My Unapologetic & Actionable Startup Product Management Strategy — Part 1

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts. — Winston Churchill

Enter the world of startups, where boundaries blur, possibilities stretch, and every member of the team strives to build something remarkable. As a product manager, you find yourself at the heart of this dynamic environment, the crucial connection point for all aspects of the business. Your role extends far beyond building the product itself; you delve into the various areas of business development, financial projections, marketing, sales, client relationships, and consulting. Though the act of building the product takes up a limited portion of your time, its success holds the key to driving the entire business forward.

But here lies the challenge: how do you navigate these diverse responsibilities within the constraints of limited resources and a ticking clock?

Let’s explore the challenges faced by startup product managers

In this blog, I will delve into the best practices and strategies that enable startup product managers to thrive amidst ambiguity, harness innovation, and steer their ventures towards better achievements and outcomes.

What are the most critical areas where the Startup struggles and PM can help “Tactically.”

Challenge 1: When everyone starts interfering in deciding the direction of the product :

In a startup, everyone needs to wear multiple hats; however, that should not become overly congested. It’s one thing to be consulted and another thing when everyone overly tries to enforce ideas to build products. The product team should be allowed to make decisions in alignment with business goals/vision and, most importantly, to address the immediate needs of customers. I have seen that in startup, it can easily derail when people want to build the product based on their imagination, and eventually, it goes into more discussion, confrontation, and results in no progress or inefficiency because the product manager becomes an order taker and struggles to impress everyone and lose focus on identifying features and functionality to enable innovation.

What, as a PM, can you do?

• Plan out a planning session (mid-quarter) to work with founders and other stakeholders to understand the latest company goals and vision.
• General Note — Based on the guidance below, the agenda should be prepared with the time and distribute in advance. The product leads must encourage people to stick with the agenda and if anyone has any issue or would like to discuss more topics then it should be done prior to planning session or bring if the time permits otherwise, I would strongly suggest product leads to ensure people are not going around the bush. Basically, you need to try to make sure there are people who love to argue and share unnecessary topics, must be shut down. Whatever approach you take :-)
• The session should not be just a presentation but more of a working session Re-agree what the product should be about and how product offerings would help to achieve the overall goal.
• Review the list of product backlog (not user stories but the ideas) and discuss which ideas are aligning with the company goals and business needs Try to utilize a template that would allow brainstorming and prioritizing ideas most efficiently. e.g. https://www.mural.co/templates/ideate
• Product lead and Product team should explain each idea to the stakeholder at a high-level.
• The meeting is not to go over detailed requirements but to communicate what idea is, how it is adding value and what problems it is going to solve.
• Use the template to have people providing comment and voting on each idea Review the voting and get agreement on the priorities to be delivered for the next quarter. Once it’s finalized, that’s it. Make that clear.

Yes changes can happen but if it’s going to happen then there must be a really good reason around it and founders must provide sign-off in writing.

Challenge 2: Don’t reinvent the wheel

Startup don’t have unlimited resources and time. If you are working for a startup with no customers then the time is the essence. There is no need to spend years to come up with a new idea and then take years to build it. In today’s time, speed is the key and marketing is everything. The product idea needs to be simple and easy to implement to showcase what the product can do. You just need to build 10% of your big picture which is called Minimum Viable Product or even less than that you just build a simple prototype and validate that with some early adopters clients.

What, as a PM, can you do?

• If the company is starting with a new product or enhancing the current product, just identify what are the key features which must be there to communicate the overall idea and impact to the business need
• Prioritize one or two features as part of MVP
• Spend time on how product would work. Basically develop user interaction flow and future state solution process.
• Once the process is in place. Research on open source library or vendors who can provide technology to support your business case. E.g. If you are running an e-commerce company, the important part is to understand customer sentiments through review. You can always look for vendors who provide NLP solution so that the solution can analyze the free text into more structured information and then apply analytics libraries to identify insights out of it.

Challenge 3: Stay Focused

It’s again connected to point 1. However, here I am talking about continuing to finish the priority and not change while it’s in development. I have seen that many times a lot of priorities which were prioritized for the quarter but then shifted due to people’s opinions, changes their mind, etc.. Changes are okay, but changing one priority to another is not a right way to go. It just demotivates people who worked hard starting from concept to requirements and then developers who are working on development. If we don’t stay focused, we would make this half done and suffer the quality.

What, as a PM, can you do?

• It’s more of an art than science
• It requires push back through showing the implications of deprioritizing something which is in the middle of development.
• Show the cost it would have in terms of time, cost, and cultural. Identify items which are not yet started and ask the team to trade-off
• Show the timeline that the new priority may not be delivered in the current quarter if the expectation is to be delivered since it needs to go through the cycle of activities, such as concept development, market research, functionality map, UI designs, socialization with the development, understanding the dependencies and timeline.
• Encourage leadership team to consult with the product team to evaluate new priorities in terms of feasibility and relevance with the company goals and product vision.
• Everyone wants to build the time machine but the issue is no one knows how to build it assuming that the product team can figure it out.
• The product team can figure out to enable the priority when the priority is properly defined by the leadership in alignment with the product manager.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where we’ll delve into tackling the remaining challenges and finding solutions to further optimize startup product management strategies.