Hiring your first product manager sounds straightforward until it isn’t.
One moment you’re building a prototype. Next, your sales team has signed customers you’re not ready to support, and the entire business is scrambling to catch up.
That’s the reality Nina Paul has stepped into more than once.
In this conversation with Heidi Ram, Product Practice Lead at The Product Recruiter, Nina shares what it actually looks like to be the first PM inside a founder-led company, how quickly the role can change, and what founders often underestimate when they make that hire.
I’ve been the first PM at a couple of companies now.
Most recently, I was VP of Product at Clean Choice Energy, where I also came in as their first product manager. Before that, I worked in VR, IoT for connected vehicles, and earlier in my career, hospitality tech.
I’ve always been drawn to new problems. Different industries, different products, different challenges. That’s really what product is about for me.
At Clean Choice, the company had been around for about six years. They were primarily doing direct mail marketing in the retail energy space.
They had just won a Department of Energy grant to launch a new business line called community solar. The idea was to create a subscription product that would give customers access to renewable energy at a discount.
What I was told in the interview was that we’d be building a small prototype. There was one farm, about ten customers, mostly friends and family. The plan was to test and iterate.
What I wasn’t told was that business development was already out selling.
About six weeks after I joined, on Christmas Eve, we got a call saying they had signed a portfolio of 10,000 customers and billing needed to start in four months.
That was the moment everything changed.
It meant we had to build everything, fast.
This wasn’t just a feature or a small product. We needed a full subscription platform. Customer onboarding, billing systems, reporting, customer portals, everything.
The challenge was that energy billing is extremely complex. It’s not something you can realistically build in a few months, especially with a relatively junior engineering team.
We tried.
The first version didn’t work at all.
For months, the operations team had to manually produce bills while we tried to stabilize things. Engineering was fully tied up, and other teams across the company were getting pulled into supporting this effort.
It became a company-wide problem.
One big thing is that product isn’t just about building features.
It’s about understanding how decisions affect the entire business.
When you launch something like this, it impacts everything. Engineering, operations, customer experience, even the rest of the company’s priorities.
At Clean Choice, a lot of the existing business got put on hold because so many people were pulled into supporting this new product. That’s something founders don’t always anticipate.
The role becomes less about execution and more about navigating those trade-offs.
In my experience, it really comes down to trust.
At Clean Choice, I worked closely with the CTO, and I was given a lot of autonomy. There wasn’t a lot of pushback, even though we were dealing with a pretty complex and messy situation.
What was harder was managing expectations across the rest of the business.
People were frustrated because this new product was consuming resources but not generating revenue yet. And I couldn’t always give clear timelines because we were figuring things out as we went.
That’s where the role can be challenging. You’re balancing what leadership wants, what the team can realistically deliver, and what the business actually needs.
