How Startup Founders Can Hire the Right Product Leaders in the AI Era
Understanding the Difference Between Product Managers, Product Designers, and (AI) Product Builders
Startup founders often ask me how to cut through the noise of product management when hiring their first product manager, as the situation has arguably worsened in recent years. On Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, Marty Cagan highlights the rise of 'product management theater,' characterized by inflated titles for vaguely defined product-related roles and the excessive hiring of inexperienced “ZIRP PMs.”
Dharmesh Shah, the legendary co-founder of HubSpot and AI visionary, recently posted one of his usual clever takes on X that I’ve found helpful:
Having worked as both a product manager who focuses on managing products and a product manager engaged in building them (which I refer to as a “Product Designer”), I definitely get the nuance that Dharmesh is hinting at. I also believe that with the emergence of AI, the 'building' aspect for a product manager/designer is set to evolve significantly, becoming even more literal. I started calling this evolution of a product manager the “AI Product Builder”, directly borrowing the term from Dharmesh.
Understanding the distinctions between these three main profiles is fundamental for founders who are hiring their product leaders. In the upcoming sections, I'll define the often ambiguous roles of product manager and product designer through practical examples from my experience. Then, I'll show how these roles can converge into the AI Product Builder, individuals who directly build and iterate on products themselves, effectively narrowing the gap between product vision and execution.
I believe that these three profiles, even if operating in different capacities, can help you, as a founder, to accelerate your product execution. Anything else, especially the roles and practices emerging from Cagan’s 'product management theater', should be avoided as it will likely lead to frustration and wasted effort.
The Product Manager
In my first startup, I was a Product Manager.
I was indeed managing the product I was responsible for.
It was a very complex one: a family of enterprise hardware switches with dual supervisors, multiple linecards, each integrating specialized ASICs like forwarding engines, queuing engines, MAC interfaces, switching crossbars.
So, yes, I was managing its execution with engineering, its quality with Quality Assurance (QA), its manufacturing, its General Availability (GA), its Marketing launch. I was managing its pricing, its forecasting, its quarterly revenue goals, its purchase procurement process, its OEM go-to-market, the business relationship with its top-tier distributors. I was managing its sales and technical training, its competitive and technical marketing, its positioning, its Fortune 100 customers. I was managing.
It was a unique, immersive, fast paced experience that I could only have had in a startup with a small team of product managers like ours. In retrospect, I now understand what Marty Cagan means by "product management theater": after my startup was acquired by a big company, a portion of my responsibilities were distributed among roles like project managers, partner managers, product operations, sales specialists, etc.
This role was more of a management, operational, and business position, for which I had to develop adjacent skills across engineering, finance, marketing, support, and sales disciplines.
💡 Insights for Founders: This is the product version of the “smart generalist” role that Gokul Rajaram suggests startups should hire early on: a versatile individual a founder can rely on to solve problems and execute tasks — truly invaluable, they can really do anything. While generally crucial for any startup, this profile becomes indispensable for the rising sector of AI hardware companies, where someone with this broad set of skills will offer a guaranteed ROI.
Specifically to product design instead, I was part of a “feature team” in Cagan terminology: I was not responsible for specifying the details of the product, as that process was fully driven by the engineering team's technical expertise, essential for such a complex technology product.
I was certainly not a product designer, let alone a product builder.
The Product Designer
In the companies I started or joined as founding member, I acted more as a Product Designer rather than Product Manager. A product designer is often misconceived as someone solely focused on making the UI of a product more aesthetically pleasing (”the Figma guy”), but in my definition it is more the next stage of product management rather than pure visual design.
As a Product Designer, I had to deeply research and understand user needs, user workflows, existing solutions, addressable markets. I had to come up with concepts for new products or ideas for new features. I had to craft detailed designs of the product and the overall user experience. I had to design the UI and each UX flows inside the product. I had to test the product myself to make sure the execution reflected the experience I had designed. I had to validate the product with users to gather feedback and identify areas for improvement. I had to design our website to make sure it reflected our brand. I had to launch the product. I had to tell a story about it and market it.
💡 Insights for Founders: No matter how product-oriented you are as a founder, you will absolutely benefit from offloading the product execution of your own vision to this type of 360-degree product designer. Vision is what a founder is responsible for and your best bet to achieve that is to hire professionals who can turn that vision into a product sooner rather than later. Don’t settle for a visual designer, hire a Product Designer.
In this broader definition of Product Designer, I was certainly more of a product builder than when I was a Product Manager. However, I still depended entirely on my development team to actually build the product and I could only “build it” through the product specifications I wrote, the UI I designed, the bugs I reported.
The (AI) Product Builder
I believe AI presents an unprecedented opportunity to elevate Product Manager and Designer roles to the next level: the Product Builder.
The Product Builder represents the ultimate combination of Product Manager and Product Designer skillsets, leveraging AI to directly participate in building products - fundamentally accelerating development through a collaborative co-creation process.
My recent work developing an LLM-powered AI product allowed me to experience this Product Builder dynamic firsthand.
I’m not coding the product in the classical meaning, but I train the model powering it, I test the model against evals (and different foundational models), I re-train the model to further improve it. At least for this portion of the product, I don’t need to write more specs, file bugs, test the fixes: I just build the product.
I also rely on a generic GenAI module taking a JSON input and spitting a JSON output to implement a variety of complete product features just by prompting it. With the power of LLMs and this simple system in place, I could add, myself, features that would have otherwise taken engineering weeks to build without LLMs.
I haven’t incorporated yet in my workflow tools like Vercel v0 (generative UI), Devin (coding assistance) or Galileo AI (website design), but I’m sure I will shortly, based on promising initial testing. Then, I’ll be able to build UIs instead of just designing them on Figma, take on coding tasks to align the product with my own specification or directly handle the design of website sections.
To be clear, this paradigm is not about replacing engineers and designers - far from it. Of course there is tons of engineering work needed just to enable these Product Builder workflows and even more engineering and design work needed to fully build the actual product.
But with the level of abstraction now provided by LLMs and the new AI tools, the Product Builder has the unique opportunity to actively participate in building the product, significantly accelerating its execution. It's not just offloading tasks from engineering or designers, but also saving time by removing the inefficiencies of writing product requirements that the team in turn has to interpret and iterate on.
💡 Insights for Founders: Finding individuals who embody the AI Product Builder profile is rare at the moment, as the integration of AI in product development to this extent is still emerging. If you can find or just cultivate this talent within your team, you're not just hiring a role; you're investing in a future where product execution is fundamentally accelerated and aligned even more so with your vision.