If you’ve been watching the product talent market closely this year, you’ve noticed something: the signals are mixed, and they’re mixed in ways that don’t show up in industry surveys. What’s actually happening depends almost entirely on which stage of company you’re asking about, what role you’re trying to fill, and whether your hiring motion…
Our client is a venture-backed B2B SaaS company in the customer engagement space, helping businesses turn passive users into active, retained ones. They’ve hit strong product-market fit, are growing 50% year over year, and operate as a lean, high-growth team where AI is core to the roadmap rather than a side project. They needed their…
Here’s a scenario Martyn Bassett described from a recent search, and it’s more common than most founders would like to admit. A client set a top-end budget of roughly $370K for a product leadership hire. Two weeks in, they got cold feet. “Actually, that’s too much. We’re going to go 40 below.” Two weeks after…
If you’re a product manager trying to figure out what you’re worth right now, here’s the uncomfortable truth: there isn’t a number. There’s a range so wide it barely functions as a benchmark, and it’s moving fast enough that data from eighteen months ago is close to useless. Heidi Ram, who leads delivery for The…
A year ago, a VP of Product spent most of their week managing people. Today, the same title might spend most of the week writing PRDs. That shift came up repeatedly in our July 8 session on product compensation at venture-backed companies, with Martyn Bassett, Heidi Ram, and Andrew Shaw. It’s not a minor trend….
If you’ve read our salary insight posts on Lead PMs, Product Directors, VPs of Product, and CPOs, you’ve probably noticed a pattern: the same title can pay wildly different amounts depending on one factor that rarely gets called out directly. Company stage. A Director of Product at a 400-person PE-backed company and a Director of…
Every comp package we put together has the same two levers: base salary and equity. What changes from search to search is how much weight candidates put on each one, and that weight isn’t random. It tracks closely with stage, role scope, and what the candidate is actually trying to get out of the move….
Our client is a B2B SaaS company in the workflow automation space, serving enterprise and mid-market customers. They were scaling a PLG motion alongside an existing sales-led business and needed a Head of Product to own both the core platform and the growth engine. Their ideal hire had experience leading product in a SaaS business…
What hiring leaders need to understand about the new product manager and why most job descriptions are already out of date. Every few years, the definition of a great product manager quietly shifts. The shift usually happens faster than companies notice, and slower than the people writing job descriptions would like to admit. That…
What product leaders need to understand about AI, velocity, and the trap of shipping fast in the wrong direction. For the better part of a decade, Martyn Bassett has watched early-stage software companies use speed as their primary competitive weapon. Move faster than the incumbent. Ship more than the competitor. Outpace everyone else to…
In our recent webinar, Martyn Bassett sat down with Daniel Shapiro, former CPO at Workleap and PartnerStack, to unpack how AI is reshaping product teams, product leadership, and what companies should be looking for in senior product talent today. 👉 Watch the full webinar recording Meet the Speakers Martyn Bassett is the founder of Martyn…
When a DTC mobile app startup engaged us for a Design Lead search, they were looking for something specific: a senior individual contributor who could think strategically, partner closely with the Chief Product Officer, and still roll up their sleeves to execute design work at a high level. This wasn’t a people management role. This…
A bad product leadership hire doesn’t just waste money. It wastes time. And at an early-stage company, time is the one thing you can’t raise more of. We’ve spent over twenty years placing product leaders at venture-backed tech companies across North America. We’ve seen what works. We’ve also watched, up close, the hiring decisions that…
Interviewing a Forward Deployed Engineer is harder than it looks. The role sits at the intersection of engineering, product thinking, and customer work, which means a standard technical screen will miss most of what matters. Hire the wrong person, and you’ll end up with either a brilliant engineer who can’t communicate or a polished customer-facing…
Founders often describe the same problem using different words. “We need someone technical who can work with customers and help us close and deliver.” On the surface, that sentence sounds like one hire. In practice, it can mean three very different roles, and confusing them is one of the more expensive mistakes you can make…