From tech giants Netflix and Intuit — to smaller, younger startups like AltSchool and now theBoardlist — Lesley Grossblatt has worked across the spectrum of sizes of tech companies since starting her product management career in 1999. Lesley got her first role in product when she didn’t even know what a product manager did. She’s gone on to create compelling products by being a quick learner who questions everything and teaching herself how to be a product manager in her first product role. She brings a unique level of clarity and understanding to the underlying foundation of the role. When we chatted with her recently, it was apparent how valuable her pragmatic perspective is — especially in relation to understanding how product is different at large companies versus small startups.

Product management? It’s just building stuff

“It’s not rocket science. At the end of the day, you’re trying to figure out what you’re going to make, what you’re going to offer people that is going to meet whatever need or want that they have. Nobody has unlimited time or resources to build things.”

So how do you figure that out? As Lesley says, everyone at the company wants to build something. This isn’t a problem that just affects larger companies, with more resources and blue sky potential, no matter how many people work at the company, you can’t build everything. You have to prioritize.

“Being a product manager, in a lot of ways, is absolutely a job about just prioritizing and figuring out what lens you’re going to look at things, and how are you going to approach things, and how are you going to make decisions. You don’t want to make decisions randomly or capriciously. You want to have a systematic way that you can explain to other people and say, ‘Well, our strategy, or our focus, is this thing, and so that means we’re going to focus on X, Y, and Z, and I’m sorry. We’re not going to focus on A, B, C, D, E, F, G.’ ”

The differences in impact and responsibility, and certainly complexity, at a small versus large company are vast, but when it comes down to it, your mission as a product manager is always the same: prioritize, focus, and make something people want. Whether that’s building a great new app that changes an industry or a small feature in QuickBooks that makes accounting easier for small businesses, being a great product manager is about one thing: focus. Your job is to create a system for evaluating priority and sticking to it.

Big companies = complex

Naturally, as a company grows, the system gets more complicated.

For example, QuickBooks is one of Intuit’s products. But it’s a massive product, and extremely complex. This means that in addition to someone managing it from the top, there are also managers for different pieces of the product. The organizational structure gets complicated, quickly. So having systems in place for prioritization, and focus, are key.

Conversely, when working at a company with one main, all-encompassing product, your role can appear to be overly simple. In this type of company, people interact with and see only one main offering from the company. Lesley’s work at Netflix reflects this type of experience. However, the inherent complexity of that product — and the large number of employees — means that it operates like a company with many different pieces and departments. The divisions look slightly different from a company like Intuit that has many different offerings and product lines, all with different customer-facing products.

In addition, as Lesley says, companies don’t get that big unless they’ve been around for a while, so they also have customers that have been around for a while and rely on the product. You have to be careful with how you change the product as time goes on so you don’t upset your customers — or kick them off entirely.

“You have to worry about things like, ‘Hey, we can’t keep supporting the product the way that it was in 2004. We have to move those customers off that version, and we have to do a lot more change management,’ right? It’d be like, ‘Well, you know, we’re not going to support your version anymore, so if you have a problem, I’m sorry. You have to just buy a new version,’ and that’s a hard thing for customers.”

Why small startup product roles are great

Another difference at a big company versus small is the level of impact you have. At a small startup, you’re reporting directly to a VP or the CEO. You have direct access to the decision makers, and a direct impact on the product.

“From a product perspective, the benefit of working in a smaller company is you have really direct impact on the future of the company. It’s not like you’re working on product number 25 in a suite of 100 products like at a very large company. You’re working on the product, and this product is either going to make it or break it for this small company.” That level of involvement can be very empowering. You have a much stronger feeling of buy-in at the company, knowing your work directly impacts the company and its customers.

At theBoardlist, Lesley is back to working at a small startup, similar to when she started her career in product. Back then during the early days of her career, she was the first PM at the company, promoted from within by one of the co-founders, because the investors said they needed to have one. “I said, ‘Sure. Okay, I’ll figure it out as I go along.’” In her current role, it’s back to thinking about what will actually move the needle, how to balance the limited resources that the company has, and trying to leverage their product to achieve success.

The idea of doing manual work is another that’s commonly accepted as the norm in small startups, an experience that Lesley has had at all of the small startups she’s worked at. It’s an important part of her role, that people in early stage product roles can’t afford to skip. It’s of utmost importance to really understand the core problem, where Lesley hopes she can eventually remove herself from the equation.

“Right now the majority of my time is spent just dealing with manually doing all the work, the work that eventually I think I can build technology to remove the human out of it, but the human needs to understand it to build it well.”