Product managers and data scientists have no place on a founding team, said Surge AI’s CEO, Edwin Chen.
Chen said on an episode of “No Priors Podcast” published Thursday that he often hears early-stage founders list the roles among their first five to 10 hires. “This is just wild to me,” he said.
Chen, who used to be a data scientist himself, said he would not hire data scientists early.
“Data scientists are great when you want to optimize your product by 2% or 5%, but that’s definitely not what you want to be doing when you start a company,” he said.
“You’re trying to swing for 10x or 100x changes, not worrying and nitpicking about small percentage points that are just noise anyway.”
The founder of the data labeling startup also said product managers don’t make sense early on. He said that the role becomes useful only once engineers no longer have the time or capacity to drive product direction.
“Your engineer should be hands-on. They should be having great ideas as well,” he said.
“Product managers are great when your company gets big enough, but at the beginning, you should be thinking about yourself, about what product you want to build,” he added.
Surge AI and Chen did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
The great product manager debate
Chen’s comments come as the debate continues in the startup world over the role of product managers.
Product managers have been referred to — both affectionately and critically — as “mini-CEOs” of the products they oversee. They act as a bridge among engineers, sales teams, customer service, and other departments, ensuring that products align with user needs.
But the role has become a polarizing one, with some tech workers arguing that product managers add little value, Business Insider’s Amanda Hoover reported in November.
Microsoft wants to increase the number of engineers relative to product or program managers, BI’s Ashley Stewart reported in March. Other companies like Airbnb and Snap are rethinking the need for product managers.
The call for executives to go “founder mode” — a concept coined by the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham and touted by Airbnb’s CEO, Brian Chesky — has some leaders questioning whether they should delegate product decisions to product managers.
In 2023, Chesky merged product management with marketing, and Snap told The Information in the same year that it laid off 20 product managers to help speed up the company’s decision-making.
Others believe product managers’ influence will only grow in the age of AI.
Microsoft’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, said on an episode of the “Twenty Minute VC” podcast published in March that product managers play a crucial role in setting up “feedback loops” to make AI agents better.
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