We've had an EM role open on our team for several months. This is a post about everything we learned from why we haven't filled it yet. I'd love to get your help in filling it! 🤝 The role: - EM for our 0-to-1 team within Postman, with the goal of defining and winning our category for a new kind of API-level monitoring/observability tool. Our team came into Postman through an acquisition and we're now building the Postman version of our product, using the same tech. - Help scale our product and team from alpha into beta. We are a department with six engineers and approved headcount to grow a lot more in the next year. - The role is 60% prioritization/roadmap management, 40% building the team. The current team members are high-ownership, independent, founding engineer types. 🤔 Misconceptions, miscalibrations, and lessons: - Initially, the role was called "Senior Engineering Manager, Observability." Instead of getting the product engineering managers we were looking for, we primarily got interest from platform/infra EMs. We got thousands of inbound applications and spent months zeroing that out. 🙀 - Previously, our recruiters were sourcing a lot of folks with observability backgrounds. We've learned that since we're actually building a new kind of observability product, much more focused on UX, the profile we're looking for is product-focused rather than tech-focused. No observability experience required. - When people think Postman, they often think of our core product: the API client. So we were getting more interest from folks looking to scale a product, rather than 0-to-1 "I want to build a team and product" types. Postman actually has several other products, for instance testing and Flows, our no-code tool. There is a lot of interesting 0-to-1 work on our way to growing as a multi-product platform! - Some people have the perception that Postman isn't one of the high-growth companies because they're not seeing lots of their friends joining Postman. Postman has quadrupled since 2020, BUT a lot of the engineering growth has been in India. (Postman is the biggest SaaS company to come out of India!) Our team is part of a recent change to grow our US engineering presence. Many of us leaders across the company are looking for folks to join early cohorts of US-based product engineering and platform teams. 💡 What we've changed on our end: - We've deemphasized the "observability" part of the job and emphasized the "new product" and "product engineering" parts of the job. - We've also switched our own reachouts to look for people with product engineering experience at SaaS companies with product-led growth. 👩🚀 Help us find our EM! We now have a solid pipeline, but haven't yet made a hire. We'd love to hear from you if: - You have thoughts about how to improve our EM search. - You know someone we should meet. - You're a scrappy EM looking for an opportunity to build a new product while growing a team. Look forward to hearing from you!
Dallas Tester
2mo
The role should be open to folks outside of the Bay Area. My background is a great fit for the role--lots of engineering and product management experience in APIs, CTO/founder experience, leadership, etc.--but I'm not based in the Bay Area. The JD states that this person will manage across geos and timezones, so the team is already distributed. The restriction on the manager being in the Bay Area doesn't have good reasoning in the JD. There is a hint of reasoning with the mention of HQ and leadership being based in the Bay Area, but I'm not sure why that's a blocker. A good leader will be able to connect and collaborate with folks regardless of location. I was fully remote for Twitch as their first dev advocate and, later, API PM. They were hiring Bay Area-only, but we came to an agreement that I would fly to SF for 1 week per month in-person time. That worked out great! Consider those types of arrangements to open up your talent pool a bit more.
John Crickett
2mo
0-1 is a lot of fun! Sounds like a great opportunity for someone!
Erin Walker
2mo
I love how you laid out your thinking at this point of the process. Every interview process isn’t linear and sometimes we learn and make discoveries along the way.
Greg Hale
2mo
So useful to hear the inside story like this. Thanks for writing it up!
Would love to chat, Jean!
🚀 I develop innovative mobile and web software products 🚀
2moAs developer I love Postman, it makes my life easier. However, might I ask.. Isn’t it possible for a EM without previous experience observability but great skills in leading SE to be a good fit? Beside this, if someone is really good at 0-1, wouldn’t she be a founder/entrepreneur? I hope you will find the Engineer Manager that you are looking for.