Product Managers in Startups: What’s their Role?

Re:Product Managers in Startups: What’s their Role? by tptacek on Thursday October 15, 2009 @02:03PM (#883888)

If your startup is all tech people and at least one of you can't do the PM role, you're boned. If you're the archetypical one-tech one-biz startup, and the biz person's full-time role doesn't knock out all the PM objectives, you're boned. If you have to hire a third person to be the PM, you're doing something wrong. In most cases, if the person doing the PM role for you tells you he can't do anything else because the PM role takes too much time, you're probably getting rolled. Unless he's spending all his time traveling to customers.

The job of the PM (and my partner Dave will laugh at me for saying this) is to get prospects on the phone and find out what they want from the product. For straight-to-consumer products, finding the right people to get on the phone is part of the challenge of the job.

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Re:Product Managers in Startups: What’s their Role? by alabut on Thursday October 15, 2009 @07:27PM (#884458)

"In most cases, if the person doing the PM role for you tells you he can't do anything else because the PM role takes too much time, you're probably getting rolled."

Ugh, I've experienced this and it's terrible. It's not just that they're a waste of resources, they often end up creating busywork for themselves that draws in others and wastes their time.

I'm not against PMs, I'm against having certain roles purely as a security blanket. It happens to designers like me too - just this week I tried talking a startup into offering a contract gig instead of a fulltime perm position because I'm still not sure if there's enough meat on the bone long term.

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