Thread by @jgheller

1/ I’ve been thinking about how to be great at hiring for a product role.

I want to share a thread on the topic

2/ The necessary conditions when hiring a product role:

- Do you need incremental or step function work done?
- Does the person have building experiences or growing a user base?
- Are they connected with the mission?

3/ The sufficient condition when hiring a product role:

Does the candidate have an understanding, acquired through expertise and/or intuition, of the core dynamics of your business?

4/ Some common core product dynamics in startups:

- Marketplaces
- Social
- E-commerce
- Enterprise
- Deeply technical (AI, blockchain, etc)

None are industry specific. Only specific to customers & economics of the business

5/ Critical skills for incremental function hires:

- Input management (process objectives of each party)
- Interoperability (successfully fit your feature into the whole product)

These are critical skills of incrementalists. Hire them to preserve, coordinate and optimize.

6/ Critical skills for step function hires:

- Output management (quickly build, ship and learn)
- Understand product-market fit (either works or it does not)

Hire these step function folks to go from nothing to something

7/ Difference between hiring for user experience vs growth:

- Some people are really good at making a product feel a certain way
- Others are really good at optimizing the flow of those experiences

8/ Differences between experience-focused PMs and growth-focused PMs:

- Experience PM are feature focused and get their signal from individual customers and their stories
- Growth PMs are workflow focused. They get their signal from aggregate data

Focus on what you need

9/ The number one mistake startups make when hiring PMs:

- Startups hiring a PM or growth person before product/market fit

Be careful. The skills needed to optimize an operation (1 to n) won’t work when going from nothing to something (0 to 1)

10/ The key mistakes big companies make hiring PMs:

- Hiring a startup CEO to be a PM at a big company because they assume, a PM is the CEO of the product

This is rarely true. PMs on large orgs are in charge of coordinating resources to realize the founder’s vision

11/ ~20 people is a good heuristics to know if you need a PM other than the founder (cont):

There is a physical limit criterion: you do not need a PM to do input management, coordination, and interoperability in a company with ~ 20 people and one product

12/ ~20 people is a good heuristics to know if you need a PM other than the founder (cont):

- WhatsApp, a 30 people company, had 1 PM (aside from CEO leading) prior to the $19B FB acquisition

13/ On mission:

- builders don’t care about verticals, they want to solve a specific problems
- Find someone who wants to solve the problem you are trying to solve and who believes on the path you are taking

14/ In summary:

- Do you need incremental vs. step function product work?
- Is the main objective to improve the experience or growing the user base?
- Assess commitment to the company mission
- Do they have a strong intuition for the underlying business dynamics?

thanks, @dksf @hnshah and @APompliano for the feedback