Sunday Rewind: The Role of the First Product Manager by Andrew Moll

This week’s Sunday Rewind is a 2022 ProductTank Barcelona talk from Andrew Moll, then Head of Product at Abacum, on what it means to be the first product manager in a startup.

In his talk Andrew discusses what product management in a startup is really about - discovery, early-stage research, product judgement, and being directionally correct.

He says the role doesn’t change in a smaller company - but product managers won’t have experts to call on and may find themselves working only with a designer, a customer success, and an engineer, meaning that they are much busier.

In newer companies, the goals are different as project runways are shorter. Product managers will ship to learn about their customer base rather than ship to earn revenue and scale. Andrew recommends using the first 15 minutes of a sales call for research.

He says product judgement is the idea that you can use your own judgement to accurately predict what your customers need, want, and value and then design and ship the right solution for them. You can develop it by learning from others, playing with other products, trusting your gut, building empathy through exposure, and building the wrong thing to avoid building it twice.

To be directionally correct, says Andrew, it’s essential to not look at where you want to go but to compare down to the baseline and see if you’re improving. 

Watch the original talk: The role of the first product manager by Andrew Moll