Author: MBA Editorial

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….

What hiring leaders need to understand about the new product manager and why most job descriptions are already out of date.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…

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…

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…

Something has changed in how the most technical, customer-facing roles are being hired. Founders used to describe the gap vaguely, “someone who can work with customers and also get into the code.” Now there’s a name for it: Forward Deployed Engineer. If you haven’t encountered the title yet, you will soon. And if you’re building…

Hiring a first product manager often feels like a logical next step. The product is gaining traction, new opportunities are emerging, and the business needs someone to bring structure to how things are built. In practice, that hire tends to expose something deeper. It reveals how prepared the business actually is to operate like a…

Hiring a first product manager is rarely just a staffing decision. For most founders, it marks the moment when building a company starts to require a fundamentally different kind of thinking about priorities, trade-offs, and how the product grows. To understand how that transition plays out in practice, we spoke with John Merse, a VP…