Insight
Jason James: Product managers should be a hire of last resort
“I see PM as, think of it as like a hire of last resort. And so I don't think a company should be allergic to hiring them, but it shouldn't be the default.”
Insight
Jason James: Founders do not need a CPO until transitioning to chairman
“I honestly think you don't need a CPO until maybe like as a founder, you're starting to think about transitioning into the chairman role.”
Insight
Jason James: Promoting '996' schedules is recruitment marketing to attract young employees
“I think it's incredible marketing. It's a way of differentiating against sort of the market. Everybody's going to be intense, but we're super intense. And so like, we're going to be like Olympians and, you know, in terms of work ethic, it's like a coded way of…”
Insight
Jason James: Business growth is the only thing that truly matters for company culture
“The only thing that matters for culture is growth, like, business growth, because for a business that's growing at, like, an amazing clip, it's always gonna have Cultural sort of issues that, you know, make it kind of suck to like work there, but everybody's o…”
Insight
James: Major capabilities beat A/B testing at $30B-$40B transaction scale
“As much as A-B testing and like high velocity optimizations feel like progress, and to some extent they will be, when you're at a business of that scale where we're talking like 30 to forty billion in gross transaction volume, the only thing that really moves …”
Disclosure
Jason James: Tezi won't hire full-time PMs until reaching 50 employees
“Like for us, my theory was we didn't need PMs until call it 50 people or so. We actually do have some gaps. And so we have PM That's like former senior director at Slack that contributes about 15 hours a week, and it really helps fill the gaps on his enterpris…”
Opinion
James: Framing product managers as 'CEO of the product' is obnoxious
“Even just the idea of like CEO of the product, I think is really obnoxious and not helpful.”
Insight
James: Startups cannot build an MVP for a breadth-first strategy
“The thing that I learned from it is You can't do an MVP for a breadth first approach.”
Insight
Jason James: Executives riding company momentum get exposed within 18 months
“I find that right place, right time can get you really far in terms of getting, you know, big roles and stuff like that. But you get found out after like a year, year and a half. And so those are, you know, often execs that turn over quickly”
Insight
James: Advice is cheap, founders should pay for hands-on execution
“As a founder, I find that everyone wants to give me advice and get paid for it, and for the most part, I don't need it. There's a few key areas where advice has been useful as it pertains to fundraising or go to market, because that's like, it hasn't been a st…”
Opinion
James: 15 hours from elite fractional PM beats 50 full-time hours
“So I, I've worked with, like, a hundred PMs probably over the course of my career. I like his 15 to 20 hours more than most of their, like, 50 to 60 hours.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jason James: Founders most frequently fire CPOs, CMOs, and Heads of Talent
“The three roles that I see that get fired over and over are CPO, CMO and head of talent. They typically have like one and a half to two year stints, and then they like move on to their next thing, you know, sort of like quietly and discreetly.”
Opinion
James: Instacart had a neglected culture while Thumbtack was an incredible workplace
“Thumbtack, amazing culture, incredible workplace. I would love to have worked there forever, and Instacart, incredible business, but neglected culture, not a pleasant place to work.”
Opinion
Jason James: DoorDash beat Instacart by capturing suburbs and expanding faster
“So yes, DoorDash did beat Instacart. I mean, why did that happen? I think the main thing is they expanded faster, went, you know, beyond restaurant sooner. I think also their key insight was when the suburbs, they got there first, beat, you know, Uber Eats to …”
Insight
James: High-quality product launches beat scrappy MVPs that cause maintenance traps
“If we can launch a new capability and do it at like an A quality level, we can actually set it down for a while and not have to come back and keep working on it for call it a year, which then enables us to be able to go and add an additional capability. But wh…”
Insight
James: Startups should only involve customers mid-build when facing genuine uncertainty
“It's when we're building, we'll have varying degrees of clarity as to what the customer needs and wants based on everything else that we've learned from customers over the last, you know, year, year and a half at Taisy. And when we have clarity as to what they…”
Insight
Jason James: Product teams should follow common sense over data dependency
“For me, the biggest product lesson from Thumbtack is you should just do the common sense things and whether you have the data to support them or not. And chasing the data to support why we should do something can actually just be a distraction and a delay.”
Insight
Jason James: Consensus building leads to slow execution and worse outcomes
“I hate consensus building. I think it leads to slow execution and often like worse outcomes that it lacks anyone's conviction because it ends up being watered down that like, this is the right thing. So I'd rather have someone feel empowered to make the call, …”
Insight
Jason James: Hiring based on impressive resumes leads to worst hires
“A lot of people hire for resume and I found some of the worst hires that I've made. Some of the worst hires I've witnessed are based on incredible resumes.”
Opinion
James: Early startups do not need prestigious veterans to launch
“When I think about, okay, new grad or like dropout, I don't think they actually need it. I think you just need people that are going to be like very competent and very driven and very ambitious, like, and like hardworking and stuff like that. And that'll get y…”
Insight
Jason James: CEO trust is the only thing that matters for CPOs
“The only thing that matters with a CPO is whether they have the trust of the CEO.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
James: Thumbtack's onboarding friction improved match quality and overall success
“At Thumbtack, you know, conventional wisdom is like remove friction from onboarding, make it easier, faster, whatever. What we found was that doesn't actually work for our product, where the friction was answering questions about your project that you're tryin…”
Insight
James: Product reviews should be opt-in rather than leadership-mandated
“One of the most important things I found is it needs to be like self-serve and like opt-in when myself or, you know, my bosses try to make it pull, not push. What it does is it changes the like life cycle of the project to where now it's anchored around like G…”
Insight
Jason James: Founders should stop interviewing ICs by Series B
“I think that that threshold of, call it series B, it's probably not a great return on The time for a CEO or like a founder to be in every recruiting loop. They are still the pace setter, the like bar setter for the company in terms of talent density and talent…”
