How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square)
Rohini Pandey, a product leader at Mercury, discusses why founders often resist hiring PMs, Mercury's journey to building a product team, and how to successfully launch new product lines. She emphasizes investing in quality and user experience as a key differentiator.
Deep Dive Analysis
13 Topic Outline
Initial Resistance to Product Managers at Mercury
Signs It's Time to Hire Product Managers
Establishing a Product Team and Career Ladder
When to Avoid Hiring Product Managers Too Early
Pioneer, Settler, City Planner PM Types
Attracting and Hiring Great Product Managers
Investing in Product Quality and User Experience
Lessons from Going Multi-Product
Organizational Structure for New Product Lines
Customer Obsession in Product Development
De-risking and Pricing New Products
Transparent Collective: Supporting Underrepresented Founders
Lightning Round
5 Key Concepts
Pioneer PM
A product manager who excels at zero-to-one product development, capable of creating something entirely new from scratch in uncharted territory without existing infrastructure.
Town Settler PM
A product manager focused on growth-stage products, working to further expand and build out an existing product by adding foundational elements and conducting experiments.
City Planner PM
A product manager skilled in managing mature products, focusing on driving efficiencies at scale where their decisions immediately impact hundreds, thousands, or millions of customers.
S-Curve of Career Development
A framework describing career progression where the Y-axis represents ambiguity and the X-axis represents scale. Individuals typically start with low ambiguity/low scale projects and advance to handling multiple projects, then single ambiguous problems, and finally all ambiguous problems at scale.
Balanced Customer Obsession
An approach to product development that involves deeply understanding what customers are trying to do and their context, rather than just what they say, and triangulating these insights with business viability to create beloved and sustainable products.
10 Questions Answered
A company should hire product managers when founders can no longer handle all PM duties themselves, when engineering and design teams are taking on too much PM responsibility, or when the company is expanding into new product areas with different customer segments.
Bottlenecks start appearing where decisions depend solely on founders, complexity grows (e.g., in regulated industries requiring cross-functional collaboration), and core engineering/design work is being neglected due to PM duties.
It's crucial to define the discipline and expectations by creating a career ladder that outlines the role at different levels, incorporating company values and specific PM skills like building customer-loved products, driving business impact, long-term vision, and cross-functional collaboration.
Product managers can be categorized as Pioneers (zero-to-one, creating new products), Town Settlers (growth stage, building foundational elements and experimenting), or City Planners (mature products, driving efficiencies at scale).
Companies should understand a candidate's career stage (e.g., on the S-curve of ambiguity vs. scale), offer challenging problems that align with their next career step, and ensure a strong, collaborative peer group within design and engineering. Transparency and honesty about challenges and opportunities are also key.
Investing in quality, especially in 'boring' industries like fintech, builds trust and confidence with customers. Small, intentional improvements compound to create a competitive moat, attracts great talent, and endears customers, ultimately leading to long-term business success.
New product areas (seedlings) should be housed in completely separate organizational structures from core, mature products. This prevents the gravitational pull of mature products from siphoning resources and prioritization away from new, growing initiatives.
Go beyond just listening to what customers say; aim to understand what they want by observing their context and true needs without bias. Validate insights with prototypes and data, and always anchor customer desires back to business viability.
Look for adjacencies to existing products or customer segments, de-risk the idea by leveraging existing 'baby features' or traction, and assess if there's a distribution advantage (e.g., existing customer base) to reduce friction in achieving escape velocity.
Initially, consider offering new products for free to encourage usage, engagement, and retention, especially if they complement a free core offering. Once customers experience value and need more complexity, then introduce paid tiers, targeting customers who genuinely benefit from the advanced features.
34 Actionable Insights
1. Founders as First PMs
Founders should act as the primary Product Managers in the early stages of a company, taking on PM duties until they are physically unable to handle the scale and complexity, to stay close to customers and product development.
2. Hire PMs for Bottlenecks
Hire Product Managers when founders become bottlenecks for decision-making or cross-functional collaboration, or when core engineering and design teams are consistently performing PM duties, hindering their primary responsibilities. This is especially true when expanding into new product areas with different customer segments.
3. Define PM Role Early
Establish clear definitions for the Product Manager role, including a career ladder outlining expectations and skills at different levels, to ensure internal alignment and guide PMs on their responsibilities and growth.
4. Align Hiring to PMs
Revamp your hiring and interview processes to align with the defined PM career ladder and desired skills, ensuring you can identify candidates who possess the specific attributes valued by your organization.
