Product is an Umbrella
Hire before it rains.
Too often I get calls from founders—mid-crunch—asking if I can help them boot up their product function, but they don’t know where to start. My advice is simple: do it now, before you get busy.
Putting off a critical product hire can be a death sentence for startups. It’s critical that this function exists by the time customers start paying for the thing you built, otherwise teams risk losing focus and getting lost in the weeds. And while many founding teams have an acting product lead, few have appropriate training or the time to commit to leading the function full-time as the company grows.
Founders own the vision
As a founder I’ve experienced the pain of birthing a product from nothing. The zero-to-one journey is marked by a lack of external validation: my vision may not be what sells, but we won’t know until it’s out in the world.
So we do our best to de-risk the product before it launches. We interview potential users, prototype our designs, test our experiences in isolation, and build the thing. But it isn’t until people use it that we know whether the value propositions match the value provided to users. Statistically, users will be underwhelmed.
Suddenly the momentum of the team shifts from “build” to “fix.” User complaints, time pressure, metrics targets, investor expectations all distract from the iterative process of improving our product until we hit the mark. Without a product function, founders jump in, putting out fires and motivating the team while continuing to wear all the hats they were already wearing. Things get dropped. Decisions are rushed, delayed, or ignored. The system is no longer serving us.
Product needs a home
Hiring a product lead may feel like a luxury for a lean team. It’s a step that requires a leap of faith from founders in the throes of raising their product babies, and it’s expensive.
Many founders end up putting off the decision in favor of other (bad) solutions:
Product lives with a founder. This is the lowest friction solution and the highest risk to product growth. While a necessity in early days, it quickly becomes unsustainable. For instance: What happens when the founder isn’t available? Is the founder writing specifications? User stories? Breaking down tickets and grooming the backlog? Attending engineering ceremonies? What aren’t they doing as a result?
Product lives within the technical organization. It seems like common sense that in the absence of a dedicated lead, product strategy and definition should live in the same place as product creation. But product definition requires a full-time steward, an individual contributor who can interpret data, user input, founder vision, and design/engineering realities and consistently create user stories that deliver the type of value the product lacks. Engineering time is typically the most scarce resource in an organization. Is that the right trade-off?
Product is “shared” between functions. To quote the youth, “i can’t with this one.” A lack of centralized product results in fragmented experiences, decisions made without the benefit of shared context or common understanding of strategy, and is generally so inefficient as to be left as an afterthought. It doesn’t scale and it leaves your organization vulnerable to pivots or reorgs as people come and go. Don’t do it.
These solutions lack a “center of gravity” for product strategy and planning. In the case of a founder-led product org, decisions and data are often lost due to competing priorities. Any individual without product management experience is liable to over-index on whatever looks like a nail to them. Documentation and prioritization techniques will vary, but are unlikely to capture context effectively. And in the case of a shared function, you’re basically leaving product decisions to chance.
In contrast, a dedicated product function is able to distill founder vision into a series of product bets, exploring the value, feasibility, and effort required for each. Attention is paid to the relative priority and success of each bet and time is spent with all functions to ensure they are aligned with the current effort. Trained product managers know their decisions are only as good as their grasp of context: they leverage the experience of experts in other functions while keeping them informed. Perhaps most important, product ensures context and effort are visible to the entire organization at all times. Fast moving teams are liable to make decisions based on the information they have in front of them. Product ensures that this is the correct information.
Hold the umbrella
When led by the right person, the product function creates an umbrella around the product development organization that allows each member of the team to focus on what they are uniquely capable of contributing to the company. Founders are freed up to wear all the hats they need to. Engineers are empowered to execute and scale their efforts. Value increases and the product grows, and the startup is able to scale.
All of this is a full time job for one or more people, even at early stage companies. When defining the minimum viable team to bring a product to market, factoring in a product hire is guaranteed to cut down on the thrash of finding product market fit. You’ll see immediate knock-on effects in product growth from the learnings and resulting features curated by strong product governance. Efficiencies compound as teams find focus under the umbrella, increasing engineering velocity and accuracy. Done well, a product team becomes a hub for ingesting and communicating context, ensuring all teams know what we’re building and why.
But the longer you wait to stand up a product function, the more time your team spends out in the rain.
Sam Gimbel is a former co-founder of Clark (acquired 2019) and VP of Product at Clover. He consults with startups to take the risk out of creating a sustainable product function within their organizations.