At what point (e.g., engineer headcount) should a startup hire its first dedicated product manager?

Tony Fadell · May 11, 2022

Once a company grows past roughly 20 people, the founder must hire a dedicated product manager to be the full-time voice of the customer rather than continuing to do product management themselves

There is too much work to do product management properly, and a CEO already has so many other things to do; the CEO's job is the work nobody else is doing — talking to customers, filling cracks, finding issues and reviewing work, not doing the work

Scope: applies past ~20 people; the CEO can still engage in product discussions from a review perspective

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Marty Cagan · Dec 7, 2022

The right time to hire the first product person is a function of engineer count — roughly once you pass 25 to 30 engineers the founder can no longer stay close enough to make the daily product decisions

Beyond that scale teams report they can't get enough founder time, so they go slowly, make bad choices, or make no choices at all

Scope: assumes at least one founder is a proven product leader; also depends on how many hours the founder is willing to invest

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Scott Belsky · Feb 3, 2023

The right time to hire your first product leader is a function of engineer count — roughly past 25 to 30 engineers

Beyond that the founder can't be close enough to all the engineers to make the daily product decisions, so teams stall, wait, or make bad or no choices

Scope: assumes at least one founder is a proven product leader; depends partly on how many hours the founder will invest; if no founder is a product leader, product expertise must come much sooner

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Scott Belsky · Feb 3, 2023

The 25-engineer threshold works because engineers naturally group into three to five product teams, each with a senior tech lead who needs a close relationship with the founder

The tech leads, not every engineer, are the ones requiring founder time; they cascade detail to the rest of the team

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Marty Cagan · Dec 7, 2022

25 engineers is not too many for one founder to cover, because they group into four or five product teams each with a tech lead, and the founder only needs a close relationship with those tech leads

The tech leads carry the detailed conversation down to the other engineers about dividing the work, so the founder's direct surface area is only four or five people

28:33 Founder can still cover 25 engineers directly via tech leads so threshold is higher

Shreyas Doshi · Feb 3, 2023

Three signals indicate a founder actually needs a first PM: frequent bottlenecks where engineers and designers are blocked on the founder's decisions, frequent misalignment on timelines, priorities or strategy, and a new side opportunity the founder has no time to explore.

PMs are especially good at unblocking teams and keeping people in sync, and a new direction needs a mini-CEO to own it.

34:41 Hire first pm when bottlenecks misalignment or new opportunities signal need

Annie Pearl · Feb 3, 2023

A team that is constantly reacting to breakages rather than proactively deciding where the product should go is a signal it's time to hire a PM

The current mix of people lacks the balance to think proactively; a purely reactive team is a dangerous slippery slope, so you either hire a PM to do the proactive thinking or to absorb execution work so others can

44:33 Reactive firefighting team signals need to hire a pm