How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more

(instrumental music) ... the CEO of the company you work at, now Mercury, tweeted, uh, a few years ago where he basically was very proud of n- not having any product managers. Clearly you have product managers today. You're a product manager (laughs) at Mercury. What was the sign to Emad and the leadership team that it was time to hire product managers?

The bottlenecks started popping up. To take things from, like, soup to nuts on every single project, it requires design and eng then to take on a lot more responsibility, which means somebody's doing the PM duties even if you don't have a PM.

What is it that you think people most miss about the value that a PM brings to your org?

There's just so many different flavors of what a product manager is. We use this idea of, like, a pioneer, a town settler, and a city planner. So the pioneer is a PM that's really good at zero to one. The settler PM is in that growth stage of maturity of a product. You're in a town. There might be a bank. There might be a post office. But nothing more than that. And then a city planner is a PM that's really good at mature products. They have the city.

Let's talk about the final big topic: going multi-product.

The organizational structure is really important. One thing we learned was having new product areas, new seedlings being too close, uh, within the, like, true org structure to the core banking or payments or mature products made it hard for that new product to even grow.

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Rohini Pandey. Rohini is currently a product leader at Mercury where she leads the product expansion team which incubates and scales new product lines within Mercury. Previously, she spent over seven years at Square, also known as Block, leading product work on Square Payments, Invoicing, and the Bitkey hardware Bitcoin wallet. She's also the co-founder of the startup bootcamp Transparent Collective and a very active angel investor. In our conversation, we talk about why founders are often so resistant to hiring product managers and Mercury's journey on deciding to hire their first PM and then scale their product management team. Also, we get into what attracts great product managers to join your company. She makes an argument for why it's important to invest in quality and user experience versus just working on things that move metrics and how that could differentiate your business. We also do a deep dive into how she successfully launched a half dozen new product lines at Mercury just this past year, which is extremely rare and very hard to do, and also something that every single startup hopes to do and tries to do and often fails. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Rohini Pandey. This episode is brought to you by Cloudinary, the foundational technology for all images and video on the internet. Trusted by over two million developers and many of the world's leading brands, Cloudinary is the API-first image and video management platform built for product leaders who rely on visual storytelling to express their unique product value, who are building engaging web and app experiences, and who understand that harnessing the power of AI to automate is the only way forward. Gil Grossman, engineering team lead at Fiverr, says that "Our users share billions of images, video, and audio files. Cloudinary's ability to automate our post-production work at scale amounts to a savings of up to 92,000 work days per month." Think bold, build big, ship fast. Let Cloudinary handle your media needs. Start your free plan today at cloudinary.com/lenny. I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of OneSchema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi, Christina.