Peng: Joining startups too early as a product leader creates founder friction
Vickie Peng · Vickie Peng: Why the Best Product People Actually Build Less Product? | E1141 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Apr 17, 2024 · at 48:28
Vickie Peng, Product Partner at Sequoia Capital, explains why hiring dedicated product leadership prematurely creates organizational tension in early-stage startups.
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“The thing that I actually warn both founders and product operators against is joining as a product leader too early in a company. And what I mean by that is there's kind of three layers of product. There's product vision, there's product strategy, and there's product execution. And when you're very, very early on in a company, I would hope that at least the first two come from the founding team. Some is anchored on the founding team, and if you're joining as, like, to provide one or more of those things, you may run into, there, there's often some tension, basically, between what swim lanes people live in and I've seen that happen, where the founder thinks that they're ready to give up product vision or product strategy, and it turns out that that's not actually the case, and it's a difficult conversation to have once you find yourself there.”
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