Strong opinion, strongly held: If you're a pre-product market fit startup hiring product people, you're doing it wrong. Product people have a time and place. Just not before PMF.
Just wondering, how do you all deal with the issue of scope creep? I’d imagine having a full engineering team leads to this sometimes (maybe im wrong though)
I mostly agree as a product person. This is sort of why over last year I’ve found myself doing consulting and advising work. since I want to make an help on early stage things, helping founders in more limited capacity
Also product people are basically founders as AI accelerates decreasing technical gaps. Strong opinion, strongly held: We're going to see a loot more startups.
Agree, founders should own the product. And if they have some knowledge gaps they can always hire consultants/advisors/coaches
Makes sense...what's your hiring order of operations?
Dan is right about this, it’s true in most scenarios. But as with all rules in startups, it’s important to know when to bend/break them :)
founders are the PMs, whether they like it or not.
if you had to say which is the key essence/quality of all of those that you recommend hiring before pmf, which would it be?
What if the founder has domain expertise but is focused on bridging the gap between the problem and solution? Don’t product people help with that?
you are the product person. imo depends on the founders. you have you and varun. that's the combo. you are doing all the things the product person does.
slightly disagree. good product people help find PMF quicker by ideating on what works and communicating with early users.
Dan when a product person applies to Warpcast
+1,000 We’re onboarding engineers this week tho 👀 We all code. Thoughts on sales and BD? I run that and intend to. But am aware of my gaps.
Product dev here and I think there's exceptions even to the strongest held opinions 🥲
Makes perfect sense when the founders have product experience. But when that isn’t the case, they’d need someone to help with product. They’d be losing precious time without it. While most tech companies have founding team members with that background (thru prod or eng), it wouldn’t be unusual if some don’t.
Do you think Farcaster has PMF and if so, what do you think the inflection point was
It depends of the nature of your product and how fast do you want to run test and iterate. B2C startups maybe need more like a UX researcher for speeding up the discovery phase and put some framework on place. But for B2B business I totally agree that founders are the one doing this
One thousand percent agree. Product people need data to do their jobs. If you bring them in too early, the data won't exist, or worse, will send you on some wild goose chases.