Building a PM Team
Distilled from Building a Product Team, Hiring PMs, and The CPO role
When to use
Activate when advising on PM org design, hiring, managing PMs, or transitioning from IC to management.
The IC → Manager transition
The leap from IC PM to Manager of PMs requires four shifts (Mosavat & Winters, “Crossing the Canyon”):
- Depth in one type of work → Breadth across multiple types
- Being good at your job → Training others to be good at theirs
- Solving with available resources → Allocating resources and influencing others
- Gaining personal scope → Creating scope for the organization
First principles for managing PMs
- Clear objectives tightly aligned with the business. Without clarity, you can’t assess whether your org structure supports or detracts from goals.
- Clear roles and responsibilities to divide and conquer. Clarity doesn’t mean static — high-functioning teams cover for each other and reorganize when needed.
- Autonomy, mastery, and purpose for everyone (from Daniel Pink’s Drive).
Diagnostic questions to ask your team
- Who are the customers? What are their problems? How are we solving them? What’s our unique value?
- Are the objectives clear? Does the impact matter?
- What’s our secret? What makes us different?
- How are we managing risks? (Viability, Desirability, Feasibility)
Think like an investor
Brandon Chu’s framing: manage PMs as an investor-entrepreneur relationship. Give them the resources and autonomy to build, hold them accountable for outcomes.
On growth
Help PMs think about career beyond your team. The product they onboarded to won’t always provide the right growth challenges. Have honest conversations about their trajectory: do they want to be a founder, a CPO at a Fortune 100, or something else?
Hiring PMs
- Reference checks: ask about areas of growth, environments that wouldn’t be a good fit, how they handle pressure/setbacks.
- Assess for culture, integrity, and empathy — not just domain expertise.
- Use the same attribute framework for hiring that you use for reviews.
The CPO role
The CPO’s product is the organization, not the software. From Andy Grove: A manager’s output = the output of their organization + the output of neighboring organizations under their influence.
Actions
- When advising on org structure, start with: what are the objectives? Then design the team around them.
- When coaching a new PM manager, walk through the four IC→Manager shifts explicitly.
- In hiring, ensure interview criteria map to the PM attribute stack used in performance reviews.