People work on what they want to work on. Product development is driven by whoever wants to drive product.
That is the surest way to reduce your startup's odds of survival. In this case, it would become a prototypical case study in survivor bias.
GitHub is lucky that they are building a product that is tailored for developers. It makes their survival rate doing this slightly higher because the developers are (only vaguely) similar to their customers. The further these two points are from each other, the worse this advice becomes.
A startup needs somebody who understands how to drive products into markets. Whether this is the CEO or a product manager hired off the street doesn't matter, but they need somebody doing it who has the real authority to turn those learnings into a product fit for a market.
FWIW, I've lived the flip side of this coin: building a tool for developers driven by what we thought would be cool to build instead of having a product guy hitting the street to understand the real customer. After burning through more than $20M, the lights got turned off.
That is the surest way to reduce your startup's odds of survival. In this case, it would become a prototypical case study in survivor bias.
GitHub is lucky that they are building a product that is tailored for developers. It makes their survival rate doing this slightly higher because the developers are (only vaguely) similar to their customers. The further these two points are from each other, the worse this advice becomes.
A startup needs somebody who understands how to drive products into markets. Whether this is the CEO or a product manager hired off the street doesn't matter, but they need somebody doing it who has the real authority to turn those learnings into a product fit for a market.
FWIW, I've lived the flip side of this coin: building a tool for developers driven by what we thought would be cool to build instead of having a product guy hitting the street to understand the real customer. After burning through more than $20M, the lights got turned off.