Hiring your first Product Manager | by Gokul Rajaram | Medium

The other day, I received this email from a CEO (for context, this is a post-Series-B company with 15 engineers and a designer): Hey Gokul, We are looking to hire our first Product Manager. Can you recommend some good folks you’ve worked with in the past? Thanks a ton! This email is illustrative of several chats I’ve had over the past few months with the CEOs of fast-growing (but still young) companies. Their engineering teams have grown to a dozen or more engineers, and they now feel the need for a full-time Product person to do all the things that Product people do. The Product role had previously been assumed by the CEO or the engineering co-founder (if the CEO is the marketing/sales co-founder), and now neither has the bandwidth to focus full-time on Product. The biggest mistake they all make is the same. Every single one of them wants to hire someone new to be their first Product person. My advice to them is invariably the same: Do not bring in an external candidate as your first

The other day, I received this email from a CEO (for context, this is a post-Series-B company with 15 engineers and a designer): Hey Gokul, We are looking to hire our first Product Manager. Can you recommend some good folks you’ve worked with in the past? Thanks a ton! This email is illustrative of several chats I’ve had over the past few months with the CEOs of fast-growing (but still young) companies. Their engineering teams have grown to a dozen or more engineers, and they now feel the need for a full-time Product person to do all the things that Product people do. The Product role had prev