Product Management

For a little context, I’m not a product manager by training. I’m a former startup guy that was hired by a large company to build a product in an area I have expertise in. Since joining almost 2 years ago, the product is starting to take off, and we’ve expanded the team to 20+ people. I’ve been able to offload all the sales/marketing/cs stuff, but I’m still the sole product person and I lead the engineering team. I’m planning on eventually also separating myself from the engineering side of things as well.

I run a pretty basic, startup-y product discovery and delivery process (talk to customers, prioritize feature roadmap, manage execution), but we’re planning on doing some significant product expansion, and I don’t have the bandwidth to do everything myself. I got the OK to hire my first PM (mid-level) to handle more of the core platform’s feature development while I focus on the overall strategy and executing on the product expansion.

My concern is that I’ve never managed a product person before, and I want to make sure I’m setting them up for success. Any recommendations on things I should do/prepare for beforehand to make this go as smoothly as possible?