In this episode of 'Never Too Early,' host Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel, interviews Giri Sreenivas, Chief Product Officer at Docker, about essential strategies for founders building their product organizations for the very first time. The conversation addresses when to hire your first PM, the importance of founders remaining involved in the product vision, and the pros/cons between hiring a CPTO versus two different leaders. Giri shares his experiences from being a founder to building products at scale, offering valuable advice on hiring, managing product teams, and achieving product market fit. Key takeaways include understanding the optimal time for bringing in a PM, the roles of product leaders, and practical tips for maintaining a balance between founder oversight and effective delegation.
00:00 Introduction to Never Too Early
00:19 Meet Giri Srinivas
01:23 Question 1: When is the right time to hire your first PM? Giri talks about how the founder should really be playing the part of the PM, perhaps even longer than you might imagine.
05:11 Question 2: How do you determine the right seniority of your first product hire? Giri talks about how he tends to lean towards hiring a PM rather than a Head of Product until you feel that you have established PMF.
08:56 Question 3: What is the right DNA for your first Head of Product? Giri personally has a bit of a bias towards a more technical type of product leader. Here’s why.
13:16 Question 4: What is the most productive way to set up your EPD organization? Giri discusses the pros and cons of the “four musketeer model” as well as hiring a CPTO or one person to own it all.
17:14 Question 5: Do you have any other final tips for founders? Giri has a unique perspective being a multiple time founder and most recently a Chief Product Officer at a growth-stage company. He reminds founders of the importance of staying close to the product strategy and the executive leaders that you hire.
19:16 Conclusion
Want more of Never Too Early? Find us on Tiktok, @nevertooearly1 and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript
LAUREN IPSEN: Welcome to Never Too Early, a YouTube series focused on unconventional talent insights for founders. I'm Lauren Ipsen, Talent Partner at Decibel. In each episode, we'll cover the top five commonly asked questions that we get from founders building their organizations for the very first time. It's never too early to learn from the best.
I'm super excited to introduce my guest today, Giri Sreenivas. Giri is currently the chief product officer at Docker. He formerly ran product and was a GM at Rapid7 during hypergrowth, and he's a multiple-time founder. So he is more than qualified to answer the top five commonly asked questions that we get from founders building their product orgs for the very first time.
Okay, Giri, so I just told the listeners a little bit about your incredible professional background, but it would be awesome if you could share something about you on a personal front that's fun for them to hear.
GIRI SREENIVAS: Sure. So, I'm originally from the Seattle area, so I'm like a Seattle sports nut, which means I've endured all the ups and downs of being a Seahawks fan, a Mariners fan, losing the Sonics. And I'm hoping we're on the verge of getting the Sonics back, and a Storm fan. So I got a chance to go check out the Storm last weekend, which was a lot of fun. WNBA's on the rise. So, yeah, go Seattle sports.
LAUREN IPSEN: I love it. That's awesome. Okay, very cool. So today we're going to cover all things product, specifically for founders that are building their product organizations for the very first time. We'll start with some pretty straightforward questions, and then we can take it from there and dive deeper as different topics come up.
But I think the most important question, and the one that I often get most regularly is, when's the right time for me to hire my first PM?
GIRI SREENIVAS: Yeah. I think this is a great question for, you know, founders as they're going through the progression. And having gone through this a couple of times myself, you know, I didn't realize how much of a product- oriented founder I was until I got into the weeds in my first company. And then I think with my second company, I just really embraced it.
So what I've learned from that process, and then also, you know, being parts of companies that have scaled, I think it's essential for founders to work through owning product all the way through product-market fit, and then endure a lot of the pain that comes with actually scaling the go-to-market before they really think about bringing on their first PM.
So what does that mean? I think early iterations of the product definition, figuring out how to get your first users of the product, getting to the point where you can credibly measure product-market fit. You know, that could be the Sean Ellis test. There's a variety of frameworks for thinking about how you get to product-market fit.
