Scaling Product Teams
Scaling product teams is a controversial subject. Why, who and when to hire lands many people in hot water as they learn for themselves what's going to work.
That's fine, there's always some learning to be done!
To help shortcut that learning process though, here's my take on why, when and who to hire when scaling your product team.
Stage 1 - Pre Product Market Fit
At this point you want to keep the team as small as possible. You're only focus is to get to PM/F, and figuring out a way to fund that journey. Generally you'll only need as small a number of engineers as you can get away with and a really good designer (this may vary obviously depending on your product). The aim is to move as quickly as possible as you learn, and you really don't want organisational baggage to slow you down. There should be one person (usually the founder) acting as the product manager at this stage.
Stage 2 - Growth Stage
Once you have some level of repeatable sales and confidence that you can service your initial market relatively well, focus gets split between growing the company and growing the product.
At this point hiring support on the product side becomes important. Be clear about what parts of the product development process you want to retain, and what parts you are prepared to delegate. If you've not done this journey before hiring someone with experience is a good idea. Depending on your product you may even end up hiring for specialisms. For example, hiring a growth PM or a technical PM. However, don't hire smart people and then try to tell them what to do. If you want to retain ownership of parts of the product development process (and you'll almost certainly want to retain strategy), then hire appropriately. If you're very opinionated about product maybe hire someone very junior, or even just a good software project manager who is prepared to simply convert your ideas into jira tickets and manage the work through the team (I don't advocate this way of working by the way). Nor to I advocate hiring a Head of Product at this stage. You need a really good IC who might progress to being a Lead PM or Head Of if things work out.
Stage 3 - Expansion Stage
So things are really cooking now and engineers are multiplying all over the place. The product is getting too big for any one person to manage efficiently. You know this because there's way more work than you can possibly do, you're spending most of your time on customer requests, and the roadmap hasn't been touched in months. You're frustrated because the team is three times the size it was in Stage 1, but it seems to take months to ship anything.
You need to start creating some product teams, each with their own area of responsibility. Those folks are going to need hiring, line managing and coaching. You need a Head of Product who can do this for you. The Head of Product will report to the CEO so there's a direct link between corporate strategy and product strategy (as opposed to reporting to the CTO where inevitably they will become a slave to the tech org).
Stage 4 - Maturity and Beyond
Congrats! You now have a organisation of 150+ people and a product that is generating significant revenue. You (and the board) start to think about what's over the next hill. New products maybe? Certainly significant additions to the current one so you can grow the market or move up market and service a new segment (usually enterprise!). You've now got quite a few product teams and it's hard to align them all around a single product strategy. Maybe you have a number of Heads of Product and line managing them properly is time consuming and difficult. You're thinking about making some strategic acquisitions. It's all getting very complicated.
Now is the time to hire a CPO. Someone who can represent Product on the board, bring a wealth of experience either in your sector or at your stage, can look externally but also focus and coach your HoPs.
A few additional points:
Don't hire too senior, too soon. It can be tempting to think seniority will bring A+ performance. It won't, and then you'll be left having a difficult conversation. Hire appropriately and give yourself the option of either promoting them or hiring above them when you need to.
A companies team scales differently depending on the complexity of the product, the sales motion, the customers etc etc. As a rule of thumb you always want to "hire slow and fire fast". That is, only hire when you absolutely have to.
Head of Product can come to board meetings and represent the team really well. Don't exclude them just because they don't have the title. A good idea is to have a product focus at every 4th board meeting for example, so your HoP can get some experience and the board can see all the great stuff that's going (although they'll only be interested if revenue is going in the right direction!)
If you need help with any of this, just book a call
