So you’re a Product Manager in a Startup. How hard could it be?

Andrew Quan
Sep 2, 2018 · 6 min read

Rarely comes a time in your life when you are given an opportunity to grow a company from concept to product. When I was asked to join as a Head of Product looking to launch a payments company in an industry ripe for disruption, I considered it to be a no brainer. After all, there’s a huge amount to learn and huge amount of upside waiting at the end of an arduous journey.

The thing is… I didn’t realise that being a PM was going to be so hard. It’s even harder when you are a PM in a small startup with limited resources and time. In this post, I want to share with you some lessons I continue to learn from this whirlwind of a journey, and how my role evolved over time.

For some context: I joined Littlepay as employee number #7 for a startup with enough funding to last at least 18 months runway. I am currently located in London, UK, where our paying clients are. Meanwhile, the development team sits in Australia. (Yes, more about this interesting set up in a later post…!).

Disclaimer: Just in case. If I say something stupid in the future, it’s better to be able to point out that the stupidity is mine, and mine alone, and not the view held by my employer(s). My stupidity! Nope — you can’t have it! :)

  1. Communicate well with your Founder!

In early stage companies, the CEO / Founder would have already validated customer problems and formed a picture in their mind for the proposition to market to the customer. This means that the product’s vision is almost always already formed, whether it be documented or simply within the mind of the CEO.

When a PM is onboard at an early stage, he or she will need to understand how best to communicate with the CEO/Founder, and how to best provide product management and discovery support without trodding on the toes of the CEO. There’s always founder cognitive biases at play (e.g., confirmation or anchoring bias) that result in an MVP that needs to pivot, sometimes drastically, from the original idea of the CEO. To pivot effectively, the PM will need to find data to present their case. Customer survey results and notes from customer interviews are key.

Credit: People Dynamics

Similarly, a PM can learn a lot from the CEO / Founder. Whether it be creativity, design, or just thinking a little bit more ahead of the current problem set, there’s much to learn. Learning comes from trust and communication.

Transitioning to becoming the “owner” of the product takes time. More on this in a separate post later!

2. Over-communicate with everyone else:

As a startup’s team grows over time, so too does the need to communicate progress on a frequent basis. Communicating decisions and the data used to arrive to those decisions needs to be as transparent as possible. Conflicting views are always likely to occur while the team is still in the “forming” or “norming” phases of group development (Tuckman, 1965). It is far better to over-communicate time and time again than to not communicate at all.

In Littlepay, we used frequent PPP reports (progress, problems, plans) via email to allow all teams to work cross-functionally to not only unlock problem areas, but also to question plans made. On top of these reports, we used JIRA and Trello religiously — not only to document our progress, but also to document future ideas and iterations as required.

I’m not sure whether I’m Vader or Leia in this example! Maybe both depending on the topic at hand!

In terms of seeing and speaking with each other, we held weekly calls with clients and separate calls internally to ensure we were all across our issues and progress. We generally made sure that any client-related calls were held UK morning / AU evening (it was very common to hear glasses clinking in the background while the Australian team kicked into their Friday evening!) and that any work incomplete in the UK but due imminently was communicated in email before signing off UK time, to allow AU teams to pickup the work in their morning. Follow the sun — as long as it’s not a weekend…

3. Avoid the rabbit holes. They will eat you alive!

I remember very vividly the tendency for many people in our team to think way too far in the future than required. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but when you have very smart people in the room with a lot of domain or industry knowledge (e.g., payments), solution-led thinking sometime dominates problem-led thinking. Combining this with a team that has different levels of experience in Agile, Lean Startup (ala Eric Ries) methodology and venture building, you get a mixture of opinions that all need to be heard but necessarily converted into product development upon launch.

Great PMs don’t spend their time on solutions, they spend time on ensuring the problems are valid and that the right proposition is being scoped to solve that problem.

Beware!

I spent a lot of time making sure people were heard and ensuring any ideas of far future ideas were logged but not specified. In first 12 months, we treated our product set as a single project plan with 10+ stages; for each stage, there was a new piece of functionality added assuming certain things were achieve by that time. Over time, we realised that there were too many components that all had different users and use cases, so eventually converted this waterfall approach towards an Agile roadmap approach. However, this a LOT of trust, time, and patience to propagate and inculcate across the company.

On the subject of Agile road-mapping and prioritisation, we’ll cover that in a separate post!

4. Take time to recharge. You deserve it.

It is really, really, really easy (really), to keep working on the startup and not work on anything else. It’s very tempting to just keep your heads down with the hope that all that work pays off. Just one more email you say. Just one more change to this design, you say. After all, you’ll make squillions of cash in the end right? But, at what cost?

How much sleep are you getting per day? When was the last time you had a decent meal (none of this instant noodle garbage!)? When was the last time you looked up and appreciated your friends and family for helping you get where you are? When was the last time you switched off your phone and did something that wasn’t related to the startup?

With every high achievement in a startup there are surely many failures that have lasting impacts on your physical and mental well being.

From one of my favourite instagram accounts: @alecwithpen

The PM role is often one where you need to step in to fight fires where many cannot. While it may feel great to be instrumental to solving such problems, speaking from experience, you stand to lose a lot more than you gain if you do this over and over again without perspective. Whatever you do, don’t forget to take the time to disconnect from work, and reconnect with your soul. Switch off the phone, go to the gym, play a sport, get a massage, take your loved ones out for dinner to thank them for their support, walk the dog that has been confined to the home while you’ve been working. If you’re struggling — tell someone. If you are happy — celebrate your successes!

Whatever it is, make sure you make time to be mindful of who you and where you draw your energy from.

Final words…

I could write so much more about what I continually learn each day, but to be honest, I’d rather stop now and drink some tea! Don’t worry — I’ll write up some more articles in the next few weeks around Product Culture, Roadmaps, and Prioritisation.

Thanks for reading, and if you learned something (anything!), don’t forget to clap your hands and say thanks.

Head of Product @ Littlepay. Cambridge MBA. All views my own

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