Hire a Founding Product Manager
An operator who owns roadmap, research, and launches, not a process manager.
Most PM candidates are the wrong shape for early-stage
- Retained recruiters.
- LinkedIn Recruiter seats.
- Keyword-matched resumes.
- Templated InMails.
PMs from big companies are trained to run rituals: grooming, stand-ups, quarterly planning. They rely on the researchers, designers, and analysts around them. Drop them into a 5-person startup and they stall.
What you need is a PM who will talk to customers on Monday, write the spec on Tuesday, test the prototype with your designer on Wednesday, and QA the launch on Friday. That's a different job.
The best early-stage PMs often come from adjacent roles: former founders, engineers who moved into product, design-minded operators. Recruiters filtering by 'PM title + years of experience' miss them entirely.
How Superposition finds your founding PM
Operator signal, not title signal
We look at shipping history, customer-interview output, and evidence of ownership, not just the word 'PM' on a resume.
Adjacent-role sourcing
Former founders, engineers-turned-PMs, and design-minded operators often outperform career PMs at this stage. We surface them.
Intake that reveals the real ask
Our voice agent separates 'need a PM' from 'need a scoping partner who will own GTM'. They require very different people.
Only high-signal matches reach you
No firehose of PMs with shiny titles. Just candidates who can actually operate at your stage.
Questions.
Answered.
Usually not yet. The first product hire makes sense when the founder is the bottleneck on decisions rather than when the roadmap is long.
A founding PM executes and owns an area. A Head of Product owns the roadmap and eventually a team. Founders often want the first and advertise the second.
They need to hold their own with your engineers. Having shipped in a technical environment matters more than a formal engineering background.
Through what they shipped, what they killed and how they wrote about both, plus your screening questions in the first exchange.
Hire a Founding Salesperson
The first GTM hire who sells the vision and closes the deal.
Hire a Head of Sales
The leader who turns founder-led sales into a repeatable motion.
Superposition for Series A Startups
The key hires that will define your next 18 months, without the 30% retained fee.
Find your founding PM.
Stop getting sent process managers. Get an operator who ships.