They eventually hired a PM to lead their initial monetization efforts.Ĭompanies that hired a PM early, like Ramp and Snyk, did so because they didn’t have the skills or time to do the product job well, and they knew their product would make or break the business. Snap hired designers who took on the PM duties, which, from what I hear, ended up being fairly chaotic. Stripe was building an engineering-oriented product and hired top-tier product-minded engineers, so they didn’t have a strong need for PMs. Notion spent much of that time (about three years) looking for product-market fit. With its powerful database functionality, extensive range of templates and document management features, Coda is one of the top alternatives to Notion currently available. Stripe, Figma, Notion) did great.Ĭompanies that waited a long time to hire their PM had different reasons to wait:

Snyk, Ramp, Slack ), and companies that waited a long time (e.g. Companies that hired a PM early did great (e.g. In terms of timing, there’s no one way to do it. Coda and Snyk (who both had PM founders) hired their PM essentially as their first employee, and Slack (with Stewart Butterfield ) just over a year in. Interestingly, many companies with a strong product founder hired a PM very early. Surprisingly, almost a fourth were engineers. Very few were previously former directors, VPs, or heads of product. Notion and Coda have developed over the years more and more into database tools (similar to the likes of Airtable), evolving outside of the documentation. Most first PMs were previously individual-contributor product managers, or senior PMs. Though others, like Stripe, were happy they wanted so long. No founder told me they regretted bringing on a PM, but some companies, including Notion, shared that they regretted waiting so long. Surprisingly, more than half of companies hired their first PM before finding product-market fit, which is counter to the advice you hear. But the ranges are wide, so don’t use this as a hard-and-fast rule. They typically had 10 to 15 engineers and 15 to 25 total employees. The typical company waited two to three years to hire their first product manager. Everyone hires a product manager eventually.

Coda vs notion