But then the next step beyond that is, you know, the product-market sales fit. And usually that entails bringing on your first couple of sales reps and working with them to transfer what you've learned from founder selling into a more scalable notion. And so I'm a big fan of, you know, you hire when things start to get really painful, to address the pain.
So once go-to-market starts to get pretty painful, because you're starting to think about what you need to do on the marketing side as far as pipeline generation, driving awareness, and then on the sales side, as far as, like, prosecuting those opportunities, the founder attention shifting over to that, you know, breaking through that, the boundaries of scale that you hit and that you run into is pretty critical.
And for many founders who tend to be technically-oriented or product-oriented they have a lot to learn on the go-to-market side. And that doesn't mean that you screen and hire for a go-to-market leader and just hand it off to them. In fact, I think you actually have to invest in becoming incredibly proficient on the go-to- market side.
So that necessarily means that you don't have the time and attention to be necessarily—to be as focused on product. So there's a moment there where, you know, there's an opportunity to bring in someone that can run product for the initial offering.
And I think that's where you’ve got to build tremendous trust, you got to find the right type of fit, right? It's not an easy hire, both for the founder and for the PM, right? Because they also have to build that trust, knowing full well that, you know, it's hard for founders to really let go of product.
But that's where I feel like there's a natural moment to start thinking about bringing in the first PM.
LAUREN IPSEN: Cool. Makes perfect sense. Yeah. I think it's something that comes up often, especially with our more product-oriented founders. You know, they struggle to pass the torch. And it can be the most difficult role to hire for because, yeah, I mean, they should have a really strong and clear product vision as to what they're trying to execute against. And to pass that off to someone else, it can be really, really hard.
Talk to me a little bit about how you think about the seniority of this type of person and whether, you know, if you should be hiring a PM or whether it should be kind of more of a head of product and someone that can kind of build the organization from the top down.
GIRI SREENIVAS: Yeah. So I would lean more towards hiring a sort of mid- to senior-level PM as opposed to a head of product that may be a more management-oriented hire for that initial hire. There's quite a bit of leverage that you can get from a senior PM doing—sort of a principal-level PM that can come in and really take on a complementary role with the founder.
Founders are always going to own and have that internal capital around what's the long-term vision, being able to make some of the tough calls. But there are a lot of things that, you know, on a tactical level, need to be nurtured within the organization for product management to really be effective. Driving customer conversations, feeding back learnings from what the sales team is learning in the field to be able to bring that back to the product team, figure out how do we adjust roadmaps and account for opportunities that are popping up.
So there's a lot of tactical work that can be combined with some parts of the near-term vision that I think are reasonable to engage with a relatively senior PM on. There's also something to be said for the complexity and the scope of the product as it grows over time.
You know, usually you nail product-market fit with a relatively narrow wedge. And then you start to look at expanding that wedge, typically by speaking to, you know, maybe a broader set of personas in different markets, right? Different segments that you want to address with your product. And that's where, because you've established a bit of a pattern with the initial product, bringing in a relatively senior PM that can take a look at a working model and figure out how to extend that in a couple of different dimensions to help grow the addressable market for the initial product.
So there's a—I think there's quite a bit of value around that. But again, a lot of this really depends on the founding team and who the founders are. If you have the ability to have a founder who can be really long-term focused on product, that'll significantly impact the type of hire you bring initially for PMs.
Now, when to bring in a head of product, I think that's an interesting question that has—for me, is a really a function of the complexity of the product or product portfolio, right? As a company is scaling from, say, one product to two products or, you know, two end products, there's a degree of complexity that has to be managed across that portfolio.
When do you look for opportunities to work better together? How do you create the right type of isolation for new initiatives to really land that wedge in the market and establish product-market fit before you start to think about other opportunities?
A head of product can be really—a really effective role. to help facilitate some of that. I won't use the word “delegate” because I think founders still need to be intimately involved in a lot of that work. But there's a lot of facilitation that can happen with the head of products, especially as that—the number of product managers starts to scale up in the organization.
