The product challenge for non-traditional founders
TL;DR
Startup founders with deep product backgrounds have a well-documented playbook (see Jonathan Golden and Ken Norton for examples) for when to hire their first product manager: wait until after they’ve hit product-market fit (explained nicely here by Lenny Rachitsky).
But this strategy seldom works for what I’ll call a “non-traditional Product Founder,” meaning a founder who is responsible for product at their company but doesn’t have significant experience as a product manager, working alongside designers and engineers to create a technical product.
Non-traditional Product Founders should consider bringing in a product manager before product-market fit, but they should make sure to:
Avoid delegating product leadership before they hit product-market fit.
Resist over-hiring for their first product manager role.
If you’re a non-traditional Product Founder (or if you’re a VC with a non-traditional Product Founder), this post is for you.
Non-traditional Product Founders are more common than you’d think
A few weeks ago I was catching up with a senior partner at a top early-stage VC that leads pre-seed to Series A rounds.
He told me, with a bit of frustration, that he was spending a lot of time with several companies in his portfolio explaining some of the fundamentals of product management to founders.
In many cases, he was in the process of trying to convince a founder to hire a senior product leader to mitigate the founder’s lack of product expertise.
These were hard conversations that ended at an impasse:
The founders weren’t convinced it was time to recruit a senior leader.
Some were even worried that the Board was trying to replace them.
Hiring a less experienced product manager (another option) felt challenging given the absence of a seasoned product leader to hire and manage them.
Meanwhile, the founders were burning through their runway without confidence among themselves or among their Board that the founders were doing the right things to get to product-market fit as quickly as possible.
So what’s going on here? Why doesn’t the standard “wait until after product-market fit to hire your first product manager” playbook seem to be working?
The challenge for a non-traditional Product Founder
As a non-traditional Product Founder, you’re bringing incredibly valuable experience to the table that more traditional Product Founders don’t have. This might be functional expertise in sales, marketing or finance, and possibly deep knowledge and relationships in your target market. You’ve probably got some strong founder-market fit mojo working for you.
That said, from a product perspective, your level of expertise, confidence, and speed of execution are likely significantly lower than a Product Founder whose previous job was in product at Stripe or AirBnB. Especially if that former Stripe employee is building with engineers and/or designers they’ve already worked with.
Alternatively, you might be a technical founder who has worked closely with product managers as an engineer, but this is your first time owning product.
All else being equal, as a non-traditional Product Founder you’ve simply got a much harder product challenge in front of you: you’re not only trying to figure out what the right product is, but you’re trying to learn how to do product at the same time. (This, by the way, is one reason most VCs prefer to have at least one founder with deep product experience (gulp)).
From the start, you’ve likely been engaging with product terms and concepts you don’t fully understand (yet), and over time you’ve probably started fielding an increasing number of important and challenging product questions from your co-founders, employees, and Board members.
Depending on how things are going, you may be feeling anxious about questions like:
Do I have the right team in place?
Are we building the right things in the right order?
Am I leading the product team effectively?
Maybe you occasionally wake up at night in a cold sweat shouting something like “What is “discovery” anyway?!” or “Wait: how can a detailed roadmap with clear date commitments be a bad thing?!”
I’m half joking here, but you shouldn’t underestimate how many smart, non-traditional Product Founders get confused or frustrated by some of the principles and best practices for building tech products. Especially when those best practices seem to be at odds with management techniques that have worked for you elsewhere.
It’s hard to make confident and efficient decisions in this context, and the issues and questions only get more challenging — tactically and strategically — as you hire more engineers and have have more contact with the market.
Complexity spikes once you’ve got a live product with real customers and data.
The busier you get, the more your personal lack of bandwidth may be causing a bottleneck that slows down the product team (or other teams), not to mention the impact on your own stress levels, balance, and ability to lead.
Bottom line: you know that getting to product-market fit is the only thing that matters, you know it’s your job to get there, but when you look around the table, and in the mirror, you don’t see a proven product leader.
That’s a scary feeling, and some product “impostor syndrome” and doubts might start creeping in.
At this point, your gut (and your investors) may be telling you, correctly, that it’s time to bring on someone to help with product, in spite of the conventional wisdom that you should wait.
It doesn’t make sense to wait until after product-market fit to hire a product manager if the way you’re currently operating is not going to maximize your chances of getting to product-market fit in the first place.
At this point the question becomes: who do you hire?
Brief interlude: “Product Leadership” versus “Product Management”
Before we dive into hiring strategy, I want to define two roles within the overall product function, both of which you own as the Product Founder (at least until you hire your first product manager).
Product Leadership
The product leader creates, refines and evangelizes the product vision, strategy, objectives, and culture. Ultimately, the product leader is responsible for the key strategic determinants of product-market fit:
Understanding and selecting the target customer.
Finding and prioritizing the customer’s key underserved problems or needs.
Crafting the product’s unique value proposition
Prioritizing the high-level feature set for the MVP and beyond
Crucially, the product leader also owns adapting the strategy based on market learnings, combined with evolving business needs and constraints.
