Founders: don’t hire a product leader (yet)
If you’re what I call a “non-traditional Product Founder” — meaning that you’re responsible for product at your company but don’t have deep product management experience — there’s a strong chance that you’ll want and need to buck conventional wisdom (see Jonathan Golden and Ken Norton for examples) and hire your first product manager before you hit product-market fit (explained nicely here by Lenny Rachitsky).
I’ve written about this dynamic, and why I think your first product hire should usually be an experienced but relatively junior product manager, in another post “The product challenge for non-traditional founders.”
In this post, I dive a bit deeper into:
Why it’s tempting to hire a more senior product leader.
The unexpected and surprisingly bad things that tend to happen when you do.
Hiring options
Once you decide with your co-founders and/or investors that you need to hire someone to help with product, the following three options tend to emerge:
1. Hire a senior product leader
~10+ years experience.
Common titles: Head of Product, VP of Product, CPO.
Takes on product leadership (i.e. product vision, strategy, objectives) and product management (i.e. day-to-day stewardship of the product) roles.
Reports to the Product Founder (or potentially to CEO if the Product Founder isn’t the CEO).
Hires future product managers after product-market fit.
2. Hire an experienced but more junior product manager (my recommended option)
2–5 years experience.
Common title: “Product Manager”
Takes on day-to-day product management.
Reports to the Product Founder, who retains product leadership.
Product Founder hires a product leader after product-market fit.
3. Hire a mid-level product manager/leader (i.e. “split the difference”)
~5–10 years experience.
Common titles: Director of Product, Head of Product
Takes on day-to-day product management.
Reports to the Product Founder, who retains product leadership.
Hopefully steps into product leadership role after product-market fit and then hires future product managers.
Why hiring a senior product leader is tempting
You’d be hard-pressed to find a VC or founder who wouldn’t agree that the most important priority for a startup is finding product-market fit.
Since the search for product-market fit is fundamentally a product-led challenge, it follows that having a strong product leader is absolutely critical to your company’s success.
By definition, as a non-traditional Product Founder you don’t have deep product leadership (or product management) experience, which is why your situation is so challenging.
So, at first glance the idea of hiring a senior product leader doesn’t seem crazy at all: getting a proven, “been there, done that” leader — assuming they are able to roll up their sleeves to get the day-to-day work done — would not only add instant horsepower, expertise, and bandwidth, but it would also solve for the future challenge of scaling the product organization after product-market fit.
Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? Especially if you’re feeling pressure from your Board and/or your team to mitigate your lack of product experience.
So, assuming everyone can get comfortable with the relatively obvious “cons” of: cost ($250K+ salary with a $75K+ exec search fee); timing (assume six months); and wrong hire risk (choosing the wrong person in such a critical and cross-functional role would really hurt), the “pros” often win the day and, with the Board’s blessing, you go out and recruit for a VP of Product.
But there are some subtler problems lurking if you go down the path of hiring a senior product leader, even if you succeed in hiring the “right” person.
Here’s what tends to go wrong
Usually, there’s a brief honeymoon period after the new VP of Product starts: it’s great to have an experienced product leader’s voice in the room, and some new practices and decisions deliver some quick wins.
But then the following symptoms show up pretty quickly:
As the Product Founder, you struggle to find the right balance between empowering the VP of Product and personally going deep on the product details and decisions that still matter more than anything else.
The added distance between you and the product team slows down and demotivates the team, either through newly created processes to keep you and your co-founders informed, reduced organizational clarity and alignment, or both.
You spend less time talking about product in All Hands meetings and other all-company forums, as you naturally gravitate towards talking about the functions you directly manage. This starts to shift the organizational tone and mindshare away from product.
The risks of focusing on the wrong things, including scaling prematurely, go up, as you naturally want to drive results in the areas you still manage (e.g. marketing, sales, customer success).
The team starts to wonder why “leadership” (and by leadership, they mean the founders) aren’t closer to the product details that are so critical, and they start voicing concerns that their company isn’t “product-led” (because, well, it isn’t anymore).
Paradoxically, the act of bringing in a product leader has shifted company focus and momentum away from product because you have prematurely delegated, and I might even say abdicated, the role of product leadership.
Another anti-pattern is the “not-really-letting go” scenario
A different, but equally thorny scenario is that you don’t actually let go of product leadership, either because you were never truly convinced you should, or the new product leader hasn’t gained your trust fast enough.
In other words, you don’t give the new VP of Product the autonomy they need to thrive in the role. Symptoms include:
Lack of clarity on who really owns the product vision and strategy.
Slow decision-making and/or changes in direction, driven by lack of alignment between you and the VP of Product.
Growing tension between you and the VP of Product.
This not only leads inevitably to a very frustrated product team, but it also creates a painful HR issue with the VP of Product, who is likely to exit the company, voluntarily or not.
What about the mid-level, “split the difference” option?
This option is also quite tempting:
It’s understandably daunting for you, as a non-traditional Product Founder, to think about recruiting a product manager, especially a junior one in a mission-critical role. How will you successfully recruit and manage a product manager if you’re not an experienced product person yourself, especially if you’re super-busy with other responsibilities? All else being equal, a more senior hire should require less support.
If you can find a candidate who is hands-on enough to do the product management work now, but senior enough to inherit product leadership from you after product-market fit, then you don’t have to worry about recruiting a senior product leader down the road. Rather, you’ll be ready to step on the gas and scale aggressively once you hit product-market fit. Nice.
A mid-level, but promotable product leader will be easier to recruit, and much less expensive, than a proven senior product leader.
But there are significant risks with this approach
First of all, it’s very hard to find a “goldilocks” candidate who can roll up their sleeves now and can step into the product leadership role once you hit product-market fit.
There’s a real danger that you’ll hire someone who either can’t do the job you urgently need done now (a short-term disaster), OR they won’t be able to step into the leadership role they’re expecting to be promoted to later (a thorny mid-term HR issue).
Because this candidate is more senior, the risks of your intentionally or unintentionally abdicating product leadership prematurely early go up. See “Here’s what tends to go wrong” above.
If you’re committed to making this your strategy, or if a promising candidate in this mold pop ups while you’re looking for a more junior product manager, here’s my advice:
Be absolutely certain the candidate is both able and willing to to get their hands dirty in the day-to-day product work with your engineers and designers.
Avoid over-promising on the future leadership role, giving yourself room to hire someone above the candidate in the future.
Be clear that, while there will be significant collaboration between you and the product manager, your plan is to continue owning the product leadership role, at least until product-market fit.
Conclusion
While it’s tempting to hire a senior (or mid-level) product leader, don’t do it!
A better approach is to hire an experienced but relatively junior person to handle day-to-day product management while you, as the Product Founder, carry the product leadership baton all the way over the product-market fit finish line.
It’s a big ask, but it’s doable if you hire the right product manager and stay committed to investing in your growth as a product leader.
If you have any questions about this article, or are interested in exploring product coaching, I’d love to talk