LAUREN IPSEN: I think the thing that's also challenging with product is product leaders can come from all different backgrounds, right? You could have a product leader that leans far more design-oriented. You could have someone that's kind of more on the platform side. You could have someone that is more of a generalist across the board or more strategic.
So talk to me a little bit about the levers in which you evaluate product leaders and, more generally speaking, what you think the right archetype is for a first- time head of product.
GIRI SREENIVAS: So, I mean, I think, you know, some of it depends on the nature of the business, right? So, I've been fortunate to work both in enterprise sort of B2B products and consumer products. I think when it comes to enterprise B2B products, it tends to favor hiring someone who can lead product who's got a more technical background, right, who's worked on technical products, specifically products that have served businesses.
It's important that there have—they have some history having worked with design, right? There’s—going back a dozen years, right, the consumerization of IT kind of kicked off. And now the expectation around business products is that they have consumer-like experiences, both from an adoption motion as well as around the productivity. So design is an important part of that, right? And design is a critical function that should roll up under product that way.
For consumer-oriented products. I think having the technical background can be helpful, right, particularly in the negotiations that go on with engineering, but I don't think it's as essential, right? Because there's a lot more focus, not just on the consumer experience, but again, the relationship between brand and consumer, and how you message and position the overall company in the space.It’s a little bit—it's a different beast than what I think you see on the business side.
I'm generally pretty biased. Like, I've had my team reflect back to me that I have a type when I look for product managers to bring in and product leaders to bring in. I'm heavily—I heavily skew towards folks that have technical backgrounds. Someone who started off in their career as an engineer, and maybe they've drifted into other functions, right? Sales, sales engineering, solution engineering. That doesn't really matter.
But they find themselves in product. But having that grounding, I think, is really essential because we're—you know, in product, yes, we're responsible for understanding the customer, the pain points, what type of solution, but also understanding how that product is built. It's capabilities and what—the realm of the possible is incredibly important, and actually understanding how to define durable products that can deliver value over time.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. How easy do you think it is for someone that's nontechnical to come into an organization as a product leader and kind of learn it on the fly?
GIRI SREENIVAS: So I have worked with a number of nontechnical product managers. I think it really comes down to personal attributes. Like, do they have that curiosity, right? Because that's basically the proxy for, are they willing and able to really ramp up on the space and really understand the entire—both the market, but then also the competitive products; why they're differentiated, how they're differentiated, what is the impact of that differentiation on the customer experience, and where the customer sees value.
And that curiosity also drives the customer empathy, right? For the most part, we're all building technical products for technical audiences, right? And so, even if you don't have a technical background, if you can develop that empathy and really find a way to live a day in the life of, then you'll be able to facilitate the definition and design and development of great products.
There have been great product managers that have no technical background. I don't think it's a prerequisite. I think it is, in general, very helpful as a starting point, but I don't think it's a prerequisite.
LAUREN IPSEN: More of a prerequisite, it sounds like, to just have a natural curiosity and a different level of empathy and understanding for what the technologists in the company are doing, right?
GIRI SREENIVAS: Yeah. 100%.
LAUREN IPSEN: So you talked about the different dynamics between internal stakeholders, engineering, design, product, program management.
In your opinion, what do you think the most productive way to set up those organizations are?
GIRI SREENIVAS: Yeah. So, I mean, there are a lot of different models that are out there today across tech companies. What I’ve found is, first and foremost, there needs to be a healthy tension. And the healthy tension is best served by treating product engineering design and product marketing as peers.
And so, we call this the Four Musketeers model, Docker today. And we really do try to create that peering model, right? So that tension that exists between those functions really helps deliver the best ideas, the best outcomes. So there’s—when you ask the question about what's the most productive way, you know, productivity can be measured in how fast or how quickly can we get something out, as opposed to what's the fastest path to getting to the outcome that we care about.
