What I Learned As Mentor @ Startup Garage: Paris, Station F Edition
Having always been closely involved in the startup world, I was excited when a fellow coworker shared an opportunity to apply as a Facebook’s Startup Garage as a Station F mentor in Paris. In partnership with Station F, the biggest startup campus in the world, the Startup Garage team from Facebook selected an initial group of start-ups and 12 mentors for the pilot program. As mentors, we helped to guide them on ways they could accelerate their businesses. Each startup spent six months at the Startup Garage from Facebook within Station F starting in September.
The startup I spent the most time with was Welcome to the Jungle, a platform that matches job seekers to companies, using exclusive video content as an inside look at company culture. As a medium-sized startup with over 50 people led by experienced founders, Welcome to the Jungle faced a very different set of challenges than other smaller start-ups with only a few people. The Facebook Startup Garage program gives startups a chance to get the perspective of a mentor with experience from Facebook and Facebookers a chance to flex their skills in a new way.
Here are some main takeaways from this program:
Your job is to help keep them user-centric, outcome-focused.
In working with one of the smaller startups on auditing their branding and messaging, it was immediately apparent that the team was so deep in their own work that they were struggling to pull back and see the experience from fresh eyes — or a new user perspective. We’ve all been there. At Facebook, we have the luxury of going in-field and hearing things straight from the mouths of users at focus groups how right or wrong we are. It keeps us grounded, focused, and able to form specific hypotheses rooted in insights.
Startups rarely have that luxury and zooming out to use a user-centric, outcome focused lens is challenging when faced with the onslaught work on a day to day. In a 2 hour working session with a startup, I walked them through every single piece of outward facing communication they had across all their owned and earned channels. From their Facebook page, to their app store description, to the blog. Using the messaging hierarchy frameworks that PMMs here are so accustomed to, I was able to help identify gaps in their product storytelling and outline all the touch-points to help improve their funnel.
Hands-on workshops trump sharing resources and frameworks.
As a PMM, I am obsessed with frameworks, briefs, requirement documents — anything that helps me streamline a high volume of complex information into a structured, digestible format that is easily shared and understood across different functions. Naturally, I shared all my favorite templates with the startups, looking forward to see how they might discover insights or achieve some greater efficiency within their team from using them.
My templates remained untouched as teams either didn’t have time to fill them out or were unsure how to fill them out in a way that would be effective. However, sitting down to explain and complete them together in working sessions completely changed their minds. Guiding them on what to look for and pushing them to challenge their own messaging in person helped them see where they were stumbling.
Mentoring isn’t the same as coaching or managing.
In a valuable wrap-up discussion we had in Paris, the mentors discussed the nuances of different types of interactions with our startups. For Facebookers who have taken Situational Leadership, mentorship requires a keen awareness of the nuances in a variety of factors about your startup: who you’re interacting with from the startup, the current size or state of the startup, where they feel the most stuck, their level of familiarity with the area where they feel the most challenged, etc.
Flexing your style to match what they need is the hardest part of mentorship and where you’ll see the most progress. With Welcome To The Jungle, I stayed mainly hands off in working with their social media marketing lead, but needed guidance on how best to use all of Facebook’s features or make the most out of their content marketing. So instead of forcing them to fill out messaging frameworks, I kept our 1:1s open to the main challenges he was facing every week and used them as metrics review and brainstorm sessions.
Startups often under-estimate the importance of repetition and have a hard time finding their growth loops.
In both messaging and product user journeys, many of the startups I worked with were inconsistent with what they presented to users. Whether it was the language they were using or the various user journeys they had created, it was often hard to follow A) what they were trying to say B) what I, as a user, should be doing, C) what I would expect if I came back.
Helping to emphasize how and why repetition and consistency is crucial, especially in the early stages, for building user understanding and habit was something I had to continue to reiterate. Especially when it came to content marketing, many startups were using different messaging and creative variations, which means they would fail to drive home the brand positioning and key messages with the reach and frequency of the ads they were running.
While being able to visit Paris was certainly a perk, the best part of this experience hands down were the people I met. From the Startup Garage team that worked so hard to put this program together to the other mentors in the program, being in this new experience together was like a startup of its own. If you’ve got any questions, feel free to leave a comment below.
