Being a Product Manager at Start-Ups — Key Learnings

As someone who has spent a decade cursing — but secretly, and in many cases ignorantly, loving — work at start-ups and early-stage ventures, and now facing into a new role at a more mature enterprise, I decided to reflect on what approaching product management can be like, and what it takes to get product out, in an environment that would usually be best described far more as chaotic than customer-focused.
1. The Swirling Vortex of Prioritization
I sat in an interview a few years ago to hire a product associate, and she asked how our company approached the prioritization of backlog items. The answer, I replied as if it made perfect sense, was based on a number of triangulated factors all weighted using a formula nobody really knew, but that was pretty much universally agreed upon comprising some level of; effort, user experience improvement, business impact, in some cases senior stakeholder input, potential ROI for revenue-deliverable items — and on and on it went.
The truth is, at start-ups and early-stage ventures, with resources and budgets so tight and the need to MVP everything, prioritization efforts are not nearly as linear, straight-forward and predictable and a focus that seems to others like somewhere between rocket science calculation, desired end-state, consensus and complete lunacy will probably suit your team and organization down to the ground.
2. Reactivity is Key
A roadmap at a start-up is exactly like a roadmap in real life as you set out on a long journey; you head out, but how and when you get there and where you might end up stopping along the way are entirely unpredictable factors. Similarly, start-up thinking and the need to react rapidly to user reception of your product or, potentially more importantly, its profitability, I find, is massively incompatible with long-term goals beyond basic vision or desired result/outcome statements.
For those only starting out in a PM role in such an organization; do not be dissuaded, or even try to set for overly-specific quarterly OKR’s or KPI’s; the business will surely demand you and your teams attention on something else much earlier. Having said that, while dialing back the scale of some of your planned developments, make sure you still find time to answer at least the basic user outcomes you had hoped to achieve in any given period.
3. Frameworks < Getting Things Done
The Hook framework, Four Steps to The Epiphany, HEART, and many, many more — there is no end to frameworks set out to help Product Managers get their work done and build products that users love. But the truth is, in my experience, you’ll adopt informally one or two ‘formal’ PM tools to help you; but only those which will help you think through concepts and ideas quickly, frame problems, and deliver exceptional product — all as rapidly and iteratively as possible.
I’ve often thought of working as a PM at early-stage ventures and start-ups as one of the most pure, raw forms of building something. You probably don’t have the budget to carry out extensive user validation or to test for user motivation, nor to build something truly beautiful right off the bat. Nor do you have the time to go out and spend countless hours with potential users understanding exactly how to solve their problem. Rather, you probably only have a rough idea of the problem you’re trying to solve and beyond some easy and quick potential wins like guerrilla testing to validate whether you’re on the right track, so much of what you do will be based on acting and thinking as a user yourself — and frequently, more than a dash of hoping for the best!
4. Teams Are Small, Characters Are Large
Compared to the traditional hierarchies and management structures one might find in a larger enterprise, you can expect as a PM to likely wind up managing whole development teams, and for your team to be seen as having the answers for everything ranging from in-office tech support to IT procurement decisions, and everything in between. A PM in an early-stage venture, along with the other functional or department managers, needs to do their best to combine being a great PM, as well as from time to time, a HR manager, Project Manager, Infra Manager and Operations Manager (possibly more!).
There will be none, so you will need to set the basic structures and processes in place for your team, and ensure these are flexible enough to evolve over time to meet the needs of your growing team.
Going hand in hand with small teams, are the frequently larger-than-life characters that seem to go hand-in-hand with startup life. In an environment where frequently most colleagues appear to be ardent believers of the he/she-who-shouts-loudest-wins philosophy, and everyone is deeply passionate about the success of the venture; you can expect this to be an environment which more than many others will require a PM with a very strong ability to say ‘no’ with regularity and a degree of forcefulness.
What do you guys think? As a Product Manager in a young business or early-stage venture, what would you say are the key learnings you have made? As always, keen to hear your thoughts.
