The secret to scaling product teams without slowing down

When you promote someone internally, they already have context, product knowledge, and team culture. But they still need to develop product sense, learn how to approach trade-offs, sharpen customer empathy, and master frameworks. Pairing them with an experienced PM (shadowing, mentoring) is the fastest way to transfer that craft. Without that, the ramp-up takes much longer.

Hiring externally looks different but comes with the same delay. Weeks of sourcing, interviews, and negotiations just get you to a signed offer. One hack I’ve seen work: don’t wait for applications. Ask every team member to source one or two strong profiles from their network and pass them to HR. It multiplies the funnel and speeds things up. But still, even strong hires need months to truly settle in and get enough context to make good calls.

Both paths are valid. Both are necessary. And both take time. And while the team waits, priorities slip, engineers spin, and opportunities are missed.

When leaders are pressed by the skill gap, they don’t always choose the best way out. More often than not, they reach for shortcuts that look attractive in the moment but don’t actually solve the problem. I’ve seen two patterns repeat again and again.

The first is the “figure it out ourselves” approach. You tell the team to spend more time reading, watching talks, or experimenting with the latest frameworks or AI tricks. It feels productive, but in reality, it’s the blind leading the blind. Without guidance, people waste energy reinventing wheels or chasing ideas that don’t fit the company’s reality. The learning is fragmented, and momentum slows down.

The second pattern is what I call “the guru route.” This is when a team brings in someone who talks a good game but hasn’t actually built products. They know the frameworks; they can recite the theory, but they don’t have the scars. To me, it feels like a sports commentator telling an athlete how to win the competition. Lots of confident advice, but none of the lived experience of being in the arena.

This is exactly why interim product experts working within the teams can make such a difference. At Value LAB, we’ve built a plug-and-play talent pool designed to enable scale. It’s not just a list of freelancers; it’s a carefully curated network of product and engineering experts who bring deep experience across industries and domains. Collectively, they represent more than 50 years of product leadership. Which means when you bring them in, they don’t need six months to get started. They can embed into your team and start adding value in week one.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard someone say, “I wish I already had a senior PM up to speed.” Interim talent is essentially that wish fulfilled. It gives you breathing room. It buys you time while you grow someone internally or search for the right long-term hire. And maybe most importantly, it models what good product management looks like inside your context, so your team doesn’t just get capacity, they get to learn from someone who’s done it before.

Scaling is inevitable. Struggling doesn’t have to be.