A growing SaaS company often has budget for one more person on the product side and three roles asking for it: a product manager, another engineer and an implementation specialist. The right first hire depends on where work is getting stuck today.
What each role does
- Product manager. Decides what gets built and in what order, by talking to customers and weighing their requests against the plan.
- Engineer. Builds and maintains the product.
- Implementation specialist. Sets the product up for each new customer: configuration, data migration, integrations and training. Some companies call this onboarding or solutions.
Find where work is stuck
Look at the last three months and ask where the delays were.
Signed customers are waiting to go live. If contracts are signed but customers take months to start using the product, hire implementation first. This happens often when SaaS is sold to large companies, where each customer wants its own setup and its own training. Until someone owns that work, your engineers do it and the roadmap slips.
The backlog is clear but delivery is slow. If everyone agrees what to build and it still ships late, you need engineering capacity. Check first whether engineers are losing time to support and customer setup. If they are, the previous answer applies.
Engineers are busy but the product is not improving. If the team ships a lot and customers still ask for basics, or every large customer gets a custom feature, nobody is deciding priorities. In an early company the founder does this. Hire a product manager when the founder no longer has time to speak to customers every week and write clear requirements.
Mistakes to avoid
One is hiring a product manager too early. A small team whose founder knows the customers does not have enough product decisions to fill the job, and the new hire ends up as a project coordinator. Another is hiring a senior person from a large company for a role that needs hands-on work. A product manager who has always had analysts and designers around them may struggle when they must write the specifications, test the build and answer customer calls themselves.
What to test in each
For a product manager, share ten real customer requests and ask which three they would build and why. For an engineer, use a small task from your own codebase. For an implementation specialist, ask them to plan the go-live of a difficult customer and explain what they would say to that customer in the first call.
Before you write the job description, list every task that was delayed last quarter and mark who should have owned it. The role with the longest list is your next hire.