When to Hire Your First Product Manager: A Founder's Framework for Timing

Saumil Mehta, Global President at Ticketmaster and former founder/CPO, provides a decision framework for early-stage founders on when to hire their first PM. The core principle: hire a PM once the marginal hour spent on product work yields less value than time spent on go-to-market or company building. Mehta outlines four heuristics based on decision-making inputs, engineering/design bandwidth, feature prioritization complexity, and organizational scale to guide this critical hiring decision.