Gokul Rajaram: observation

Transcript context

…Oh, my God. I love that. And I've definitely seen these teams that you're talking about. And that only becomes worse once they hire a PM. I like your rule of thumb of hiring a PM when you've gotten like eight to 10 engineers. What kind of points to it's time to hire a PM? Other than that, is there other things you've seen of just like, oh, my God, this team really needs a PM or they should wait longer? What have you seen there? I always feel that you should hire to solve a problem you're facing. You should never hire or you feel you're going to face. But especially, I think, just overhiring, especially you want to be efficient and smaller teams are always good, smaller companies are always good. So there are many teams. First of all, the question is, if the founder is able to play the role, someone needs to play the role of a product manager. If the founder is able to and willing to play the role of product manager, the problem is with eight to 10 engineers, if the founder is doing other things besides playing the role of a product manager, then the eight to 10% engineering team is not being cared for and fed. Engineers are by far the most expensive resource of the company, by far, right? I mean, if you look at the competition of engineers and PMs versus any other function, it's two to three XI, equity, cash, everything. And if you think of it that way, then if you're not caring and feeding and not leveraging this amazing, most expensive resource well, that's a crime, that's a crime. And so in some ways you've got to think about yourself. Am I, as the founder, is this 10% team or 8% team being leveraged? Are they solving the right problems? Do they know how to brainstorm? Do they know how to solve problems? Do I have the bandwidth to sit with them and present the right problems, talk to customers, figure out the right sequencing, the right prioritization of problems to work on, et cetera? And if you're not able to do that, you've got to have someone who can do that full time. And it might be someone from the team. I mean, there are two. We can talk about how to hire your first PM. And there are many, many. Yeah, let's do it. I definitely wanted to ask that. I know you wrote a great post about this, just how to actually hire your great PM. And you have a strong opinion about that. I have a strong opinion.…

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