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Pick your spike
Some PMs excel at craft. Others can walk into a room of stakeholders with strong opinions and leave with everyone swimming in the same direction. Whichever it is, the skill that can be tied to a company's impact deserves the extra effort.
Combining disciplines
Combining disciplines multiplies it. A product-minded engineer is an absolute unicorn when engineers act as mini PMs, and a PM who can design is one when the designer is stretched thin, and a company is far less likely to let that person go. Nick Lin, who runs Claude for Excel and Sheets, came from investment banking and private equity, which suits that product exactly.
His own mix
A mix of founder experience, finance, and sales sits behind the growth leader's own outsized impact, and he was right on the edge of choosing sales over product.
Why do combined skills make people so rare?
Each added skill narrows the pool of people who have the full set, so a combination can be scarce even when every individual skill is common. Economist Edward Lazear studied Stanford MBA alumni and found that people who had held a wider range of roles were more likely to become entrepreneurs, which he attributed to the need for competence across many areas.
Why does finance suit a spreadsheet product?
Investment banking and private equity run on financial models built largely in spreadsheets, so analysts in those fields spend years working in Excel. They learn conventions such as blue text for hard-coded inputs and black for formulas. A product built for spreadsheets is judged by whether it respects those habits and the formatting standards a model's reviewers expect. Microsoft released Excel in 1985, first for the Macintosh.