Product Answers #3: Do we need a dedicated product manager? Until now, our founders take care of the product.
This question came from the co-founder and CTO of an early-stage startup. The CTO wanted to avoid introducing too many roles too early. The organisation had only a handful of employees yet.
You typically start a company because you came across an opportunity that you want to tackle. An unsolved problem to a larger audience, that would be willing to pay for a solution. When you start working towards that solution, you need complementary skills. You need someone working on understanding the problem and the underlying needs of the potential customers (product manager), someone with prototyping skills to enable you trying out many different solutions quickly (product designer), and someone turning the validated prototype into a real product (engineer). All the things in between are typically secondary and handled between this first group of people.
You only hire additional people when the founding team is missing critical skills or when certain skills need to scale. In the meantime, one person goes in the lead for the product part and another in the lead for the engineering part. Yet, you will discuss and work so close to each other, that there is no clear separation. That’s the preferred option as long as all of your people are really close (i.e. can or could sit around one large table). Once the organisation grows and spreads and you need to take care about many more things (hiring, coaching, marketing, legal etc.), you still need someone to perform the product manager’s job full time and be present with the rest of the people who build prototypes and the real product. There comes your first product person to hire.