What hiring leaders need to understand about the new product manager and why most job descriptions are already out of date.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…
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…
Our client, a PE-backed edtech company with over 100 employees, was hiring for its most senior marketing leadership role, with a mandate centered on performance and growth. The company was approaching $20M ARR and had recently secured meaningful investment to support its next phase of expansion. They were seeking a marketing leader with the mandate…
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…
AI is not simply reshaping software functionality. It is fundamentally altering how enterprise technology is evaluated, validated, approved, and ultimately purchased. For founders building B2B SaaS companies in 2026, this shift is structural rather than cosmetic. Enterprise sales has moved from persuasion-heavy to validation-heavy. It has shifted from storytelling to technical credibility. And increasingly, it…
When the CEO of Alexi set out to hire their first product manager, the objective was clear: ship the next version of the product on more advanced LLM models and support the company’s growth from Series A to B. What unfolded was broader and ultimately more impactful. Walid Koleila joined Alexi, an AI automation platform…
Our client, a Bay Area AI SaaS startup, had recently raised a Series A and was experiencing a surge in inbound interest. To keep up with demand and drive expansion, they needed an Enterprise Customer Success Manager. Our client was in search of CSMs with a specific profile: experience managing technical users and large Enterprise…
Hiring your first Product Manager is one of the most consequential decisions a founder will make. It is rarely just a headcount decision. It is a signal that the company is shifting from founder-led product decisions to a more structured, repeatable way of building. When done at the right moment and with the right profile,…