When Should You Hire Your First PM?

I'm often asked by early-stage founders:

When should I hire my first PM?

The short answer:

As late as possible.

I didn’t get it right the first time either.

And I’ve seen many teams make the same mistake: hiring a PM too early — and slowing themselves down right when speed matters most.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

Resilience isn’t built by delegating too early. It’s built by staying close to the real problems.

Until Product-Market Fit, the Founder Is the PM

In the early days, product management isn't a job you hand off.

It’s an obsession you have to live.

You need the tightest possible feedback loop between customer conversations, product decisions, and what gets shipped.

Hours — not weeks.

Real conversations — not filtered reports.

If you introduce a PM too early, you create distance.

You slow the feedback cycle that’s supposed to be brutal, painful, and fast.

And when you're searching for product-market fit, distance is death.

Finding product-market fit isn't a process you manage.

It's something you survive.

Hiring Too Early Creates Distance You Can't Afford

Hiring a PM before you find product-market fit is like hiring a VP Sales before closing your first few deals.

It almost never works.

You can't outsource the parts of your company you haven’t proven yet.

You have to carry them yourself — feel them, learn from them, bleed through them.

It’s only once you truly understand your customers, your edge, and your gaps that you can even think about scaling product leadership through someone else.

Speed of learning — not structure — is what finds product-market fit.

Paradoxically, the Best Teams Hire PMs Late

The best product teams don't hire PMs early.

Not because product management doesn’t happen — but because it happens everywhere.

• Founders obsessed with customer problems.
• Engineers thinking beyond code, into real user value.
• Designers who don’t just build screens, but fight for clarity.

When product management is a shared mindset, not a siloed role, the whole team moves faster and learns faster.

Hiring a PM too early often signals the wrong thing:

That product thinking is isolated.

That customer empathy belongs to "someone else’s job."

But product management isn’t reserved for product managers.

It’s a skill every early team member — especially founders — needs to master.

Just like you need to learn how to sell before you hire your first VP Sales,

you need to learn how to find product truth before you hire your first PM.

Product management is not a title. It’s a survival skill.

The Most Important Skill: Product Sense

If you're a founder trying to cover product management early on,

you don't need to master Jira boards, PRDs, or process diagrams.

You need to build product sense.

Product sense comes from one thing:

talking to customers and deeply feeling their pain.

It’s about capturing the real struggles, quotes, and moments of frustration —

and turning them into inspiration for your team.

• Record conversations.
• Capture quotes.
• Clip video snippets of real user pain.

Then aggregate those signals into clear problems or feature opportunities.

Show your team why what they’re building matters — not just what to build.

That’s what engineers and designers really need:

Context. Empathy. Purpose.

Before you ever think about hiring a PM,

get in the habit of letting customer voices lead your product thinking.

If there's only one thing to do right when you start building, it's this.

(And honestly, if there's one thing to keep doing as you scale, it's still this.)

Product management starts with product sense.Product sense starts with listening.

So When Should You Actually Hire Your First PM?

When you’re overwhelmed by scale — not by uncertainty.

You should hire your first PM when:

• You know what customers want.
• You have more customer needs than you can personally handle.
• You need help prioritizing, structuring, and maintaining quality across a growing team.

That's when a great PM doesn’t slow you down — they multiply you.

Finding product-market fit is a founder’s job.Scaling it is a PM’s job.They happen at different moments — and mistaking them can cost you years.

Closing thought

At Cycle, we believe that keeping teams close to customer feedback is what keeps them close to truth.

That’s why we built Cycle: to keep the feedback loop alive, fast, and meaningful — even as teams grow.

Speed of learning wins.

Always has. Always will.