B2B Wins #51: The Founder-Product Manager
When you're too busy to be close to product, that's when you need to be closest
As the non-technical founder of my new company, I'm thinking very deeply about product. One of the reasons I'm thinking about this is because this is an area where I struggle. Both Mike and Philippe have stronger technical and product chops. But as CEO, I can't just delegate this away.
We're pre-product building out the Alpha. The product vision has been codified in a document and today I start putting that roadmap into a backlog so we can be very intentional about how to sequence our next steps based upon alignment with our vision and our soon to be gathered feedback from Alpha users.
At my last startup, I partnered with some very good technical co-founders. As the business founder, I mostly left product and technical decisions to those folks. I should have been closer to engineering decisions and product management priorities in additional to selling and fundraising.
Product management is a core function of the founder. You own the product vision and need to be intimate with the execution of the vision. Delegating product execution, especially after hiring your first product manager, is a common trap. Founders, drowning in a sea of fundraising, recruiting, and business operations, outsource product management to their first PM hire and then wonder why the product doesn't reflect their vision or meet market needs.
Here's an uncomfortable truth: no one cares about your product as much as you do. No one understands the vision as deeply as you do. And yet, as your company grows, most founders drift further from the product development process. It's a recipe for disaster.
Founders have to deeply internalize the details of the product roadmap and be an active participant in crafting and prioritizing engineering efforts. After several deployments into the startup trenches, I've learned this lesson deeply. To be totally clear, a lot of what follows remains aspirational for me. I'm going to be intentional about embracing product and expect my co-founders to hold me to it.
Product is the Founder's Job
Let's start with this reality: product management is not some specialized function you can fully delegate, especially in the early stages. It's the founder's job.
In the beginning, you ARE the product manager. You're talking to customers, defining requirements, prioritizing features, and probably writing some code or at least some specs. You're close to the details-maybe too close. You can see exactly how each feature serves the vision that drove you to start this company in the first place.
Then something happens. You raise money. You hire people. You suddenly find yourself sitting in meetings about HR policies and office space. You have investor updates to write and customer complaints to handle. The product and engineering team seems functioning, so you step back.
Six months later, you look at what they've built, and it's... fine. It works. But it's started to diverge from your vision. It lacks the magic, the opinion, the point of view that made your initial concept compelling. Somewhere along the way, your product became generic.
The PM you hired is smart and capable, but they're not a founder. They don't wake up at 3 AM thinking about the product. They haven't spent thousands of hours obsessing over the problem space. They're doing their best, but their best is a pale shadow of what the product could be under your guidance.
Why Founders Disengage from Product
Before we talk about the solution, let's understand why this happens:
The lure of "adult" business functions
As your startup grows, you suddenly acquire all these "real company" functions like finance, sales, marketing, and HR. These areas often feel more concrete, more "business-y" than product work. You can see tangible progress. You're signing deals, hiring people, setting up processes. It feels like you're building a real company.
Product work, by contrast, is messy and abstract. Progress is non-linear. You can spend weeks with nothing to show for it. And unlike a deal that closes or doesn't, product success is often subjective. It's tempting to focus on the parts of the business that give you that dopamine hit of visible progress.
For me, the business side is where my strengths are, so it's easy to evolve attention to those places. But I also have strong feelings about products. I have to listen less to that part of my brain that says "Work on the tax filing instead of the product roadmap."
The curse of competence
Many founders come from technical or product backgrounds. You're good at product development. It feels comfortable. And that's exactly why you delegate it, because you think, "I already know how to do this part. I need to learn these other parts of running a business."
This is backward thinking. You should delegate the things you're not good at and stay deeply involved in the areas where you add the most value. If product is your superpower, that's where you should keep playing. You can always hire a super-capable COO to cover your blind spots. In fact, I highly recommend super-capable COOs.
The false comfort of "scalable" leadership
You've read all those business books about how the founder's job is to "work on the business, not in the business." I'm a true believer in this framework. But it's not an either or. You have to do both. Right now your time should be heavily skewed towards working in the business. In the early days, the founder needs to be deeply, sometimes uncomfortably, involved in the core functions. Product is the core of the core.
The Signs You're Too Disconnected
How do you know if you've drifted too far from your product? Watch for these warning signs:
You can't demo your own product anymore. You need to call the PM or an engineer to show it off because you don't know what features were shipped in the last release.
Your feedback to the product team mainly consists of reactions to what they show you rather than proactive direction based on customer insights you've gathered.
