Which companies produce the best product managers
Part two in my exploration of the companies that find and develop the best PMs
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My first-ever deep dive a few months ago into which companies accelerate PM careers most led to a lot of great feedback and ideas, so I’m back with a follow-up, going one level deeper into the question: Which companies produce the best product managers? We arrived at the answer by triangulating a bunch of juicy data.
In this post, we’ll look at:
Which companies create the most successful PM alumni founders
Which companies accelerate PM careers most—with four new data points since the last deep dive
Why Stripe PMs didn’t score higher—this one is fascinating
Across the board, here are the top companies that seem to produce the best PMs:
The big change we made in this updated edition was zeroing in on just the past 10 years vs. the company’s entire history. We also went deeper into the founder data, looking at not just the raw number of founders but also how they’ve done. And we added a few companies to the list (e.g. Airbnb, DoorDash, Salesforce, Dropbox) that people pointed out we missed.
A big thank-you to Live Data Technologies (Jason Saltzman and Ethan Elias) for sharing this data with us and for helping with the analysis.
Caveats:
We are looking only at companies that have enough data (i.e. enough PM alumni) to draw meaningful conclusions from. Your startup may be producing the best PMs ever—we just won’t know this yet.
A confounding variable is the quality of PMs these companies hire. If a company hires only amazing senior PMs, they will naturally go on to do amazing things—and that doesn’t mean the company made these PMs great. However, if the goal of this post is to help you figure out where to work, getting a gig at one of the companies on this list will put you on a good track either way.
1. Which companies create the most founders—and the most successful founders?
First, we looked into which companies’ PM alumni go on to start the most companies, irrespective of how these companies do. Palantir dominates. Over a third of their PMs have started a company. 🤯
Intercom comes in second, at over 18% (almost one in every five alumni PMs!), followed by Dropbox, Plaid, N26, Revolut, Duolingo, Uber, LinkedIn, and Coinbase.
I’ll also give props to Ramp, Airbnb, and Notion, which came in just below the top 10 but all have 10% of alumni PMs who start a company. That’s impressive as hell.
Go work at one of these companies if your goal is to start your own company: Palantir, Intercom, Dropbox, Plaid, N26, Revolut, Duolingo, Uber, LinkedIn, Coinbase, Ramp, Airbnb, or Notion. But keep reading. . .
Next, we looked more closely at which companies create the most successful founders. It’s one thing to start a company—it’s another to start something that works.
Based on the data we have available to us, the best proxy we found for measuring “successful” was to look at which companies have gone on to raise a Series A. Yes, some founders choose to stay bootstrapped and never raise money, and raising a Series A doesn’t mean you’re successful, but it’s a simple way to zero in on founders aiming to build large venture-scale companies.
The headline is Chime. Wow. Over 20% (one in five) of Chime’s PM alumni go on to not just start a company but also raise a Series A.
Scale, Palantir, and Faire aren’t too far behind, at around 15%. And then we have Dropbox, Robinhood, Stripe, Block/Square, Coinbase, and Salesforce rounding out the top 10.
Go work at one of these places if you want to build a venture-scale company: Chime, Scale, Palantir, Faire, Dropbox, Robinhood, Stripe, Block/Square, Coinbase, Salesforce.
Which companies accelerate PM careers most?
Building on our analysis in the previous edition and adding four new data points, below we’ve triangulated which companies’ alumni PMs create the biggest inflection in the career of their PMs by looking at:
Rate of PMs getting promoted within the company
Rate of alumni PMs getting promoted after leaving
The average time to promotion after leaving
The average time to reach a leadership position (e.g. VP of Product, Head of, CPO)
Takeaways:
Intercom dominates. It’s the only company to rank in the top 10 on all four dimensions (1st in promotions internally, 5th in promotions externally, 7th in fastest to promotion, and 9th in fastest rise to leadership). 👏
Revolut and Nubank are tied for second place, both ranking in the top 10 in three different categories. Fintech? More like Win-tech. 🤣
N26 comes in fourth, ranking in the top 10 in two categories: rate of promotion externally and fastest rise to leadership. Nice.
A special mention to Palantir, Deel, HubSpot, Discord, Block/Square, Faire, Chime, and Cruise for ranking highly in at least one of the categories.