When it’s time to grow the team, a product leader takes on the additional responsibility of people management, i.e. hiring and developing product managers (and, usually, designers). Marty Cagan does a great job of describing the product leadership role in “Product Leadership is Hard.”
Product Management
The product manager leads the ongoing, hands-on work of additional discovery, and delivery within the strategic framework set by the product leader. This requires deep, day-to-day collaboration with designers, engineers, and stakeholders. Like product leadership, to be done well product management requires frequent contact with, and deep understanding of, customers.
Now that we’ve got these definitions straight, let’s move on.
My advice on hiring your first product manager
My strong advice to non-traditional Product Founders is to use the following high-level strategy:
1. Persist as long as you can as the sole product leader and product manager.
Extended and detailed immersion with the team, product, and customers will build a foundation that will pay dividends when you eventually hand over the product reins but still want and need to be the leader of a product-led company.
A direct working relationship with a founder can be incredibly inspiring and motivating for the product team. Don’t underestimate this.
2. But when your lack of bandwidth or experience is starting to slow down the team, hire someone to take on the day-to-day tasks of product management to:
Translate and communicate your product vision and market expertise to your engineers and designers.
Collaborate with the product team on detailed feature and design decisions and prioritization.
Drive day-to-day execution of the product team
Communicate with key stakeholders.
3. Do not delegate product leadership until you hit product-market fit:
No one can translate market signals into insights as accurately and fast, while also having the authority to quickly make the right pivots, as you can as a founder.
While “going big” and hiring a VP of Product or CPO might be tempting, some unexpected and surprisingly bad things tend to happen if you do, even if you can successfully recruit (and afford) the “right” person.
I discuss this “anti-pattern” in detail, as well as the scenario of recruiting a mid-level product leader, in my post: Founders: don’t hire a product leader (yet)
What’s the right level to hire for your first product manager?
My advice is to look for an experienced but relatively junior product manager with clear experience building (not maintaining) a new product or a significant new feature.
Hire for a Product Manager with ~2–5 years of product experience.
Don’t hire a senior product leader (e.g. VP of Product, CPO) with ~10+ years experience: you’d be over-hiring dramatically to get the product management work done, and you increase the chances of delegating product leadership too quickly. Again, more detail on why you want to avoid this here.
Avoid falling into the trap of “splitting the difference” by looking for a mid-level hire (~6–10 years experience) to play the product management role now and step into the product leadership role later. If you happen to find someone along the way who fits this profile great. But these types of “goldilocks” candidates are hard to find, and you want to be very careful with how you set expectations. Again, I dig into this in more detail here.
Before you go external, consider whether there’s a high performer already in your company (e.g. an engineer, designer, or chief of staff) who might be a viable option. If you go this route, make sure the candidate is both good at product and interested in product (see Gokul Rajaram’s Hiring your first Product Manager) and that there’s a lead engineer or designer who already knows what good looks like and is willing to take the product manager under their wing.
Good news: you can do this, especially if you get the right support
Product leadership is a complex discipline, especially at scale, but in the early stages of a company it’s not rocket science. You can learn the key concepts and skills quickly, especially if:
You invest in a trusted coach or advisor. There are some great people out there who can provide expert, pragmatic, and high-impact support, affordably (either cash and/or equity) and in a safe and 100% confidential space. Full disclosure: I’m one of those people :)
You’re curious, open to understanding your blindspots, and willing to put in some extra hours to accelerate your learning.
While the prospect of hiring a junior product manager may feel daunting to you as a non-traditional Product Founder — you may be worried not only about your ability to recruit a great candidate but also about your ability to effectively manage them once hired — fear not:
The right hire will have the necessary experience and be entrepreneurial. This means they should be able to operate without heavy oversight from you, and they will be thrilled about the opportunity to report directly to, and learn from, a founder (even if that comes with the trade-off of not having a manager who is an experienced product leader).
A product coach or advisor can help you create the right job description, recruiting approach, and evaluation process. They can also help interview candidates and design and support a successful onboarding process.
There’s a ton of great educational content out there on both product leadership and product management:
Marty Cagan’s books Empowered (with Chris Jones) and Inspired are amazing resources for understanding the roles of product leaders and of product managers (and other key product team roles), respectively.
Books like Running Lean (Ash Maurya) and The Lean Product Playbook (Dan Olsen) give very pragmatic, step-by-step advice and frameworks on how to navigate the path from idea to product-market fit (and beyond).
All of the people above offer 1–2 day public workshops that can deepen and accelerate your learning. They have also published plenty of videos that can give you a lot of knowledge in very little time.
Non-traditional Product Founders can make fantastic product leaders. They just need to make smart hiring choices (right timing, right role definition, right person) and should consider investing in their own success (and sanity) with some extra support from a product coach or advisor.
If you have any questions about this article, or are interested in exploring product coaching, I’d be delighted to talk.
