Over the last six months I've seen, heard and read about companies not initially hiring a product manager for their products. How can I tell or know, there are two situations where this most commonly happens
· It's become apparent that the CEO/Founder either overspent or wasted a significant portion of their tech development capital on a product that they can no longer use or go to market with.
· The GTM timeline continues to push out due to miscellaneous features being needed for the MVP. This tells me that the ideal client profile or problem continues to change.
How does a company determine the correct amount, or the right amount of product management experience needed to keep the mission and vision of the company and the initiatives and strategies together to deliver value to their customers?
It’s a two-step process.
Step 1 is realizing that you as the CEO/Founder may not be the best product manager for your company. There are plenty of chances and opportunities to blend roles in startups. I've seen many CEO's and founders misalign their vision and mission of their company with their product strategy. Everyone begins assuming their customers’ needs. To turn those assumptions into data driven and impactful problems, the assistance of a skilled Product Manager will help develop those problems into a North Star and impactful roadmaps so that the CEO/Founder has more time to focus on selling the value of the problem that they're solving.
Step 2 is to start out small. Not everyone has to be a full-time employee to be committed to mission & vision of your company. With a few hours per week, a skilled product manager will help ensure that your development team understands the problem, buys into the solution, and helps maintain & measure the impact of your strategies.
Additionally, this gives the CEO/Founder the opportunity to evaluate their product managers skill sets, strengths & weaknesses, and styles without being overly committed to the person/position. It’s true. Not everyone will be or has the desire to be that lifetime employee. Your product manager may have other professional goals. This provides both parties an opportunity to evaluate measure and decide for themselves how long the partnership should last.
If you believe that you’re in either of the two use cases mentioned above, you don’t have to stay there. There’s still time to change course. Please reach out to us, I’d love to hear about the problems that you’re solving and impact that it’s having on your customers. At the end of the conversation, we’ll see if I’m the right kind of help for you & your team or if I can find you a better resource.
Comments