Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, a playbook for hiring leaders, getting ahead in you career, how to get started angel investing, more
with Gokul Rajaram · Jun 2022
While good engineers are important, the leverage of a good PM is disproportionately higher. One bad product manager can create cascading errors across an entire engineering team, making PM hiring and development one of the highest-leverage decisions a founder makes.
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How to get into product management
Jun 2019Product managers hold disproportionate influence over key decisions yet lack direct authority over their teams. Success requires building trust, making decisive calls, and helping everyone do their best work—not through command, but through influence and credibility.
How to get into product management
Jun 2019Teams look to the PM to help reach decisions. The PM's job isn't to make every decision, but to ensure a decision gets made—whether by themselves, their team, or stakeholders. Indecision is the real enemy.
Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, a playbook for hiring leaders, getting ahead in you career, how to get started angel investing, more
Jun 2022The first PM should be an engineer, designer, or analyst already at the company. They understand the founder and team dynamics, are trusted by both, and can assimilate culturally. External PMs with different processes often get rejected by the organization.
What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Business
Jun 2019As you move up in leadership, the most critical product to get right is how you organize people. Structure determines whether teams move autonomously toward goals or get trapped in dependencies. Org design is either a force multiplier or a hidden tax on everything you build.
How to get into product management
Jun 2019A PM who is good at nothing else but execution is valuable to a team, while a team with a PM that can't execute is better off without that PM. Shipping beats strategy when forced to choose.
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