Building product discipline: a crucial leap

You’re shipping fast. Customers are interested. Your engineers are sprinting to keep up with a growing list of priorities. Things are happening and all at once.

Then someone asks the question: “Should we hire a PM?”

This is a big moment. One of those quiet milestones that rarely gets celebrated but often determines whether your startup can continue to grow with clarity or spirals into chaos. Bringing in product discipline isn’t just about hiring someone to manage the backlog. It’s about choosing to build structure, focus, and strategic intent into how your company makes decisions.

Let’s try and help you get this right.

What product is actually for

In the earliest days, product decisions are usually made by the founder. That makes sense. No one understands the customer, the vision, or the trade-offs quite like the founder does, at least initially. But as the team grows and complexity expands, those decisions start slipping through the cracks. You need someone who can hold the centre.

As Jono Hey, one of our Product mentors, points out:

In the early days, the founder, usually the CEO, has the product vision, customer knowledge, and a developed instinct to run the product. But before long, they'll have too many demands on their time with everything else needed to run the business (sales, fundraising, operations, hiring, premises, finance...) that they'll become the bottleneck or start to do a bad job.

A strong product function connects insights from customers, data, and the broader market, shaping what the company builds next. It translates the user’s voice into business outcomes, brings engineering focus, and ensures the roadmap reflects both what’s urgent and what’s important. Crucially, product is not just project management. It’s strategic. Its job is to ask the hard questions, spot patterns, and say no when needed.

Jono elaborates:

Founders bring deep product insight and customer understanding—but delivering software at scale is a different discipline. A strong product manager complements the founder by turning that vision into consistent execution.

Hiring your first PM: what to look for

Bringing in your first product manager isn’t just ticking an org-chart box; it’s about extending your judgment. You should look for someone who thrives in ambiguity, communicates relentlessly, and can make decisions with incomplete information. Be wary of those who’ve only operated at scale; they may struggle in scrappy startup environments.

We recommend a practical test: have a candidate shadow you for a week. Let them sit in roadmap sessions, join user calls, and try scoping a feature. See how they think. If they make you feel like you’ve got a second brain, chances are you’ve found your person.

In Jono’s words:

A new PM needs to speak to customers as soon as possible. Founders have immersed themselves in the space, maybe for years. A PM must build empathy as soon as possible to understand both what the founders think and to know the customers as well, or better, than they do.

Setting them up to succeed

Hiring is just the start. Supporting a product function means reshaping decision-making. Give them time with you, access to customers and data, and clarity on what they own, including things like roadmaps, feature decisions, customer feedback loops. And be sure not to step away. You should focus effort on mentoring the team, unblocking them and guiding them. You could become a blocker and you’ll be pulled in. a lot of different directions so be sure to be a collaborative one.

Mistakes happen when product becomes delivery-only, gets hired too late, or is burdened with undefined strategy ownership. Product managers aren’t just project managers, they operationalise vision - they don’t necessarily invent the vision, but they iterate it and become a key sounding board for founders and other teams as they hone the product vision.

Jono reminds us:

Hiring a PM to focus on product is not a sign of weakness from a founder. While a founder may want to focus on the product - and might be really good at it - the reality is there's so much else that's needed from founders that a dedicated PM will help the company achieve more. Hiring a PM enables founders to deliver on their vision at scale.

The Payoff

When product discipline clicks, everything becomes intentional. Alignment improves, decision-making accelerates, customers feel heard, and you stop being the bottleneck. You’re not just scaling execution; you’re scaling judgment. Do it deliberately, and well.