Pandey: Mercury's converted business leads struggled with core PM competencies
Rohini Pandey · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more · Jan 12, 2025 · at 11:45
Rohini Pandey, product leader at Mercury, discusses the shortcomings of Mercury's early attempt to repurpose generalist business leads as product managers.
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“The problem with that became they weren't PMs. They didn't have experience in the PM role. And so kind of the core, maybe the basics of what product management needed internally were missed. Like, strategic planning wasn't exactly right, or road mapping was really hard for some of these folks. Prioritization. Doing any sort of goal settings, doing deep customer research, wasn't necessarily part of like what they've been trained for or had gotten experience with.”
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Mercury operated with no PMs until reaching roughly 400 employees
“Prior to two years ago, there were no PMs at the company, and I think at that time, there was probably close to 400 employees across Mercury. I'd say at least half of them were in some level of, like, the R&D role, so engineering, design, those types of Core r…”
Mercury regrets waiting until 400 employees to hire product managers
“And I think in hindsight, we should probably done the official transition to the PM role a lot sooner, but you know, hindsight's always twenty-twenty.”
Pandey: Mercury uses open-topic presentations to evaluate PM craft and depth
“A good example is we still go through, we have this mercury presentation in our interviews. And it's, the prompt is very, very generic. It's like, just talk about something that you're interested in and talk in depth to a panel about it. And what we're really …”