5. Understand PM Archetypes
Understand the different archetypes of Product Managers (Pioneer for zero-to-one, Town Settler for growth, City Planner for mature products) and hire specifically for the type of PM needed for a given product’s stage of maturity.
6. Separate Org for New Products
When expanding to multiple products, create separate organizational structures for new “seedling” product areas, isolating them from the gravitational pull of mature products to allow them dedicated resources and space to grow without being deprioritized.
7. Treat New Products as Startups
Treat new product “seedlings” like small seed-stage companies, providing dedicated cross-functional teams and regularly evaluating their progress (quarterly/biannually) to decide on continued investment based on their path to success.
8. Adopt Agile for Seedling Teams
For zero-to-one “seedling” product teams, adopt agile methodologies like two-week sprints and weekly check-ins to remain nimble, learn, iterate, and adapt quickly, unlike the longer development cycles of mature products.
9. Cultivate Customer Call Culture
Foster a strong customer call culture, aiming for at least one customer conversation per week per team member, with more intensive discovery periods involving 20-25 calls, to deeply understand customer needs.
10. Research with Observer Mindset
When conducting customer research, approach conversations as a non-judgmental observer or documentarian, focusing on understanding what customers are trying to do and their context, rather than validating biases. Then, validate emerging patterns with prototypes and data.
11. Balance Customer & Business Needs
Balance customer obsession with business viability, ensuring that desired customer features and experiences align with the company’s ability to offer them profitably and sustainably. Triangulate customer needs with business goals.
12. De-risk New Product Ideas
When considering new products, prioritize those that are adjacent to existing offerings and have already shown some traction (de-risked by a “baby feature”), and where you have a clear distribution advantage with your current customer base.
13. Prioritize Usage Over Revenue
For new products, initially prioritize driving usage, engagement, and retention by offering them for free or with basic free functionality, allowing customers to experience value before introducing a paid offering for more complex features.
14. Build Loved Products First
Prioritize building products that customers genuinely love, as this focus on user value and experience will naturally lead to revenue generation as a byproduct.
15. Invest in Product Quality
Invest in high-quality user experience and craftsmanship, especially in “boring” industries, because precise and intentional details build customer trust and confidence, creating a compounding competitive advantage over time.
16. Quality as a Differentiator
Consider quality and user experience as a core strategic differentiator, especially in competitive or “unsexy” markets, to stand out and attract users who value a superior experience.
17. Quality Attracts Talent
Prioritizing quality and craftsmanship not only differentiates the product but also attracts top talent who are proud of their work and endears customers by making their lives easier and simpler.
18. Avoid Understaffing New Efforts
Avoid the common pitfall of trying to launch too many new products simultaneously, as this often leads to understaffing and insufficient resources, preventing any single “seedling” from receiving the care needed to grow.
19. Match Talent to Career S-Curve
Attract top PM talent by understanding where they are on their career “S-curve” (ambiguity vs. scale) and offering challenges that align with their desired next step, ensuring the problem area is meaty enough to foster their growth and impact.
20. Highlight Quality of Peers
Attract great talent by emphasizing the quality of their potential colleagues and peer groups, as top performers seek to work with and be challenged by other exceptional individuals.
21. Be Transparent with Candidates
Be transparent with candidates about the company’s challenges and opportunities, sharing the “good, the bad, and the ugly” to build trust and set realistic expectations, while still conveying excitement for the role.
22. Add Written Interview Component
Experiment with incorporating a written component into the PM interview process, as strong writing skills demonstrate a candidate’s ability to think deeply, articulate thoughts clearly, and align teams through documentation, especially for senior roles.
23. Test Passion with Generic Presentation
Include a generic presentation prompt in interviews, asking candidates to speak in depth about any topic they’re passionate about, to assess their attention to detail, craftsmanship, and ability to go deep into a subject.
24. Embrace “Well Stolen” Approach
When building new processes or frameworks (e.g., career ladders, interview processes), leverage existing work from other successful companies and consult with senior leaders, adapting “well-stolen” ideas to your specific context.
25. Support Underrepresented Founders
Support organizations like Transparent Collective (transparentcollective.com) that provide underrepresented founders with resources, connections, and fundraising preparation, helping them build successful tech companies and fostering a more inclusive ecosystem.
26. Invest in Product-Minded Founders
As an angel investor, prioritize founders who exhibit a “producty mindset,” demonstrating a deep understanding of problems and a thoughtful approach to solutions, even if they don’t have a traditional PM background.
27. Invest in Passionate Founders
As an investor, look for founders who exhibit deep passion and detail-orientedness for solving “unsexy” but impactful problems, especially those driven by a personal connection to making others’ lives better.
