Eeke de Milliano: evaluation

Transcript context

…Okay. But yeah, no, it was late in the game. And actually, maybe just to pattern match. Retool also didn't really have PMs for a while. And I think actually both in the Stripe case and the Retool case, the thing that both of these companies have in common is, you're building for developers. The people who are building the product are the customers in a lot of ways. So, they get it. There's really no reason why you should have, in some ways, a middle man trying to figure out, "Hey, who's the customer, and what is it that they need?" And what are their pain points?" And I think the moment at which it became clear, "We really do need PMs at Stripe." And I think we felt the same way at Retool is, your customer base starts expanding. You start having different kinds of customers. You need to understand the whole market, all of the ICPs that you're going after. And the organization gets more complex. I think Stripe... Gosh, in particular, it's just an extremely matrixed organization in business. Because every time you launch a product, you're having to think about, "Well, how do we do this in other countries? There's different financial infrastructure. How do we think about the legal side, the compliance side, et cetera?" And I think PMs can really kind of bring that whole story together and make the whole machine move. In addition to understanding the customers, and the value prop, and what the overall strategy was. That's a really good reminder of, engineers and designers can do the work of a PM, but often they don't want to. There's a lot of non-fun parts to it. They're like, "Oh, I wish we could have someone here do these things." And PMs enjoy that work. They're good at it. And so, eventually engineers and designers realize, "Okay, I see why maybe we should hire a PM."…

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