For HR, if you could ask every employee at your organization a question or two each week, what would it be?

What are the company's policies regarding the frequency and timing of employee reviews? Start by checking your employee handbook and make sure you completely understand the policies. You then have a decision to make: you can approach your boss to discuss the matter and try to work it out, you can talk to your HR professionals to ask them to address it on your behalf, or you can wait and ask if any adjustment to your compensation can be made retroactively, in light of the delay. Each strategy carries risks. The first two risk impacting your long term relationship with your boss. The last strategy is a financial risk but preserves the relationship. You have to ultimately decide what's most important to you, and what consequences you're willing to live with. Happy to talk with you directly if I can be of more help.

This depends upon where you are in the start-up continuum. If you are still in search of a viable business model (i.e. the start-up phase) then the "multiple hats" scenario is spot on. In this phase the key is to discover that which is repeatable and scalable. In other words - to put your energy and resources into discovering things like: -Who your market is -What your positioning is -What your offers are -What your pricing model is -Where your market is (aka what channels to use for inbound and outbound marketing) -etc Warning: It would be a mistake to think you already have these things figured out when you haven't. In my experience - mastery of these "basics" are what separates successful businesses from floundering ones. And no offense - but if you are only at $1.1M in gross revenues then it seems to me like you are just beginning to figure these things out. Due to the need for flexibility in this phase (some call this being "agile") you are best served by a team that is willing and able to do what's needed. There will likely not (yet) be any "established" positions. And with (gross?) revenues of only $1.1M it would seem that you wouldn't require a large team anyway. [I suppose this depends upon your current business model - so I apologize for making this assumption.] Once you've discovered a viable business model - then it's time to build systems (since you will only then know all that goes into making the sale). These systems will help you efficiently and effectively scale and repeat. It's at that time you would start creating "positions" (aka jobs) and hiring staff to do what you discovered works. All in all - Much depends on where you are right now in order for me (or anyone else) to provide you with more specific direction. I'd love to talk this through with you if you are still looking for assistance. Best of luck!

Please resist the urge to pull the band-aid. I'm not a fan of keeping a poor performer, but unless this person is a behavioral or "for cause" termination, he deserves some professionalism here. 30-day Performance Plan, make the goals aggressive and stick to it - he can consider that his head start to either buck up or start searching. Remember, your other employees watch how you treat their former colleagues. A quick termination before a holiday is prickish, an aggressive performance plan is taking care of business.

Some of this is stage dependent and all of it is highly dependent on the team above the product manager. The simplest answer of course is to find PM's from companies who have had exemplary success where the Product Manager candidate either led prior success or was exposed to it in a meaningful way. A simple starting point is to ask them to give you examples of conflicting opinions on a feature and how they evaluated the conflicting opinions and made a decision and tracked the success or failure of that decision. AirBnb actually gives PM's homework as part of the interview process where they have to actually present a unique idea (from scratch) to the interviewing team. Happy to talk to you about best process based on your stage and existing team.

Don't worry about the fact that you "failed". What you presumably did is work hard, and learn a lot, and probably created some quality stuff, regardless of whether it ended up being published. That's usually all your potential employers will care about. The people that work for companies that end up going out of business aren't considered failures. They generally produced quality work but their company may have just not been able to find / convince the right customers, which is equivalent to you not having found the right publisher. This is an optimistic way to look at it, but that doesn't mean it's not true in your case. I would publish whatever unfinished books you have on Amazon as e-books. Make a title and cover image. That way they're 'published' immediately, and each book will even get a DOI and/or PMID #. Then you can continue to edit them and finish them whenever you have time (see: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/A2KRM4C8E91086). Meanwhile, if you have other non-book writings, try publishing them as guest-blogger posts on other people's existing blogs. best of luck, Lee