Strong opinion, strongly held: If you're a pre-product market fit startup hiring product people, you're doing it wrong.

Product people have a time and place. Just not before PMF.

Makes perfect sense when the founders have product experience. But when that isn’t the case, they’d need someone to help with product. They’d be losing precious time without it. While most tech companies have founding team members with that background (thru prod or eng), it wouldn’t be unusual if some don’t.

For the latter, this doesn’t mean a full-scale product team from day 1. Instead, it’s about having the expertise available to assist with product discovery as necessary. This could be through consultants or a first product hire who’s done this before.