You haven't spoken directly to a user about your product in over a month.
You're surprised by major product decisions that your team has already committed to.
Your team struggles to articulate the "why" behind feature requests. They know what to build but not why it matters.
2 and 3 defined my problem at my last company. When you start seeing a few of these warning signs pop up, it is time to rethink how you’re approaching product.
How do you know if you've drifted too far from your product? Watch for these warning signs:
You can't demo your own product anymore. You need to call the PM or an engineer to show it off because you don't know what features were shipped in the last release.
Your feedback to the product team mainly consists of reactions to what they show you rather than proactive direction based on customer insights you've gathered.
You haven't spoken directly to a user about your product in over a month.
You're surprised by major product decisions that your team has already committed to.
Your team struggles to articulate the "why" behind feature requests. They know what to build but not why it matters.
2 and 3 defined my problem at my last company. When you start seeing a few of these warning signs pop up, it is time to rethink how you're approaching product.
How to Be an Effective Founder-PM
You can't (and shouldn't) do all the product management work yourself. But you need to stay deeply connected to the product development process. Here's how to strike that balance:
Carve out sacred product time
Set aside non-negotiable time blocks for product work—at least 30% of your time if you're pre-Product/Market Fit. This includes:
Customer interviews (at least 2-3 per week)
Product review sessions (weekly at a minimum)
Hands-on time using your own product (daily)
Free-form thinking and sketching time (weekly)
These blocks should be treated like board meetings—immovable except in true emergencies. Your calendar should reflect your priorities, and product needs to be at the top.
We are currently pre-product at my new company. Phillipe and I meet every other day to talk about progress of the core platform. I’m currently building out the first iteration of the product roadmap so we can begin to look forward. This sort of intimacy with product is critical.
Set aside non-negotiable time blocks for product work-at least 30% of your time if you're pre-Product/Market Fit. This includes:
Customer interviews (at least 2-3 per week)
Product review sessions (weekly at a minimum)
Hands-on time using your own product (daily)
Free-form thinking and sketching time (weekly)
These blocks should be treated like board meetings—immovable except in true emergencies. Your calendar should reflect your priorities, and product focus needs to be at the top. We are currently pre-product at my new company. Phillipe and I meet every other day to talk about the progress of the core platform. I'm building out the product roadmap's first iteration so we can begin to look forward. This sort of intimacy with the product is critical.
Distinguish between delegating and abdicating
You can and should delegate aspects of product management as you grow. But there's a crucial difference between delegating (assigning responsibility while maintaining involvement) and abdicating (washing your hands of the whole function).
What to delegate:
Process management
Documentation
Testing coordination
Feature specification details
Data analysis
What not to delegate:
Product vision and narrative
Core user experience decisions
Key feature prioritization
Direct customer insight gathering
Final approval on significant UX changes
The distinction is simple: delegate the how, and retain control of the what and why.
Create direct customer feedback loops
No matter how large your company grows, you need direct, unfiltered access to customer feedback. Don't rely solely on your sales or customer success teams to tell you what customers think.
Implement these practices:
Those customer calls I just mentioned. Do them.
An open calendar slot where customers can book time directly with you. Especially those that are important to you.
Regular time reviewing customer support tickets, NPS feedback, and usage data
Direct customer contact isn't just about gathering feedback—it's about developing the intuition that only comes from countless hours of customer conversations. This intuition is often what separates great founders from merely good ones.
No matter how large your company grows, you need direct, unfiltered access to customer feedback. Don't rely solely on your sales or customer success teams to tell you what customers think.
Implement these practices:
Those customer calls I just mentioned. Do them.
An open calendar slot where customers can book time directly with you. Especially those that are important to you.
Regular time reviewing customer support tickets, NPS feedback, and usage data
Direct customer contact isn't just about gathering feedback—it's about developing the intuition that only comes from countless hours of customer conversations. This intuition is often what separates great founders from merely good ones.
Maintain a founder-level product narrative
Your most valuable contribution to product isn't in the details of how feature X works. It's in maintaining and communicating the product narrative—the story of what your product is, why it matters, and where it's going.
This narrative should be:
Simple enough to explain in 2 minutes
Compelling enough that people want to be part of it
Specific enough to guide product decisions
Flexible enough to evolve with market feedback
I’m still working on this for the NewCo. It’s taking me a while because it requires a significant amount of think time and research time. As I progress, I’m working on documenting this in a way that is not only effective in defining the product direction, but also in a way that allows me to explain it to others outside the company.
