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Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

51.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2025

⏱️ 79 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Rohini Pandhi is a product leader at Mercury, and previously spent over seven years at Square/Block leading product work on Square payments, invoicing, and the Bitkey hardware Bitcoin wallet. She’s also the co-founder of the startup bootcamp Transparent Collective and is an active angel investor. In our conversation, we discuss:

• Key indicators that it’s time to hire PMs

• How to build your early PM team

• Why founders should initially take on the product manager role themselves

• How to attract top PM talent

• What she’s learned about going multi-product

• A case for investing in quality

• More

Skip the Mercury Personal waitlist: https://mercurytechnologies.typeform.com/lenny

Brought to you by:

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-build-your-product-team-from-scratch-rohini-pandhi

Where to find Rohini Pandhi:

• X: https://x.com/rohinip

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohinipandhi

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Rohini’s background

(05:00) The role of product managers at Mercury

(09:51) Key indicators that it’s time to hire PMs

(13:18) Building the product team at Mercury

(19:53) Why you should avoid hiring PMs too early

(22:26) The different flavors of product management

(26:15) How to attract top talent

(35:59) Advocating for quality in product development

(44:10) Going multi-product

(46:37) Organizational structure for multi-product success

(50:57) Organizational culture for multi-product success

(52:07) Customer obsession and product development

(57:36) More lessons from going multi-product

(01:05:57) Transparent Collective: supporting underrepresented founders

(01:09:54) Lightning round

Referenced:

• Immad Akhund on X: https://x.com/immad

• Mercury: https://mercury.com

• Square: https://squareup.com

• Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners [Wardley]: https://orghacking.com/pioneers-settlers-town-planners-wardley-9dcd3709cde7

• Jason Zhang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-zhang-5645a860

• What is ‘Dogfooding’?: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/business/dogfooding.html

• Mercury Bill Pay: https://mercury.com/bill-pay

• Zip: https://zip.co

• Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira

• The art and science of pricing | Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation, Simon-Kucher): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-art-and-science-of-pricing-madhavan

• Gokul Rajaram on designing your product development process, when and how to hire your first PM, a playbook for hiring leaders, getting ahead in you career, how to get started angel investing, more: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/gokul-rajaram-on-designing-your-product

• Gokul Rajaram on X: https://x.com/gokulr

• Transparent Collective: https://www.transparentcollective.com

• 16 Reading Tips from Naval Ravikant: https://alexandbooks.com/archive/16-reading-tips-from-naval-ravikant

Shrinking on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/shrinking

Bad Sisters on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/bad-sisters

Slow Horses on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/slow-horses

Severance on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/severance

Presumed Innocent on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/presumed-innocent

• Waymo: https://waymo.com

• Adam Robinson on X: https://x.com/IAmAdamRobinson

• Cyan Banister—From Homeless and Broke to Top Angel Investor (Uber, SpaceX, and 100+ More): https://tim.blog/2024/11/28/cyan-banister

• Bobby Matson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobbymatson

• Jobs at Mercury: https://mercury.com/jobs

Recommended books:

Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays: https://www.amazon.com/Vectors-Aphorisms-Ten-Second-James-Richardson/dp/0967266890

• The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance: https://www.amazon.com/Inner-Game-Tennis-Classic-Performance/dp/0679778314

Pachinko: https://www.amazon.com/Pachinko-National-Book-Award-Finalist/dp/1455563927

Cutting for Stone: https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Stone-Abraham-Verghese/dp/0375714367

The Song of Achilles: https://www.amazon.com/Song-Achilles-Novel-Madeline-Miller/dp/0062060627

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.



Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

The CEO of the company you work at now, Mercury, tweeted a few years ago, where he basically

0:06.2

was very proud of not having any product managers.

0:09.3

Clearly you have product managers today.

0:10.8

You're a product manager at Mercury.

0:12.5

What was the sign to Imada and the leadership team that it was time to hire product managers?

0:16.7

The bottlenecks started popping up to take things from like soup to nuts on every single

0:21.7

project. It requires design and Eng then to take on a lot more responsibility, which means

0:26.1

somebody's doing the PM duties, even if you don't have a PM.

0:28.2

What is it you think people most miss about the value that a PM brings to your org?

0:32.9

There's just so many different flavors of what a product manager is. We use this idea of

0:37.1

like a pioneer, a town

0:38.4

settler, and a city planner. So the pioneer is a PM that's really good at zero to one.

0:42.8

Settler PM is in that growth stage of maturity of a product. You're in a town. There might be

0:48.4

a bank. There might be a post office, but nothing more than that. And then a city planner is a PM

0:53.7

that's really good at mature products.

0:55.2

They have the city. Let's talk about the final big topic going multi-product. The organizational structure

0:59.9

is really important. One thing we learned was having new product areas, new seedlings being too

1:05.6

close within the true org structure to the core banking or payments or mature products made it hard for that

1:12.2

new product to even grow.

1:17.3

Today, my guest is Rohini Pandi.

1:20.0

Rojini is currently a product leader at Mercury, where she leads to the product expansion

1:24.3

team, which incubates and scales new product lines within Mercury.

...

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