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Your First Product Manager: The Hire Everyone Argues About and Nobody Times Right

When should a startup hire its first product manager?

Stripe waited until employee 200. Snapchat's Evan Spiegel was famously "indignant" about never hiring PMs -- and then eventually did. Linear built their entire product without one. Meanwhile, Wiz hired a PM as one of their first ten employees, before they even knew what they were building.

There is no consensus. But there is a pattern that most people miss: the question is not "when do you hire a PM?" It is "what problem are you actually solving when you do?"

Your startup is growing. Engineers are making product decisions, the founder is stretched thin, and customer feedback is piling up. When do you hire your first product manager -- and what kind of PM should they be? The answer varies wildly depending on who you ask, ranging from "as early as possible" to "as late as possible" -- and both camps have billion-dollar companies to point to as evidence. The disagreement is not about whether PMs are valuable. It is about what kind of value the first PM should create, and when that value exceeds the cost of adding another person to the communication graph.

The 4 Positions

1 / 4

Wait as long as possible -- build product-minded engineers instead

David Singleton (CTO · Stripe) · Karri Saarinen (Co-founder · Linear)

Advocates: David Singleton (CTO, Stripe), Karri Saarinen (Co-founder, Linear)

Stripe's decision to delay the PM hire until around 200 employees was not a failure of planning. It was a deliberate strategy to build a culture where engineers deeply understood customers and owned product decisions.

"Stripe is kind of famous slash infamous for waiting a long time to hire your first product manager. From what I understand, it was like around the 200th employee and maybe five years in, which to me tells me that you're really good at building product minded engineers."
Lenny Rachitsky
▶ 00:16:40

Linear followed a similar path. When the founding team has strong product intuition and the team is small enough for direct coordination, adding a PM creates overhead without adding insight.

"There's other companies like Stripe I think waited until 200 employees to hire I think their first product manager. Snapchat I think is famous for something around that."
Lenny Rachitsky
▶ 00:23:47

The logic: every person between an engineer and a customer adds latency. If your engineers can talk directly to customers, interpret feedback, and make product tradeoffs, you move faster without a PM. The PM hire is not a milestone of maturity -- it is an admission that coordination costs have exceeded what informal processes can handle.

The hidden benefit of delaying PM hiring is cultural. When engineers are forced to understand customers, they develop product intuition that persists even after PMs are eventually hired. Stripe's engineering culture is famously product-oriented precisely because engineers spent years doing the work that other companies outsource to PMs. This creates a compound advantage: even when Stripe eventually hired PMs, those PMs joined an engineering team that could evaluate product decisions independently, raising the quality bar for everyone.

When This Applies

Founder has strong product sense, engineering culture is customer-oriented, team is small enough for informal coordination (Stripe, Linear model)

Hire multidisciplinary makers, not traditional PMs -- but accept PMs become necessary

Josh Miller (CEO · The Browser Company)

Advocates: Josh Miller (CEO, The Browser Company)

The Browser Company's position is the most nuanced in this debate. They do not reject PMs ideologically. They reject narrow PMs -- people who view their job as writing specs and managing backlogs rather than making things.

"It's not that we don't hire PMs, but we want to hire people who have a multidisciplinary approach and view things as, 'I like to make things. Tell me how I contribute to making it.'"
Josh Milleron Lenny's Podcast (Browser Company's philosophy on PMs)

But Miller is also honest about what happens at scale. Leaders he respects, who swore they would never hire PMs, eventually did.

"I know from my own experience with people that I respect from a product perspective that were indignant, they would never hire PMs, their organizations now have PMs. And that's probably for a really good reason."
Josh Miller
▶ 00:55:37

The implication: resist the PM hire for as long as you can maintain quality, but do not turn resistance into ideology. When coordination becomes your bottleneck, hire.

When This Applies

Founders are technical, product direction is unclear, someone needs to systematize customer discovery (Wiz model)

The anti-PM trend is a reaction to bad PMs, not the PM role itself

Christian Idiodi (Partner · SVPG)

Advocates: Christian Idiodi (Partner, SVPG)

This is the counterargument that the "no PM" camp needs to reckon with. The trend of founders resisting PMs is real -- but it is driven by exposure to bad product management, not by the role being unnecessary.

"It feels like there's this trend of people just not liking product managers. There's a trend of founders feeling like they should wait a long time to hire their first product manager. There's a lot of teams that wish they didn't have a product manager in their team."
Lenny Rachitskyon Lenny's Podcast (framing the anti-PM trend for Christian Idiodi)

When done right, PMs are connective tissue. They synthesize customer insight, align stakeholders, and free engineers to focus on building. The problem is that most PMs are not doing this -- they are doing project management, feature factory coordination, or political navigation. The solution is not to eliminate the role but to hire the right person and coach them properly.

Idiodi's framing cuts through the romanticism on both sides. The "we don't need PMs" camp is often reacting to specific bad PMs they have worked with -- the ones who added process without adding insight, who scheduled meetings instead of making decisions, who acted as middlemen rather than multipliers. The "you always need PMs" camp is often defending the role in its ideal form without acknowledging how rarely that ideal is achieved. The truth is in the gap: PMs are valuable when they do the job well, and the job done well looks nothing like what most PMs actually do day-to-day.

