Ben Erez on Hiring the first PM, Early-Stage Technical Leadership, and Design Excellence
Product State Q&A
Ben Erez is a Partner at Ben & Bloom’s Design Studio. Ben was formerly Head of Product & Design at Continuum, Lead Product Manager at Attentive, and Product Manager at Facebook, Abstract, and Canvas.
Website / LinkedIn
EC: When should founders consider hiring their first PM?
BE: I've been the first PM at 3 different startups and feel strongly that if a startup doesn't have product-market fit, hiring a full-time product manager will be a net negative for the company — regardless of PM quality.
Before you have PMF, you're zigging and zagging. As the founder, you need to be driving every zig and every zag. The ability to decide when to zig/zag must be informed by what your customers — aka the market — are telling you.
Delegating that signal collection is essentially giving up the ability to ‘feel’ the market. A PM creates a layer of separation between you (the founder) and the customer. An analogy is like transitioning from driving a manual transmission to driving automatic. You just don't feel the road in the same way.
You might be tempted to see this layer of separation as a healthy delegation that allows you to ‘work on the business vs in the business’ but I think this mindset is very dangerous pre-PMF (post-PMF is a different story).
Every single customer conversation has the potential to make something click for you.
And while the PM you hire will be very good at talking to customers and understanding their problems, the PM is the wrong person to be steering the direction of the entire company. That's the founder's job.
If you're an early stage founder who needs help on the product side and you don't yet have PMF, work with an advisor who specializes in the early stage zigging and zagging.
Whatever you do, you must own product until you reach PMF. Do not hire a full-time product person. You'd be delegating your biggest job.
EC: How can technical founders of early stage startups become better at product?
BE: I recently kicked off a product advisory engagement with the technical co-founder of an early stage YC-backed startup. He's hungry to become a better product leader (he's an A+ engineer).
Context: I'm coaching him around customer discovery + product validation, including internal communication loops to ensure learnings & insights from customers are incorporated into his team's product development process.
He framed the initial problems and I tried a question-based approach. He stopped me.
‘I'd like you to tell me what to do specifically as if I was a junior PM at my own startup.’
Here are a few points I shared:
1) Intimately know your customer. His company has a few early customers so I told him he needs to become an expert on every user and decision maker. What are their goals in life, pain points in their daily workflow, etc. I should be able to quiz you about your customers and you know the answer every time.
2) Learn where deals die. Product leaders are first & foremost business leaders. Understand the GTM + revenue generating motion of the business, including how customers find you and convert from leads to paying customers. Blockers to closing deals are a P0. You should always understand the deal pipeline.
3) Fall in love with problems, not solutions. Engineers tend to feel a sense of pride in the elegance of the solution. However, early stage solutions are usually wrong and need iteration. The *problem* is what has longevity, not the solution. Falling in love with a problem will give you the energy and excitement to experiment w/ different solutions as you seek product market fit.
4) Be 10x better on a key dimension the customer cares about. You have a small team and need to focus on the biggest impact. I believe the right place to focus for a new product is in being 10x better along a key dimension your customer cares about. Bite off a part of their workflow that sucks and make it fun, seamless, or gone. Incrementality = death.
5) Delighting customers is the best way to grow. Your customers will know people just like them. The best way to get word-of-mouth (WoM) going is by blowing them away. WoM is free marketing that brings highly qualified prospects to your doorstep with their wallets out. Make your first customers your biggest champions.
6) Bring your team along for the ride. Don't wait to have a fully fleshed out solution in your head. Instead, regularly share your latest thinking about the business strategy, milestones, biggest bottlenecks for growth, and problems you think the business should be focused on. This ensures everyone on the team is living and breathing the same headspace as the founders.
I've never seen a founder ask for this advice so directly but I absolutely loved it because it showed humility and a true growth mindset.
EC: What makes for a great early stage product designer?
BE: I've been fortunate to work with some incredible product designers over the last decade. While each has been unique, I've noticed one pattern consistently with my favorite designers.
We'll get jazzed up about a new idea in the morning, and later that day they'll ping me ‘ready to look at some mocks?’
Designers who work that way are a dream. Taking the initiative to run with an idea and not being afraid to review an initial stab together makes life as a PM fun and exciting. It allows for building momentum — and it’s straight up energizing.
Another attribute I value deeply in product design partners is not getting attached to their own designs and maintaining an objective distance from the work. The best designers I know are deeply critical of their own designs and are the first ones to call out where they’re falling short because they want my input.
“The right place to focus for a new product is in being 10x better along a key dimension your customer cares about."
- Ben Erez