Growing in High Growth: An Introduction
I’m embarking on a bit of a series I’m calling Growing in High Growth. Having just finished a three year stint at Cedar as the Head of Product, I wanted to reflect on my journey of scaling up a product team in a fast growing environment.
The motivation to publish these learnings is in fact a learning unto itself: I realized that the best way to refine ideas is to be put in a position to defend them. Either they evolve with previously unknown insight or they harden through use.
Overview
While the entire series will naturally be most relevant to someone growing into a product leadership role at an early stage startup, I intentionally kept the parts contained so that someone can pick and choose the ones that are most relevant to them:
- Part 1: Building the first product team at a startup
- Part 2: Leveling up into Product leadership
- Part 3: Leading during a startup’s growing pains
- Bonus: The value of Product in enterprise healthcare
High Level Context
As a primer, Cedar is an enterprise healthcare company whose vision is to fundamentally improve the patient healthcare experience. Given the expansiveness of that vision, the initial focus has been on the financial side of healthcare and even more specifically, enabling large healthcare providers to offer their patients modern post-visit medical billing experiences.
I joined as the first PM and employee number 13 and left in May 2020 when the company had grown close to 120 (and counting!) and product was myself and 4 PMs.
As a final note, the opinions shared in this series are wholly my own. Not only that, I’m sure they’ll be continually refined through the benefit of more experience and discussion so don’t hesitate to reach out and share your thoughts and opinions.
