5 lessons on Product Management in Startups

I value “first times” a lot in life. My first ever tweet was dedicated to #BatKid. My first ever Medium post had to be about something that I am passionate about: building products in startups.

I have the most awesome job in the world where I get to build products at StyleSeat, both for beauty professionals to grow their business & help them connect with new clients, and also for clients to discover new professionals, get inspired and book all beauty appointments online.

It’s been one hell of a year at StyleSeat. Hyper growth phase. Series B funding. Moar new awesome co-workers every month, almost outgrowing our SoMa space. Hockey stick growth graphs in every team update. Like, every single update. Good times.

As the company size tripled in last year, in a typical startup fashion, my job description changed several times. I, along with my rockstar team, obsessed about different KPIs through the year across different core elements of our marketplace: increasing demand, increasing supply and maximizing revenue.

Product management has been different within every company I have worked at. I have built & managed portfolio products for high net worth clients at Goldman Sachs, mobile gaming products for kids at Disney Interactive, products for drivers and then developer community at Uber. Each of them were truly rewarding experiences, but startup life in 2015 taught me a few new lessons.

1. Build later. Validate first.

When you are trying to do more with less, it’s all about validating your hypotheses before you start ruthlessly prioritizing the top ideas. When I joined StyleSeat, there were many projects that I could tackle. However, I took up the mantle to significantly improve client retention. (I highly recommend Brian Balfour’s talk on retention for those of you who may wonder why)

Two developers x 2-month timeline with one business objective to “Drive repeat bookings after a client’s first appointment on StyleSeat”. The team came up with a solid list of solutions to this problem; however, given the shortage of resources, we had to ask ourselves this question often: “How can we use experimentation driven by business hypothesis (with or without engineering resources) before kicking off ANY product releases?” After a few rounds of validation experiments both within and outside the product, we ended up picking the needle-moving idea, which was to send a recurring reminder to clients with creative seasonal suggestions on why now would be the right time to book their next appointment. This StyleSeat feature resulted in an increase of 4x in repeat client bookings for our professionals as compared to their bookings from traditional channels!

Very often things sound like a good idea. However, a discipline of doing back-of-the-envelope opportunity assessments for all your ideas with an eye towards business KPIs can be a game changer in not only what features you build, but also how your team’s KPIs improve MoM / QoQ.

2. Inspire a culture of hustle & execution.

Startups foster a can-do attitude without organizational boundaries. When new obstacles come up, you do not need to be constrained and think outside the box, when you can actually execute without a box. #ThereIsNoBox.

In the summer, my team worked on an exciting partnership with Google. Basically, you can go to Google Search and book your next beauty appointment via StyleSeat right from within Google’s search results page. A week before the launch, we identified a need to perform data scrubbing across thousands of pages to make sure the user experience was top notch and seamless. The nature and volume of updates would have taken our internal team 3+ weeks to complete. The problem was raised in our internal chat room around 5PM and guess what? Employees summoned their cousins, rugby team members and relatives immediately. One developer knocked out a scrappy admin tool overnight to expedite the editorial updates. By 11AM next day, we had 15 friends & family members of StyleSeat employees in the office, ready to start cranking on these updates. 2 days, 50 cups of coffee, 40 pizza pies later, we were ready for our big launch! Read more about the Google partnership here.

3. X-functional knowledge sharing rocks.

Even in a startup, it’s equally important to share and socialize your vision with other teams. Be it slack communications with your Customer Success team or other channels. At StyleSeat, we do Monday Morning Planning Meetings (MMPMs) every week where all the teams present their updates, learnings & roadmaps. So much amazing stuff happens each week here and I have personally benefited from the ideas / signals of caution brought up by other members in these meetings.

4. “I got your back” attitude wins.

This one is for managers. Ben Horowitz recently wrote a great forward on Andy Grove’s book High Output Management that prompted a strong recommendation to read the book. Andy Grove has a whole section dedicated to meetings, beginning with conducting one-on-one meetings. He explains how one-on-ones are not only a fundamental element in manager/employee relationship, but also the best source for organizational knowledge for managers. ALWAYS make time for your team. This is the guaranteed maximum output generated for your time than any other managerial activity.

5. Have fun!

This one is less of a conscious act, but more of a function of what you are working on and the people you work with. If you happen “to find the one” startup, make sure you enjoy every moment and have fun!

Hope you enjoyed this post. My 2016 resolution is to blog “often”. Will see y’all more this year!