Founders rejecting PMs often mistake mature city planners for early pioneers
Rohini Pandey · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more · Jan 12, 2025 · at 24:25
Rohini Pandhi discusses product manager archetypes—Pioneer, Town Settler, and City Planner—learned during her time at Square.
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“And then a city planner is a PM that's really good at mature products, really good at driving efficiencies at scale. They have the city. They, everything that they do touches hundreds, thousands, millions of customers immediately. And so the type of PM that you need for something like that is going to be very different than a zero to one PM. And so when you, when people, especially founders say, I don't want a PM, I think it's because they're thinking of a mature, a city planner, when they could find an A former entrepreneur, a former founder, a good pioneer to build out the next set of products, or they really need somebody who's great at growth and like starting to put some of the process in, but not build it to the point of, you know, I'm a big mature enterprise company anymore.”
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