robertfred777
New member
Hey GH, long-time lurker here.
I was hoping to get some guidance from the community about a potential PM hire for the company vs. our team and how to structure things in general. I'm the Director of Growth at a recently Series A funded startup, and we have 10 engineers, 2 growth marketing ppl, and 1 UI/UX designer (soon 2).
I manage the designer, and pretty much handle most/all of the product workflow as it relates to growth (our onboarding process and other user-facing items). Another major portion of our business is the Operations team. They have a robust salesforce-like CRM system that's been built by our eng team.
The user-facing growth products and internal ops products are pretty much the major products as it relates to our business.
So my question...our CEO wants to hire a Sr. PM (we definitely need a PM or 2 w/ no currently dedicated PMs in the company and 10 engineers). He wants him to exist on an island and report into him, allowing this person to build out a third-party product team that controls all aspect of the product roadmap.
My concern is that we should instead hire PMs under the respective heads of the teams (Growth PM, Ops PM) and divide engineering resources in a way that allows each PM/team to have a pool of resources that can be relied upon. Otherwise, I see major issues with politics getting in the way of execution. What if we want to make tweaks to the onboarding funnel/run experiments/overhaul certain aspects of the user dashboard? Do I have to negotiate with the independent PM about getting my requests on the roadmap? Btw I can't see a scenario where this person will have the time to look at all of the analysis that we're looking at on the growth side to determine priority of projects appropriately.
I dunno, overall just concerned with the politics of the whole situation. Think it's better to start hiring PMs on the respective teams, and if things need to get rolled up later, then so be it.
Any thoughts or help would be much appreciated! I'm new to the management-side of growth.
I was hoping to get some guidance from the community about a potential PM hire for the company vs. our team and how to structure things in general. I'm the Director of Growth at a recently Series A funded startup, and we have 10 engineers, 2 growth marketing ppl, and 1 UI/UX designer (soon 2).
I manage the designer, and pretty much handle most/all of the product workflow as it relates to growth (our onboarding process and other user-facing items). Another major portion of our business is the Operations team. They have a robust salesforce-like CRM system that's been built by our eng team.
The user-facing growth products and internal ops products are pretty much the major products as it relates to our business.
So my question...our CEO wants to hire a Sr. PM (we definitely need a PM or 2 w/ no currently dedicated PMs in the company and 10 engineers). He wants him to exist on an island and report into him, allowing this person to build out a third-party product team that controls all aspect of the product roadmap.
My concern is that we should instead hire PMs under the respective heads of the teams (Growth PM, Ops PM) and divide engineering resources in a way that allows each PM/team to have a pool of resources that can be relied upon. Otherwise, I see major issues with politics getting in the way of execution. What if we want to make tweaks to the onboarding funnel/run experiments/overhaul certain aspects of the user dashboard? Do I have to negotiate with the independent PM about getting my requests on the roadmap? Btw I can't see a scenario where this person will have the time to look at all of the analysis that we're looking at on the growth side to determine priority of projects appropriately.
I dunno, overall just concerned with the politics of the whole situation. Think it's better to start hiring PMs on the respective teams, and if things need to get rolled up later, then so be it.
Any thoughts or help would be much appreciated! I'm new to the management-side of growth.