidly. However, according to Josh Elman, an early product manager at both LinkedIn and Twitter, at this stage it sometimes proves challenging to accelerate growth when targeting the next wave of non-users, because they are intrinsically less interested in the product than early adopters. Attracting them often requires use-case expansion, new features, and rethinking product positioning—in other words, a new round of product leadership. However, in a startup that’s scaling rapidly, the founder/CEO is less likely to have time to figure out what to do next, because they will be busy with fundraising, recruiting for other functions (e.g., marketing, sales, customer service), and introducing new management systems and processes required in a fast-growing firm. 

The founder/CEO now needs a full-stack PM to serve as a partner in formulating product strategy. According to Elman, that PM must play the role of detective, figuring out what’s been working for early adopters and how the needs of the next wave of users might differ. The PM also must be a cultural anthropologist, understanding what parts of the product development team has been functioning well and what parts are in chaos as the team scales up. It’s important to carefully decide which working arrangements to preserve vs. which to replace and do better. Finally, the PM will bring a new focus on data that’s been missing up to this point, because the product has had a limited operating history. The PM will be curious about evolving usage patterns and will interrogate the data.  

Failure Modes. In this scenario, the venture’s first PM might derail in three ways: 

• Because they are new and there’s a lot to learn, they can take too long to formulate new plans for the product.
• The PM may be rejected by the engineering team, because they’ve grown attached to working closely with the founder and to the routines they’ve established. The engineers may resent the newcomer’s intrusion and fail to see the need to tamper with their “well-oiled” product development machine.
• Despite being too busy, the product-focused founder may be reluctant to truly share responsibility for formulating product strategy.

With respect to the last point, Daffy co-founder/CEO Adam Nash points out that such reluctance isn’t limited to technical founders. Business-oriented founders who’ve actively shaped product vision may undermine a new PM’s efforts, too. Shishir Mehrotra likewise notes that a founder’s reluctance to hire a PM with strong problem-finding skills may be due to: 1) a fear of errors that might be committed by the new PM, and/or 2) a founder’s fragile ego -- their fear of being shown up by the newly-hired full-stack PM.

SCENARIO 2: EXECUTOR PM HIRED BEFORE ACHIEVING PRODUCT-MARKET FIT

Sometimes, a founder/CEO has a strong product vision, but lacks the time, know-how, and/or inclination to work closely with engineering to turn that vision into reality. Their failure to provide guidance will manifest itself in recurring problems, long before the startup achieves product-market fit. Engineering will frequently be stalled, because the founder isn’t available to answer questions. The team will repeatedly miss deadlines—often to the founder’s surprise—because engineers have not clearly communicated their status and, lacking clear priorities, no-one has recognized the need to shift assignments to address bottlenecks.

The solution is straightforward: the startup should hire an executor PM who can work with engineering to: 1) translate the founder’s vision into product requirements, whether in the form of user stories, wireframes, or traditional specifications; 2) prioritize work; and 3)  track progress against commitments, and ensure that concerned parties are informed of delays. 

Failure Modes. Some engineering teams, growing frustrated at delays and miscommunication may indeed welcome the discipline introduced by the venture’s first PM. Other teams may prefer their past fluid working arrangements and take umbrage at the structure introduced by a PM who Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston has likened to a “librarian.” The engineers may legitimately fear they will be slowed down by too much process. In the words of Hunter Walk, “A company who hires its first product manager runs the risk of seeing its culture and tempo slow. Meetings, debate and measurement become part of a previously lightweight decision making process.”

Jonathan Golden cautions against hiring a first PM who is too junior (and “doesn’t know how to wrangle the team”) or too senior (and “carried a big title at a large tech company but didn’t actually do any work”). Likewise, Golden suggests avoiding PMs who have worked only on mature products and never in an early-stage setting. He says: “Your first PM has to want to get their hands dirty… I’ve seen numerous PMs from established tech companies flounder because there isn’t a full data science or design team in place. It’s the PM’s job to fill in the gaps.”

SCENARIO 3: FULL-STACK PM HIRED AS A VERY EARLY EMPLOYEE

Some startups should hire a full-stack PM as one of their first employees, when the founder/CEO is still thinking through product strategy options and engineering work isn’t yet underway. Two types of founders may benefit from this:

• Founders who lack a strong product vision. Their vision may shift suddenly as the founder gets input from advisors, over-reacts to rivals’ moves, etc. These founders need help stabilizing the vision before subjecting an engineering team to zigs and zags that waste effort.
• Founders who have a strong product vision, but want a thought partner to stress-test and help refine the vision. Like many creators (think of Lennon and McCartney or Jobs and Wozniak), these founders thrive in a collaborative pairing, and may lack a co-founder who can play the role of sounding board or muse.

Failure Modes. In this scenario, a first PM can fail in at least two ways:

• The PM might not be truly “full-stack,” but rather (in Drew Houston’s typology) a “poet” who wants to riff with the founder on the product vision but cannot execute the vision. According to Credit Karma’s Nikhyl Singhal, if the PM says they’re okay doing the dirty work “for now,” then “you’re in a race between the career expectations of the candidate and the growth curve of the business,” and should ask the candidate how they’d feel if the venture struggles to find product-market fit for a year.
• Former Windows Division president Steven Sinofsky cautions against hiring a “mini-me” who amplifies the founder’s strengths and weaknesses and therefore brings little or no diversity of thought.

Jared Smith, president of Qualtrics, warns against hoping that a first PM has the “right stuff,” then simply “throwing them into the deep end” to see if they really do, and firing fast if they don’t. Smith says that early-stage startups cannot afford the disruption and delays that ensue when recruiting a replacement. The implication: assess a candidate’s skills and attitude thoroughly and thoughtfully.

Note that in all three scenarios, the venture’s first PM is not positioned as its product leader: the founder/CEO plays that role. So, when does it make sense to bring in a product leader from the outside? That’s the topic of a different essay (link).