When to Hire Your First PM
Stay founder-as-PM until bottlenecks, hijacked eng/design, or new customer segments force the hire
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
A decision rule for the classic 'do we need PMs yet?' question. The default answer for early companies is no — the founders are the original PMs and should stay closest to customer and solution until they literally cannot do the job anymore. Three concrete signals flip the decision: work stalls without the founder (founder is the bottleneck), engineers and designers are absorbing core PM duties at the expense of their own, or the company is moving into an adjacent surface with a different customer segment that must be learned.
Origin
Rohini Pandhi's advice, consistent across her experience at Square and Mercury; echoes Lenny Rachitsky's own writing on signs you need PMs.
Core principles
- 01The founder is the original PM and should be the PM until they cannot do the job anymore
- 02Hiring a PM too early feels like handing the company's soul — customer conversations, product personality — to someone else prematurely
- 03Bottlenecks are the primary tell: if every decision waits on the founders, things slow or halt
- 04New adjacent customer segments require a dedicated product person to learn that customer's needs
How to run it
- 1
Default to founder-as-PM
In early/seed days, keep the founder(s) as PM. Stay as close to customers and to the solution being built as possible. Do not hire a PM just because you're asking the question.
Watch out Asking 'should I hire a PM?' very early is usually a sign it's too early — resist until a real signal appears.
- 2
Watch for the bottleneck signal
Hire when work simply isn't getting done without you — when you personally are the bottleneck and decisions stall waiting on you.
- 3
Watch for eng/design absorbing PM duties
When engineers and designers are doing cross-functional PM work (compliance, legal, risk coordination, start-to-finish shepherding) and therefore not doing their own core work, it's time.
Pro tip In regulated/fintech contexts this breaks early — Mercury's need appeared under 100 employees, well before the 400-person mark.
- 4
Watch for adjacent-segment expansion
When you move into a new product area with a different target customer, hire a product person to learn what that customer needs and what to build for them.
Pro tip Snapchat brought in its first PM specifically to go deep on ads — a dedicated person for a new deep surface.
In the wild
Mercury ran with zero official PMs up to ~400 employees (~200 in R&D roles), but PM duties were already being done — first by founders, then by hired 'business leads' who ran cross-functional coordination. The breakdown that justified real PMs actually started under 100 employees.
→ Recognizing the signals led to formalizing the role; in hindsight it should have happened sooner.
Common mistakes
Hiring a PM too early
Bringing in a PM before a real bottleneck hands over customer intimacy and product personality prematurely and isn't worth it.
Ignoring that eng/design are secretly the PMs
Letting engineers and designers keep absorbing PM duties silently taxes their core work and hides the real need.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders deciding whether it's finally time to hire their first product manager
Not ideal for
Companies already past product-team formation that need a full discipline build-out instead
From the transcript
“Until you cannot do the job anymore, you yourself should be the PM”
“the bottlenecks started popping up”
“somebody's doing the PM duties even if you don't have a PM. But then that means they're not doing their engineering or design uh responsibilities”
“when you start moving into adjacent surface areas or different product areas with different kind of target segments of customers”
From the episode
How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more
Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square)