Hire a Head of Product
The hire where the founder has to give something up, and usually does not want to.
You are hiring someone to take a job you liked doing
- Retained recruiters.
- LinkedIn Recruiter seats.
- Keyword-matched resumes.
- Templated InMails.
Until this hire, product is the founder's. The roadmap is in their head, the taste is theirs, and the best decisions came from customer calls they took personally. A head of product has to take that over without turning it into a process.
That makes stage fit unusually important. Product leaders from large companies arrive with frameworks, quarterly planning and a team structure. At thirty people, that machinery buries the thing that was working.
It also makes the search hard to run on titles. The strongest candidates are often the first PM at a company that went well, or a founder whose startup did not, and neither has Head of Product on the CV.
How the agent runs a head of product search
It reads the thinking
Product leaders leave a trail: essays, changelogs they wrote, talks about a launch that went badly. That is where judgement and taste are visible, not in titles.
It searches the adjacent paths
First PMs, founding designers who owned scope, technical founders between companies. The agent surfaces them and says why they fit.
Outreach that admits the handover
Senior product people want to know what they actually own. The message is honest about what the founder will keep deciding and what they will not.
Screening on the disagreement
Your questions go out early: the last time they told a founder no, and what happened next.
Questions.
Answered.
If you want someone to execute a roadmap you still own, hire a PM. If you want someone to own the roadmap, hire the leader. Most founders want the first and advertise the second.
They need to hold their own with your engineers. Formal engineering experience matters less than whether they have shipped in a technical environment.
Public evidence first: what they shipped, how they wrote about it, what they killed. Then your screening questions in the first exchange.
Often excellent and frequently overlooked. The agent surfaces them, and the read is honest about the risk that they leave to start something again.
Hire a Founding Product Manager
An operator who owns roadmap, research, and launches, not a process manager.
Hire a VP of Engineering
The hire that either buys you a year of focus or costs you one.
Hire a Product Designer
The designer whose work defines how your product feels.
Find your head of product.
Tell us what you are handing over and the agent will find people who have taken it before.