When This Applies

Multiple teams are building in parallel, priorities conflict, engineers are spending more time in meetings than building

The first PM should be a discovery machine embedded with customers

Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy · Wiz)

Advocates: Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy, Wiz)

Wiz took the opposite approach from Stripe. They hired a PM as one of their first ten employees, before the product even existed. But the role was radically different from a traditional PM.

"I was hired as the first product manager. I sat in on those calls. I still did not exactly understand what we were going to build, which was confusing, because I was a product manager."
Raaz Herzberg
▶ 00:07:01

At Wiz, the first PM's job was not to write PRDs or manage sprints. It was to sit in every customer call, synthesize patterns, and translate raw market signal into product direction. This is fundamentally a discovery role, not a delivery role. If your founding team needs help understanding the market more than they need help shipping code, the PM hire should come early.

Herzberg's experience also highlights a reality that most first-PM job descriptions ignore: the first PM at a startup is confused for a long time. The product does not exist yet. The customers are uncertain about what they need. The founders are still iterating on the vision. A first PM who needs clear direction and established processes will fail. The first PM must be comfortable with ambiguity, capable of synthesizing conflicting signals, and willing to influence without authority. This is a fundamentally different profile from the experienced PM who has spent a decade at established companies managing feature roadmaps.

When This Applies

In any scenario, the first PM should be a maker or discovery person, not a process person. The PM who adds the most value early is the one who reduces ambiguity, not the one who adds structure

Evidence from the Archive

The Browser Company

The Browser Company tracks one metric (D5/D7) rather than building elaborate PM-driven metric frameworks

Rebecca at The Browser Company: PhD from MIT in behavioral psychology, former software engineer at Stripe, now effectively PMing the multiplayer team -- came through a maker path, not a PM path

Josh Miller · CEO ▶ 00:52:58

SVPG

SVPG's four-risk framework (value, usability, feasibility, viability) as the structural definition of what PMs own

The 'Bob' example: a hypothetical PM who is trusted because he has deep business knowledge, not because of his title -- illustrating competence-based trust

Christian Idiodi · Partner ▶ 00:04:59

Wiz

10-15 customer meetings per day as the first PM's core activity -- pure discovery at scale

Wiz (originally 'Beyond Networks') pivoted from network security to cloud security after Herzberg questioned what they were building

Raaz Herzberg · CMO and VP Product Strategy ▶ 00:07:01

Stripe

Stripe waited approximately until its 200th employee (Singleton says slightly earlier) and five years in to hire its...

Stripe waited approximately until its 200th employee (Singleton says slightly earlier) and five years in to hire its first PM

David Singleton · CTO ▶ 00:17:06

Linear

Linear at ~50 employees with just one PM serving as head of product

No durable cross-functional teams: teams assemble around a project and disperse once it's done

Karri Saarinen · Co-founder and CEO ▶ 00:21:32

The Synthesis

The debate is not really about timing. It is about what you are hiring for. Companies that delay PM hiring successfully (Stripe, Linear, Snapchat) have founding teams with exceptional product sense who can do customer discovery themselves. Companies that hire early successfully (Wiz) have founding teams that need a dedicated person to systematize customer insight.

Founding Team Capability

What actually determines when to hire your first PM?

Process PM Anti-Pattern

Which PM hire fuels the anti-PM backlash?

Emergent PM Function

Does the PM function need to arrive fully formed?

The debate is not about timing -- it is about what you are hiring for. Companies that delay successfully have founding teams with exceptional product sense. Companies that hire early have founders who need a dedicated person to systematize customer insight.

If your founders have strong product intuition and the team is under 30, delay the PM hire and invest in product-minded engineers. If your founders need someone to own the customer-to-product translation loop, hire a discovery-oriented PM early. Never hire a PM whose primary skill is process management.

The PM function can emerge organically: from informal founder-led conversations, to structured strategy cadences, to a formal PM organization. Ramp built to $100M ARR with very few PMs by empowering engineers to own decisions. The key was PM-like thinking distributed across the team.

Which Approach Fits You?

Answer 3 questions about your situation. We'll match you to the right approach.

Question 1

Does your founder have strong product sense?

Question 2

How large is your team?

Question 3

What type of PM would add the most value?

Notable Absences

The Bottom Line

The AI era adds another dimension. As tools like Cursor and Claude Code allow PMs to build prototypes and engineers to conduct user research, the boundaries between PM work and engineering work are blurring. The first PM of the future may look less like a traditional PM and more like a "product generalist" -- someone who can talk to customers, build prototypes, analyze data, and coordinate teams. The title matters less than the capability set.

There is also a third path that few companies discuss: evolving the PM role as the company grows. As Coda demonstrated, the PM function can start as informal founder-led conversations, evolve into structured strategy cadences, and eventually become a formal PM organization -- all without a single dramatic hiring decision. The PM function does not need to arrive fully formed. It can emerge organically from the needs of the team. Ramp built to $100M ARR with very few PMs by empowering engineers to own decisions. The key was not "no PMs" but "PM-like thinking distributed across the team."

Sources

David Singleton — "Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe)" — Lenny's Podcast, May 4, 2023
Josh Miller — "Competing with giants: An inside look at how The Browser Company builds product | Josh Miller (CEO)" — Lenny's Podcast, March 19, 2023
Karri Saarinen — "Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO)" — Lenny's Podcast, October 8, 2023
Christian Idiodi — "The essence of product management | Christian Idiodi (SVPG)" — Lenny's Podcast, December 21, 2023
Raaz Herzberg — "Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy)" — Lenny's Podcast, November 17, 2024