Why you should hire an ex-founder for your next PM
Ex-founders make the best Product Managers.? For recruiters, here 4 reasons why you should hire an ex-founder for your next open PM role.?
You won’t have to convince them to take on more ownership.? If you get them excited about the problem you are solving and give them a reason to get personally invested in the vision of the product, they will treat the product and the business like their own if you give them the freedom to do so.
2. Growth is in our DNA.
Ex-founders come with the growth mindset you are looking for.? If we weren’t growing the company as a Founder it meant the business was dying. They are constantly looking for ways to move the needle.?
3. Ex-Founder can lead a dev team.
Most founders are at least somewhat technical if not really technical.? Find yourself an Ex-founder who has recruited their own dev team.? Most of them have recruited some of the most talented developers in the world and have done it without offering market rate salary or big bonuses. Ask them how they did it to find out.?
4. Ex-Founders communicate cross-functionally.
They owned the business.? They’ve communicated and managed every team in the company at a high level at the least.? They’ve managed shareholders, investors, PR, marketing, legal, strategy, partnerships, ops, QA, InfoSec and so much more.? Great founders can communicate with the janitor (sometimes we are the janitor) and an engineer in the same breath while pitching an investor in 90 seconds on the way to the airport.? You want this type of person in your PM role.?
Ex-founders, and former tech entrepreneurs, this is why you would make a great PM if you didn’t already know already, here is 4 reasons why.
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Not all founders take their company public or get acquired by Google for billions. Product Managers get paid well.? No MBA or CS degree required. I’ve literally met PMs with a degree in German History.?
2. Your skills translate.
Even if you weren’t the technical founder or the CEO, you were probably heavily involved with the product without realizing it.? Did you contribute to what the future of the company would look like?? In PM talk this is roadmap planning.?
3. You don’t have to fundraise.
Imagine being able to build the product without ever having to worry about raising money.? That is what most PMs at large tech companies do.? You will have to pitch internally for resources eg convince the engineering lead to give you an extra 3 devs to hit a launch deadline, but this is nothing compared to pitching for hundreds of millions and if you don’t get it the company dies and you have to lay off the people you worked so hard to hire.? The stakes aren’t as high.?
4. You get to focus on product.
No more being the janitor.? No more paying company taxes or running payroll.? You get to spend 100% of your time building and growing products that ideally solve big problems that impact millions if not billions of lives. You still get to create, design, be a visionary, talk to customers and actually make a difference.? Which at least for me, is why I founded companies in the first place.??
If you are an ex-founder looking to make the switch into product management or have already made the switch.? I’m starting a group for us to share resources, data, and fight the wave of layoffs. If you’re interested DM me.