Is there a tool/software that helps manage who gets what product in the case of customized products.

I am assuming your question is more pertaining to empowering and motivating (rather than hiring). I can outline some of the practices I have seen really result in high motivation and sense of ownership among engineering teams: * Empathize - Your engineering team will work well and be more motivated if they see you as one of them rather than a person who doesn't understand their function. Show your geeky side to them, and show that you understand their thought process and drivers. * Pick their brain on big and small decisions (roadmap, usability, whatever it is) - Product teams value being heard. The more you position yourself as someone who is WANTS to listen, is keen to have their inputs, you will be surprised at how involved they can get, and also how you can actually tap into a lot of smart ideas/thoughts from them that you can develop on. * Take care to explain - show how you arrive at decisions. Share your research, competitive analysis, and even your thought process on arriving at a feature set or list of things for a release. Its stuff you would have worked on anyway - so no harm sharing with more eyes! * Share customer feedback - nothing motivates your engineers than a positive interaction with a customer. Get them to see customer feedback. Have them sit in and observe some of the usability studies. (B2B - have them see you do some demos or do a successful sales pitch) * Send out interesting articles, insights, business and tech articles with your comments/highlights to them on a regular basis (maybe twice a week?) - maybe even some analysis you did on competition or customer feedback * Engineers like working with people they feel are competent and complement the work they are doing to build a great product. So make sure they see how everyone else around them is also doing a good job and adding value and contributing to the success of the product. * Be transparent about the product/business - Make them feel they are responsible and involved in the business, not just technology. I've seen engineering teams happy about their annual goals having components relating to making revenues, keeping customers happy, or reducing costs. If they are enthused about the business as a whole, they will be more motivated with their engineering efforts * Have a mix of little experiments, R&D, attending to engineering debt, in addition to bug fixes and new features that each engineer gets to spend some time on (based on their interest) * Finally get to know each of your engineers personally, and be aware of what their priorities are. Each of us has different motivations in life, so there is no silver bullet to motivate people. When they know you care for them, they are more motivated :).

I read your story and I feel your pain, but I have bad news. The problem is not your people, the problem is you. You have a responsibility that goes way beyond developing great products that wow customers; you have the responsibility of leading! Leadership is one of those subjects that most people feel they have covered, I thought I had it covered too until I found myself in exactly the same shoes as you are wearing right now, and boy did it pinch. It took a while for me to realize I was the problem but three things clued me in: 1. I found out that I kept firing and hiring new people and it did not make a difference 2. I met a friend who was building a great company with what I would consider average people and he was really getting things done. The difference was that leading people came natural to him while building products came natural to me 3. I finally came to terms with the fact that I enjoyed being the solution point and the center of the product development universe. Clients loved me, me people stood in awe of me and I loved it and hated it at the same time You need to get into a leadership coaching program. I'm sure you will find some very capable people on clarity but trust me, the sooner you start, the better. Your organization will not change until you change, and there is no better way to say it. Like I said, I know your pain and you are not alone in this my friend.

As a 500 Startup mentor I would suggest the following 1) Blog about distribution, design and data. Those are the things that 500 values most and usually the fastest way to get on their radar. 2) Interact with @davemcclure (and all other partners) on Twitter 3) Attend geeks on a plane or other events they host. It's all about relationships and perception, so create opportunities to increase the probability of showing them that you have skills that are relevant to the companies they invest in. Hope that helps.

Don't Outsource. Period. While there are big drawbacks with outsourcing related to building internal expertise the real reason I would never outsource at your stage is the need for speed and flexibility. Per your description, you are an early stage start-up with a MVP that is gathering data. Congratulations as that is a big accomplishment! However, you inevitably have a ton to learn about what your prospective customers need most and what customers deserve your attention most. The means you will be tweaking your product constantly for the foreseeable future and having to submit ideas to an outsourced team, make sure they understand what you want, wait for the new feature to be scheduled, etc is just too slow and too expensive. You should have your developers literally sitting next to you and (if you have one besides yourself) your product person so you can quickly and constantly share information. Good luck! You are in for a fun ride...

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.