Startups For the Rest of Us Episode 756 | Why Great Product Management Is Critical for Your Startup
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Feb 11, 2025 
Brendan Fortune, Director of Product Management at Customer.io, brings his wealth of SaaS experience to the discussion. He emphasizes the crucial role of product management in startups and shares frameworks for driving product success. The conversation dives into understanding customer behavior as the basis for product decisions. Brendan also discusses the innovative concept of pricing flywheels and how to establish a 'fair' value metric, illustrating the delicate balance of pricing experimentation for growth.
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Product Management Definition
- Product management, crucial in SaaS, involves deciding what to build, how to build it, and how to market it.
- It encompasses understanding customer behavior, pricing strategies, and explaining the product to the team and the world.
When to Hire a PM
- Hire your first dedicated product manager when you can afford a $120-130K salary.
- This signals sufficient scale and complexity where a founder can no longer handle all product decisions effectively.
Pricing and Flywheel
- Align pricing with a product flywheel, a cyclical pattern of customer behavior that generates value.
- Tying pricing to this flywheel drives expansion revenue and net negative churn by incentivizing usage.