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Let me start with something that might save you some time: not every startup needs a product manager in year one.
I know that’s not the usual advice.
The usual advice is to hire a PM as soon as you have product-market fit, or when your roadmap gets complicated, or when the founder can no longer keep everything in their head.
All of that can be true. But what often gets skipped is the harder question: what kind of product manager, and what does your company actually look like when they arrive?
Getting this hire wrong is one of the most expensive mistakes a founder can make – not just financially, but in terms of momentum, culture, and the time you’ll spend untangling the consequences.
Founding PM vs. Scale-up PM – They Are Not the Same Person
This is the distinction I spend most time on with founders who are thinking about their first PM hire, and it’s the one that gets skipped most often.
A Founding Product Manager is operating in the ‘zero to one’ environment.
There’s no established process. The roadmap is a living document that changes with every customer conversation. They need to be comfortable with that chaos – not just tolerant of it, genuinely energised by it. They’re part researcher, part strategist, part collaborator, and they have to build the function from scratch while also delivering.
A Scale-up Product Manager is a different animal entirely.
They’re arriving into something that already exists and needs to be grown, structured, and made more predictable. They’re excellent at optimisation, governance, and working within a system. Put them into a pre-product-market-fit environment and you’ll watch them struggle – not because they lack ability, but because it’s the wrong environment for their strengths.
Before you write a job spec, get clear on which one you actually need.
What to Look for That a Job Spec Won’t Tell You
The checklist approach to hiring a PM – years of experience, specific tools, sector knowledge – misses the thing that actually makes someone successful in the role.
Here’s what I’d rather assess:
Product sense
Can this person walk into a conversation with a customer and quickly identify what the real problem is? Not the stated problem – the real one.
This is a hard skill to assess from a CV and easy to probe in a conversation. Ask them about a product decision they made that they later changed their mind about, and why.
Communication across functions
A PM’s job is essentially to be understood by everyone and to translate between engineering, commercial, and leadership.
Ask them how they handle a situation where the engineering team thinks a commercial request is unrealistic. The answer will tell you a lot.
Intellectual curiosity
The best PMs I’ve ever placed are the ones who are genuinely interested in problems. Not just product problems – they read widely, ask good questions, and notice things other people miss.
You can’t train this in. You spot it in the way someone talks.
Fractional PM vs. Permanent – Which Is Right for You?
For some founders, a fractional product manager is the right starting point. If you’re pre-Series A, building fast, and not yet certain of the exact shape of the role, bringing in a senior fractional PM on a defined scope can give you the function without the commitment.
The trade-off is depth of ownership. A fractional PM will bring structure and experience, but they won’t be embedded in the way a permanent hire will. For roles where you need someone building culture and relationships across the team day-to-day, permanent is usually the right call.
If you’re genuinely unsure which model fits your situation, that’s worth having a proper conversation about before you start a search.
The First 90 Days Matter More Than the Hire Decision
Even when the hire is right, the first 90 days can unravel it if the onboarding is poor.
Be clear from day one about what success looks like in the first three months. Not ‘get up to speed’ – that’s not a target. Specific outcomes: what should they have shipped, built, assessed, or changed by the end of month three?
And give them access to the information they need. Customer feedback, previous roadmap thinking, context on why certain decisions were made. A good PM will absorb it and use it. A poor one won’t know what to do with it. That difference becomes visible fast.
If you’re hiring for this role and want a second perspective on your brief, a Hiring Health Check is a good starting point. We’ll look at whether the role is defined clearly enough to recruit well, and what the process should look like.
Get a free Hiring Health Check
AUTHOR BIO
Helen Wingrove-Sanders has 27 years of recruitment experience and is the founder of HFBAC. She works with bootstrapped and founder-led UK businesses using her Chemistry First methodology – the belief that the right hire isn’t the best CV in the pile, it’s the right person for this team, at this stage. Find her at hfbac.com.
