When you build products with business-facing surface area, business-facing product managers come with the territory. So, in these cases we advise hiring a PM much earlier—maybe as soon as the team is formed. However, you need to avoid the mistake of thinking every successful business-focused PM can successfully transition to internal platforms. They’ll be accustomed to being evaluated based on whether they can deliver the company revenue and profits, so they’ll be focused on business and customer needs. This likely means that not only will they want to leave platform aspects like “reliability”
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