Things to Consider as a PM for Your Next Company
During my career as a product manager, I have worked for small startups, growing startups, a regional startup, and even I co-founded my own startup as my first-time job.
For everyone who aspires to be PM or move to another company, these few things might be good to consider to make your next company fit your career aspiration.
Size of the startup
You need to understand there is a big company with more than 1 thousand employees, there is a mid-size company with 500 employees, and a small company with around 100 employees. This size is also translated to the size of the tech team or product team.
Small startup
Let’s start with the small startup. If you come into a small startup you might see some process is not there yet, they might not have a proper sprint process, and how they collaborate not firmly build into day-to-day activity. Yes as a PM you are hired there to fix this and be the frontline that starts creating the system because you know “PM works across divisions and talks to a lot of people inside the company”. So as a PM you might be expected to settle down some process there. Also, you might notice that there are no senior or lead product managers inside, so mostly you are gonna be led by either CEO or CTO directly.
Since working with the founders, you are expected to be a self-starter and autonomous which means you are being proactive to decide what will be created and challenging the idea coming from the top. On the bright side, it is good for you if you are shining thru your peers, you might get promoted to be lead or head in a few years to come.
Medium startup
For medium size startups, you might see there is already a lead PM or head product as the one you will refer to when there is any issue. Mostly you will be reporting to him, working close to him, and even helping with their scope of work. You might see the team is quite big to do a few projects at once so you can see weekly meeting alignment has been set up or maybe a few other meetings.
Since there is a lead or head in place, you will be working collaboratively with 4–5 other PMs. Usually, there is a specific vertical for each product that PM owns, for instance, customer-facing web, mobile app, internal dashboard, or core product like payment or infrastructure. In some cases, your work might intersect with other product manager work. So you might want to make it clear for everyone else when you are doing your product.
Big startups
Big company, since the company has been there for many years like more than 5 years so everything should be settled up and you are being part of the product ecosystem. This is a type of company that I am not familiar with since I have never in a unicorn type of company. But a few things that I would say related to this are:
- Firstly, you will work on a small part of the product and your team is siloed. You will work closely with like 10–15 people per tribe, consist of some sprint squads.
- Second, you might want to get it right since working in a big company means bigger revenue and also bigger risk. You might want to release the product iteratively from a small portion of users before full-scale release.
- Third, you will learn a lot from senior product people. Take your time to talk to each of them and absorb all the best knowledge you can get from them.
Type of products
What I mean is like B2C or B2B company, or maybe other types of business models like B2B2C or C2C or even B2G (or Business to government). Why is it important to consider the type of products?
Okay, you might familiar with a product like Tokopedia, the users are everyone in Indonesia or what we are called end users. The number of users is huge, but they have small ticket sizes.
When you want to build a product for a B2C company you can get wild and test it with your users whenever you want or even release a janky product into production so you can get early feedback and iterate fast to validate the idea. But this is not the case for B2B product managers, you need to be careful when you release products for your client. When the product break, the client will get angry and charge you a fine because you are disrupting their operational process.
If you are a B2C product manager, you can iterate fast by releasing feature to a small part of users. When the first phase of the product breaks or works not as expected, you might just need to subsidize them with a promo code and they will happy to continue using the product.
But for a B2B product manager, you can’t ship buggy products to production. Everything must be checked deliberately. If a bug happens on the client side, the client is the first one that pays the cost of the error and they will spread it across the industry that this company is broken don’t use their products. So for a B2B company, you might see the product development process might be slower and you need to come up with proof of concept and work for it closely with a single client before launching it for a bigger market.
So it’s up to your preference which type of style you want to go for your next product manager career.
Stability
I put this one special for today’s condition when nothing is certain in the startup landscape. You have seen in recent months, a lot of layoffs are happening in tech companies so you might also want to consider it as well. Few points that you can use as criteria for stability:
- Funding. If the company got funded recently, like less than 6 months it should be safer for your career. Usually, each funding stage gives the company around 2 years of runaways until it is out of money.
- Industry. We see there is inflation going on and buying power of people is decreasing, so you might want to think twice to enter verticals like financial, lending, or maybe lux products.
So I think that’s all I got for you guys today, hope everything I shared today will help to navigate your next PM career. I would love to talk and discuss this in the comment or even can ping me thru Linkedin if you have things to discuss for your next PM career. Love to help the next generation of PMs out there. Cheers!
