What 20 years in product taught me about hiring your first PM

The hardest hire to get right is the first product manager, and founders often make it for the wrong reason. They're tired, they want their time back, and they think hiring a PM will let them stop carrying the product. It won't. It will move the carrying to a different shape, and if you hire too early or to the wrong shape, the carrying gets harder, not lighter.

The first thing to understand about a PM is that they aren't a substitute for product judgment. They're an amplifier of it. A good PM in a company without product judgment makes worse decisions faster. The PM is the operator of a process whose direction has to come from somewhere, and in the first years that somewhere is you. If you aren't yet confident in your product direction, hiring a PM won't give you confidence. It will give you someone executing on confusion.

The second thing is that the right time to hire isn't when you're overloaded. It's when you have more product work than you can do well and the additional product work is the kind a PM is actually good at. PM work is most valuable in the middle of the lifecycle, when there are existing customers giving signal, an existing product with plenty of surface area, and open questions about prioritization, roadmapping, and trade-offs. PM work is least valuable when you're still searching for product market fit, where the work is mostly founder-led conviction and rapid iteration that doesn't benefit from a process layer.

The third thing is to hire for the situation you're in, not the one you wish you were in. A PM who is great at scaling an existing product is usually bad at zero-to-one work, and a PM who is great at zero-to-one work is usually impatient at scaling. Both are fine. Neither is universal. The interview question that matters isn't what they have done. It's what they have done in a situation that looks like yours.

If you take one thing from this, take this. You won't hire your way out of needing product judgment. You'll hire your way into needing better product judgment, applied at the level of who you bring on and what you ask them to do. The PM doesn't replace you. They make the consequences of your judgment bigger, faster.

This connects to a question I answer in depth: What should I build next as a solo founder.