"Product Manager." "Product Owner." "Product Designer." "Head of Product." "Growth PM." The titles multiply, the definitions blur, and somewhere along the way it becomes genuinely hard to answer a simple question: what actually makes someone a product person?
This talk tackles that question from two angles — one practical, one structural.
First, how to build a product team: what roles you actually need, when you need them, how to sequence hires as your company grows, and what processes glue them together. Hiring a Senior PM at seed stage is as wrong as hiring a Product Analyst at Series B — but most founders learn this the expensive way.
Second, the Product Competence Map: a framework covering 7 domain categories and 2 enabling categories that define product work across 18 distinct roles. It's the answer to "what is a product person, really?" — and a tool for both the people hiring them and the people becoming them.

What you'll take away
A clear model for which product roles matter at which stage — seed, growth, scale — and which ones are premature hires
How to set up the processes that let a product team actually function (not just exist on an org chart)
The full Product Competence Map: 7 domain + 2 enabling categories across 18 roles
Access to the proprietary Product Competence Map to self-evaluate your own competencies, identify gaps, and plan growth
A clearer answer to "am I a product person, and what kind?" — whether you're hiring them or becoming one

Who this is for
Founders and CEOs building a product team for the first time — or the second, after the first attempt didn't work
Product people at any level who want to understand where they sit on the map, what's adjacent, and where to grow next - designers, product managers, scrum masters, developers
Hiring managers and People ops trying to write job descriptions that actually describe the job