28. Adopt Adam Robinson’s Life Rules
Adopt Adam Robinson’s three guiding rules for life: connect with others, enthusiastically create fun and delight for others, and approach each moment expecting magic or miracles.
29. Don’t Finish Every Book
Give yourself permission to stop reading a book midway if it’s not engaging, which can make you more comfortable starting and trying new books without the pressure of completion.
30. Read “Inner Game of Tennis”
Read “The Inner Game of Tennis” to learn about achieving a “state of flow” and “relaxed concentration,” principles applicable to daily work and personal life beyond sports.
31. Read “Vectors” for Essays
Read “Vectors, aphorisms and 10 second essays” for short, insightful pieces that can be easily consumed and reflected upon.
32. Watch Recommended Apple TV Shows
Explore Apple TV+ for high-quality shows like “Shrinking,” “Bad Sisters,” “Slow Horses,” “Severance,” and “Presumed Innocent,” which are recommended for their engaging content.
33. Experience Waymo Self-Driving Cars
Experience a Waymo ride if possible, as the self-driving car technology is described as “mind-blowing” and quickly instills comfort, offering a glimpse into the future of transportation.
34. Skip Mercury Banking Waitlist
Listeners can skip the waitlist for Mercury Personal Banking by using a special link provided in the show notes, offering an opportunity to try a new personal banking solution.
5 Key Quotes
Well stolen is half done.
Rohini Pandhi
The details done right really matter, especially when you're in like a boring industry like fintech, meaning like it's just unsexy, there's not a lot of, you know, it's not like this consumer exciting app, but you need the details to be precise, to be intentional, in order to breed that trust and confidence that the customer base needs in order to save its money with you, in order to move its money with you.
Rohini Pandhi
You don't want to go into a conversation with a bias. You want to be a researcher. You want to be like this third party nonjudgmental kind of like you're being brought into the jungle and just watching what's happening. You're an observer. You're being like a documentarian.
Rohini Pandhi
My three guiding rules of life: First, whenever possible, connect with others. Second, with enthusiasm, strive always to create fun and delight for others. And third, lean into each moment and every encounter expecting magic or miracles.
Adam Robinson (quoted by Rohini Pandhi)
They're never hyper focused on the revenue, they're never focused on a number that they're trying to drive, they really want to build, they keep telling these the teams to build the products that people love, and the revenue will just be a byproduct of that.
Rohini Pandhi
3 Protocols
Building a Product Team (Mercury's Approach)
Rohini Pandhi- Define the discipline and expectations of a product manager internally, including a career ladder with roles, levels, and expectations aligned with company values (e.g., humility, low ego) and PM-specific criteria (e.g., building customer-loved products, positive business impact, long-term vision, cross-functional leadership).
- Update the hiring and interview process to test for the skills and criteria defined in the career ladder, such as product sense, customer/quality obsession, analytical skills, and system-wide thinking.
- Consider adding a written element to the interview process to assess depth of thought and communication skills.
Evaluating New Product Seedlings (Mercury's Approach)
Rohini Pandhi- House new product areas in completely separate organizational structures from core, mature products to prevent resource drain and prioritization conflicts.
- Treat new product areas like small seed-stage companies, with dedicated cross-functional squads (eng, design, product, data science) and leveraging central teams for other functions (CS, risk, ops).
- Conduct regular check-ins (e.g., quarterly/bi-annually) to assess progress, learnings, and whether to continue investment, focusing on hitting goals and financial projections while allowing for pivots.
- Adopt nimble development cycles (e.g., two-week sprints with weekly check-ins) to facilitate learning, iteration, and quick adaptation.
- Instill a heavy customer call and research culture, expecting at least one customer conversation per week from team members, and leveraging UXR teams, RM/sales/CS calls, and direct customer feedback channels.
Identifying Promising New Product Opportunities
Rohini Pandhi- Look for adjacencies to existing products or customer segments, focusing on solutions that tie closely to current spaces but offer a deeper, fuller product experience beyond a simple feature.
- De-risk the new product idea by identifying existing 'baby features' or concepts that already show traction and indicate a customer need (e.g., payment requests leading to invoicing).
- Assess if there's a distribution advantage, such as an existing customer base within the current product, to reduce friction in acquiring new users for the additional product.
- Consider the total addressable market (TAM) to ensure the opportunity is significant.
- Leverage current UX to drive attachment to new products by highlighting them within the natural flow of existing customer workflows (e.g., suggesting BillPay when sending a payment).