[gyardley]

Sure - that's how most places usually hire their first product manager, if they're not just promoting from within. Honestly, that's how most early-stage startups hire pretty much anybody.

If the company continues to succeed in spite of itself, eventually that guy (it's almost always a guy) gets sacked and they bring on someone who's at least managed a team of product managers elsewhere. The new person almost always has a hiring process similar to the one in the post, having either figured it out from experience or from reading one of the many articles very very very similar to this one.