Product management is a hard job. Some of the reasons for this are mundane: long hours, lots of responsibility, isolation. But one big reason for why the job is difficult is not related to the execution factors (i.e. what you might call work/life balance), but rather the fundamental nature of the job itself: the need to live in two worlds simultaneously.

Sometimes when we talk about risk within fintech companies, we lose track of the core concept. Since risk is such a central aspect of what we do, this can harm our ability to make good decisions. ‘Risk’ does not stand alone as a concept – it requires additional information to be meaningful.

Hiring is a matching problem: finding the right fit (the right employee + the right company) is hard but vital. Investing more effort into this search will pay big dividends.

How does a company know that it’s the right time to hire a product manager? This is not such an easy question to answer, as it turns out. There’s no precise formula (although there are still some helpful rules of thumb), because different companies have different focuses.