So I'm much more focused on the latter, right? And so, we really—we set up our teams in this way. So I have an engineering peer. Design does happen to roll up to me, but I also have a marketing peer. And so, we have people on our teams that sit as peers across various initiatives within the company.
It's not always the fastest way to get the work done, but I do think that having these functions challenge each other and really ask the difficult questions is what enables us to have the outcomes that we want.
LAUREN IPSEN: You mentioned that in the past, you've owned engineering, design, product all under one purview. And then obviously, today, you, you mentioned the Four Musketeers formula that you're a part of. So talk to me about strengths, or pros and cons, I guess, to both.
GIRI SREENIVAS: As founder, you know, at a couple of companies, I had all of these rolling up to me. And I think the challenge that comes with that is lack of ability, like the lack of space to really focus on any one particular area and maybe drive the level of excellence that you'd like to have, right?
Because the—it's a very broad purview. Right now, in my current role, where I have—I've got design, developer experience, growth and data, and product management rolling up to me, I can drive functional excellence, right? And this is one of the reasons why we structured ourselves the way that we did last year, was to be able to focus on that.
So again, there are pros and cons to that. For me right now, this is work that I really enjoy. It’s about—I get to think about product management as a craft, and focusing on how do we get better about the work that we do? Which is, as you know, in my view, as important as, like, what is the output of the work that we're doing? Because if we're not going about doing it well, then it's hard for us to expect to have good outcomes. But this is a—it really comes down to the type of focus that you want to have.
Then, now, the flip side, even in the GM role that I had, where I had multiple functions rolling up to me, one of the benefits of that is then you get to really— you get to have a solitary focus on driving revenue. And it changes the types of leaders that you want to bring on your team to focus on because then you look to those folks to be driving excellence by function, right? As opposed to feeling accountable for that yourself directly.
LAUREN IPSEN: Any final tips, tricks, learnings, now that you've—I mean, you've been on both sides of it. So I'm curious, for founders, what you really think they should index on, or if there's any final takeaways that you think would be helpful when they're building out their first product orgs.
GIRI SREENIVAS: Yeah. I mean, I think—and I'll kind of refer to, I guess, what's in the discourse now around the founder mode versus manager mode. I think it's incumbent upon founders to stay in the details and stay in the weeds and have that ownership mindset. And this is across the business. There has been an over-reliance on, you know, go hire an expert in X, and then step back and let them operate.
And it's not that you shouldn't look for experts in the various areas and bring on the best that you can for sales and marketing and engineering and even product, but that doesn't mean you take a step back and defer, right? It's actually incumbent upon you to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with them and learn, right? Where it's not your area, learn, so that you are you are in-depth and involved in the details. That should not translate to micromanagement. I don't—you're gonna drive.
LAUREN IPSEN: It’s a fine balance.
GIRI SREENIVAS: Yeah, it is a balance. You're gonna drive away great talent by micromanaging them. But being involved in the details is incredibly important. So yeah, I would encourage founders to take stock of where their strengths are, both individually and across the founding team, have a really good understanding of where the pain is in the business and where they're personally experiencing pain, and their growth and their scaling; hire to complement and address that.
But that's—those hires are not excuses to get away from those areas, right? Those hires are opportunities to be able to learn and continue to inject, you know, what's the vision? These are our goals. What are the outcomes that we're driving toward, and staying close to that.
LAUREN IPSEN: Awesome. Cool. Well, I can't thank you enough. I know you and I could continue to talk about this stuff for a very long time, and we're just kind of scratching the surface, but I so appreciate all of the insights and wisdom, and I know our founders will too. So thank you so much for joining us.
GIRI SREENIVAS: Yeah. Thanks, Lauren. Appreciate it.
LAUREN IPSEN: Yeah. I appreciate it as well. And thank you all for tuning in to Never Too Early. More to come soon.
Share this post