How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
The CEO of the company you work at now, Mercury, tweeted a few years ago, where he basically was very proud of not having any product managers. Clearly, you have product managers today. You're a product manager at Mercury. What was the sign to Immad and the leadership team that it was time to hire product managers?

**Rohini Pandhi** (0:16)
The bottlenecks started popping up to take things from soup to nuts on every single project. It requires design and eng then to take on a lot more responsibility, which means if somebody is doing the PM duties, even if you don't have a PM.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:28)
What is it that you think people most miss about the value that a PM brings to your org?

**Rohini Pandhi** (0:32)
There's just so many different flavors of what a product manager is. We use this idea of a pioneer, a town settler, and a city planner. The pioneer is a PM that's really good at zero to one. Settler PM is in that growth stage of maturity of a product. You're in a town, there might be a bank, there might be a post office, but nothing more than that. Then a city planner is a PM that's really good at mature products. They have the city.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:56)
Let's talk about the final big topic, going multi-product.

**Rohini Pandhi** (0:58)
The organizational structure is really important. One thing we learned was having new product areas, new seedlings being too close within the true org structure to the core banking or payments for mature products made it hard for that new product to even grow.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:17)
Today my guest is Rohini Pandhi. Rohini is currently a product leader at Mercury, where she leads the product expansion team, which incubates and scales new product lines within Mercury. Previously, she spent over 7 years at Square, also known as Block, leading product work on Square payments, invoicing and the Bitkey hardware Bitcoin wallet. She's also the co-founder of the startup bootcamp Transparent Collective and a very active angel investor. In her conversation, we talk about why founders are often so resistant to hiring product managers, and Mercury's journey on deciding to hire their first PM and then scale their product management team. Also we get into what attracts great product managers to join your company. She makes an argument for why it's important to invest in quality and user experience versus just working on things that move metrics and how that could differentiate your business. We also do a deep dive into how she successfully launched a half dozen new product lines at Mercury just this past year, which is extremely rare and very hard to do, and also something that every single startup hopes to do and tries to do and often fails. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Rohini Pandhi. This episode is brought to you by Cloudinary, the foundational technology for all images and video on the Internet. Trusted by over 2 million developers and many of the world's leading brands, Cloudinary is the API-first image and video management platform built for product leaders who rely on visual storytelling to express their unique product value, who are building engaging web and app experiences, and who understand that harnessing the power of AI to automate is the only way forward. Gil Grossman, engineering team lead at Fiverr, says that our users share billions of images, video and audio files. Cloudinary's ability to automate our post-production work at scale amounts to a savings of up to 92,000 workdays per month. Think bold, build big, ship fast, let Cloudinary handle your media needs. Start your free plan today at cloudinary.com/lenny.
I'm excited to chat with Christina Gilbert, the founder of One Schema, one of our longtime podcast sponsors. Hi Christina.

**Christina Gilbert** (3:36)
Yes, thank you for having me on Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:38)
What is the latest with One Schema? I know you now work with some of my favorite companies like Ramp, Vanta, Scale and Watershed. I heard that you just launched a new product to help product teams import CSVs from especially tricky systems like ERPs.

**Christina Gilbert** (3:53)
Yes, so we just launched One Schema File Feeds, which allows you to build an integration with any system in 15 minutes as long as you can export a CSV to an SFTP folder. We see our customers all the time getting stuck with hacks and workarounds and the product teams that we work with don't have to turn down prospects because their systems are too hard to integrate with. We allow our customers to offer thousands of integrations without involving their engineering team at all.