Be the voice of "why"
As founder, your most important product question isn't "what are we building next?" but "why are we building this at all?"
In every product planning and reviews, your primary job is to relentlessly question the why:
Why does this feature matter to our users?
Why is this more important than other priorities?
Why will this approach solve the underlying problem?
Why should we build this now versus later?
Working with Your Product Team
As you scale beyond being a solo founder-PM, you'll need to build a productive relationship with your growing product team:
Hire PMs who complement you, not clone you
The worst product hires are those who think exactly like you do. They'll never challenge your assumptions or bring new perspectives. Instead, look for PMs who:
Share your values but bring different skills
Have experience in areas where you're weak
Will push back (respectfully) when they disagree
Are comfortable with your continued deep involvement
The best product teams have a diversity of thinking styles. If you're a visionary big-picture thinker (that’s me), hire a detail-oriented executor (I always look for this person to round me out). If you're analytical and data-driven, find someone who excels at intuitive user experience design.
Create clear spheres of ownership
Your product team needs to know exactly where their authority begins and ends. Nothing is more demoralizing than spending weeks on something only to have the founder swoop in at the last minute and change everything.
Be explicit about:
Decisions that are entirely in their domain
Decisions that require your input
Decisions that you'll make yourself
This clarity reduces friction and helps your team work more autonomously within appropriate boundaries. It also creates clarity for you, the founder. You don’t want to be one of those disruptive founders who acts impulsively and creates chaos. People want to know their swimlanes and you should honor them as much as they honor yours.
Share context, not just conclusions
Your product intuition is built on thousands of customer conversations, competitor analyses, and market insights. When you make product decisions, share that context with your team, not just your conclusions.
Instead of "We need to rebuild the onboarding flow," say, "I've spoken with 12 customers who all struggled with the same part of onboarding. Here's what I'm hearing and why we must rebuild it." Be as specific as possible. People respond very well to details when trying to understand something.
This approach accomplishes two things: it helps your team understand your thinking, and it helps them develop better product intuition over time.
Staying Connected as You Scale
Maintaining a deep product connection becomes even more challenging as your company grows beyond 20, 50, or 100 people. Here are strategies from founders who've managed to stay effectively involved at scale:
Maintain a personal "must review" list
As your product expands, you can't review everything. Create a list of product areas so critical to your vision that you must personally review any significant changes. This might include your core user flows, key algorithms, or brand elements.
Institute founder office hours
Set aside a recurring block (2-3 hours weekly) where anyone working on product or engineering can book a 15-minute slot with you. No agenda required—they can use this time to get feedback, share ideas, or ask questions. This creates an open channel while respecting everyone's time. I’ve always gained my best insight from this sort of informal time.
Note for Corporate types: Always being talking to people deep in your org. It’s where truth exists.
Write more, meet less
As you scale, your most valuable product contribution becomes clear thinking, clearly communicated. Writing forces clarity in a way that meetings don't. Develop the practice of writing detailed product memos that articulate your thinking, then circulate them for discussion and feedback.
Become your own customer
No matter how busy you get, make time to regularly use your own product as a customer would. Block an hour each week to go through core user journeys. Don't just click around, try to accomplish real tasks, ideally in a production environment.
This direct experience will give you insights that no amount of reporting can provide.
The Risks of Staying Too Close
While I've advocated for staying deeply involved with your product, there are legitimate risks of being too involved:
Becoming a bottleneck: If every decision requires your input, development will slow to a crawl.
Disempowering your team: Constant intervention undermines your team's sense of ownership and growth.
Getting lost in details: You can become so focused on product specifics that you neglect other critical aspects of the business.
To mitigate these risks:
Be explicit about where you need to be involved and where you don't.
Make the swimlane boundaries clear.
Focus your involvement on vision, strategy, and key decisions
Hire strong product leaders who complement your skills
Create processes that work with or without your direct involvement
Product is Your Legacy
Remember this: when your company succeeds, nobody will remember your fundraising deck, hiring process, or financial models. They'll remember your product.
Your product is the most tangible expression of your vision. It is the physical manifestation of the change you want to see in the world. Delegating that entirely is like a painter hiring someone else to hold the brush.
As founder, you're the keeper of the vision. When you drift too far from product, that vision blurs, dilutes, and eventually fades entirely. Your company might still succeed financially, but it will fail to become what you set out to build.
Stay close to your product. It's not just good business, it's the reason you started this journey in the first place.
Author’s Note: All Em Dashes were entered by the author.