“Hire a PM” sounds like a simple decision.
In practice, it is a structural change. You are introducing a role whose job is to create clarity, challenge assumptions, and force the company to look at customers and outcomes more seriously than it has before.
That is why hiring the first product person often creates tension, even when it is the right move.
Last week I ran another Crew Inner Circle session with Daragh Kan who’s been the first PM twice now, so he was able to offer some insights and reflections that are worth sharing.
This session was for founders and PMs who are either:
- getting ready to hire their first PM
- stepping into a “first product person” role
- trying to make product work in a business that has historically been engineering-led or founder-led
A few of the strongest takeaways.
1) Don’t hire a “first PM”, hire the capability you actually need. The title does not matter much. The role will mean different things depending on where the company is at, what the founder expects, and what the business needs right now.
The practical move is to get explicit on:
- What does success look like in 3, 6, 12 months?
- What metric are we actually moving? Revenue, retention, CAC, activation, profitability, time-to-value, something else?
- What are the milestones the business is trying to hit, and what would this person need to do to support them?
Then reverse engineer the job description and the expectations from there.
2) The first PM is rarely a junior hire. Daragh’s view was pretty clear, hiring a junior as the first product hire often creates long hangovers. Too many decisions get set in motion without the experience to know what to say yes to, and more importantly, what to say no to.
There was a consistent theme from the group, early stage teams usually do not have the bandwidth to coach someone junior into the role while also trying to ship, sell, and survive. Someone junior, with less overall business and I suppose life experience may struggle with the influencing component of the role.
That thing of leading everyone, but managing no-one.
3) Founders need to be close to customers, and users. One sharp point that came out was, founders can be “close to the customer” in a CEO-to-CEO way, but still be far from the day-to-day user reality.
A good first PM will keep testing whether product direction and decisions are based on:
- real customer and user feedback
- or internal conviction and vision with no evidence behind it
4) Your first six months comes with a rare superpower, the “new person” licence. When you are new, you can ask a lot of questions without it feeling like you’re attacking past decisions.
If the company has never worked with product before, it also helps to set expectations early:
- “Here’s what product management means here”
- “Here’s what I’m going to do”
- “Here’s what I’m going to ask for”
- “Here’s how we’ll know it’s working”
5) Quick wins are often context and clarity, not shiny features. One of Daragh’s best examples was using domain knowledge to write something simple that the business could immediately reuse and share internally, effectively “what matters to X” in plain language.
More broadly, the quickest way to create credibility is usually:
- define success clearly
- reduce ambiguity
- create alignment
- build a repeatable feedback loop with customers and internal teams
6) Talk to customers constantly, and use internal teams to bridge access. If you cannot get direct customer access yet, start with the people who already speak to them:
- support
- sales
- engineering
- anyone fielding objections, requests, and complaints
You’re looking for patterns, blockers, and the “small obvious gap” that stops the product’s value from being felt.
7) Product is often the job of saying no, with reasons. A common failure mode, especially for newer PMs, is saying yes to everything to build trust. That trust gets expensive fast.
Part of the role is building enough credibility to say:
- “No, and here’s why”
- “Not now, and here’s what we’re prioritising instead”
- “If we do that, here’s what we’re not doing”
So they’re the big ticket items, hopefully there’s something useful there. In truth, you could probably use these themes for starting in any role.
The next Inner Circle call is already being lined up. These sessions are small, not recorded, and designed to feel like a real conversation, not content. Hit me up if you’re keen to join the next one.
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Simon
