Having been through the hypergrowth phase a few times, a crucial trend has stuck out that I thought was worth calling out explicitly: the move from generalists to specialists. This is an attempt to outline how I believe most companies pursue product managers through their growth.
Seed / Series A – No Product managers needed
In the Seed / Series A stage, the founder(s) is/are the product manager(s). They have a say in all aspects of the product, define the strategy (even if it’s fairly short term to reach the next round) and the focus of the team is highly dependent on the founder’s vision.
At this point in the growth of the company, the team is small, nimble, scrappy, and in get shit done mode – there’s no time for verticals, distinguishing between product lines, or ramp up / learning for people who are specialized to become more generalists. If there is a Product Manager (towards the end of the Series A stage), it’s going to be a Head of Product (HoP) or Chief Product Officer (CPO) that operates highly tactically, getting into the implementation and driving the product forward.
Series B – Senior Generalists
As a company grows to Series B, the product team will have its first CPO / HoP and begin to make its first few hires. The key aspect of these first few hires are their ability to straddle many different things at once, but with tangentially related domains.
For example, in the realm of Fintech – Compliance, it could be argued, dictates a lot of what is acceptable in an onboarding/sign up flow including the Know Your Customer (KYC) process. Someone who is hired to work on sign up, might also take on KYC, then they might also take on compliance tasks and issues and, on top of that, take on implementing compliance-related aspects of products or features across the platform. In a later stage company, each of the items I laid out above, it can (and in many cases, should) be a team of people.
The other crucial aspect is not just someone’s ability to be a generalist, but also their ability to begin establishing the culture of product management. This is where more senior hires are crucial. Having been through similar hypergrowth experiences and/or high intensity experiences, they should have both the experience and foresight to establish 1) infrastructure for scale 2) team culture and practices 3) teams for future growth
Series C – Explore specialization
As the company continues to grow, generalists who previously covered multiple topics slowly start to split their tasks and responsibilities. The path becomes clear to hire specialists e.g., sign up specialists who understand the fundamentals of A/B testing and data analysis on various parts of the flow.
Within the Series B stage, the goal of the generalists were to ship the highest impact, highest visibility products/features that allow the company to grow quickly that seem to be part of the platform of the company, but moving into the Series C stage, the products need to be maintained, iterated upon, and improved where a generalist managing multiple products/features has neither the time nor depth to fully push for those iterations and improvements.
One major caveat: hiring specialists does not mean hiring people who have experience in one particular field – it means hiring people who could be placed in more specialized roles and handle the work required to do so. For example, if I was building a team, I might hire generalists to “build a bench” as a friend of mine says and supplement the work being done by the more senior / established team members from the series B round of the company.
Series D and onwards – Specialization and hiring juniors
Within Series D, the company should be well-versed in the products supported, the infrastructure may be undergoing some major changes, but the functionality required to support crucial and supplementary products/features is largely stable and actively iterated upon. As the team grows and leads are brought up/hired in different areas, product managers can start to focus in on even more specific areas of the company.
For example, in the payments world, specialization could be those who understand debit card transactions and their various combinations exceptionally well, but may not have a grasp on ACH transactions. Importantly, that specialist on debit card transactions can understand what it might mean to allow certain transaction sizes from an anti-money laundering perspective, how to detect trends in spending, and potentially how to optimize revenue generation from interchange. This specialization can have massive benefits, helping to uncover areas of opportunity not previously explored.
Along with the growth of the team and hiring specialized PMs, the company can start to bring on more junior product managers both in the form of “analysts” and interns. The guidance from more senior team members who have a thorough handle of the subject matter allows the team(s) to effectively guide and mentor team members who are new to product management and/or have very limited experience in their respective domain. This step of hiring more junior team members only really comes around when the team has matured for 2 main reasons. The first being the team doesn’t have the capacity to effectively coach and mentor the new PMs and the second is the space for the more junior member to take responsible for a meaningful-enough chunk of the product.
In conclusion, the growth of the product management team seems to represent triangles where PMs start broad and hyper general and, slowly, but surely, the specialization takes place to the most specific aspects where a more junior team member can take the reigns of more specific aspects of the products. This specialization matches the evolution of a company through its Seed through Series D and beyond where the company itself is nailing down the specifics and specializations of its various products and features.
Amaan Lakhani 