Scaling Product Management at a Growing Startup

Welcome back!

Now that you know about Jetty and the mission we’re on to make renting effortless for everyone involved, let’s dig into how we go about delivering great online experiences to both renters & property management companies. But before we dive in, proper context would be helpful.

A bit of background

The work we do is in a complex domain (insurance and lending), and the decisions we make have to account for two very different users (large property management companies and renters). We’re also growing quickly, and as we grow, we need to be thoughtful about how we organize our product development teams (i.e. engineers, product managers & designers) to accomplish meaningful work.

Additionally:

• We’re a fully remote company! Many of us have recently joined and have never met in person
• We have three lines of business: Jetty Deposit, Jetty Rent & Jetty Protect
• We operate in a space that’s heavily regulated — compliance, risk, and privacy are very real concerns
• We care deeply about solving the long standing problems in the rental market in new and innovative ways

How we were working and what needed to change

In 2021 we added a lot of great folks to the team as we focused on the launch of our newest product, Jetty Rent, while continuing to evolve our current products. But there were areas to improve clarity:

• How teams planned and aligned around the work
• Who was responsible for what
• What would the impact be for our customers and our business?

As an organization continues to grow, so does the need to address these challenges in a repeatable and scalable way. The product development team and the broader company needed to determine how we wanted to work in order to best solve the challenges ahead of us. But how could we get alignment on a new direction?

Enter the Jetty book club

We knew this change needed to extend beyond the product development organization, so in order to be successful, we included our cross-functional stakeholders that we knew should be on this ride with us. When thinking about organizational change two things are critical:

1. Ensure you’ve created trusting relationships. This needs to be intentional and something you make time to foster once established.
2. Have empathy for others around you. Understand their priorities and the challenges they face and genuinely be interested in helping them achieve and overcome them.

Our first book…

A number of folks on our growing team are either new to Jetty or new to working with product development. Marty Cagan’s book Inspired, does a great job of outlining the roles and responsibilities of common members on a product development team (ie. Engineer, Designer, Product Manager), including the very real needs of stakeholders that need to be understood and taken into account. Discussion of these roles and how we’ve implemented them at Jetty created a space to understand, align, and create empathy for how challenging and necessary each of our roles are to deliver great outcomes for our customers in ways that work for our business.

Additionally, the book covered topics that are very relevant to an ever-changing company in high growth mode:

• Common pitfalls to avoid as we build products together
• How we develop a more robust process around customer discovery and testing
• How we can create more autonomy, focus, and create healthy accountability for the outcomes we’re all driving towards
• Ideas for scaling our teams as we continue to add more product development squads

How did we do this?

We gathered our executive team, department leaders, engineering leaders, and our product team on a weekly basis to discuss what we found to be interesting and useful to us as we reconsider how we’re approaching opportunities and each of our important roles in that process. Here’s what we did:

• Created a reading guide for each week and a place for folks to capture interesting quotes or questions
• Met weekly to discuss the reading and ideas we thought might make sense for our organization
• Leveraged a slack group to continue discussions outside of our weekly meetings
• Tasked a different team member with facilitating the conversation each week and encouraged participation from everyone
• Held a final wrap up session to identify commitments we were ready to make about the way we were working

Where we are now

It’s only been a month since we wrapped up this book club and made commitments to ourselves and the organization. In that time, we’re already seeing promising signs of progress:

• We have more understanding and empathy for one another and the role each of us plays in delivering a great experience to our customers
• We’ve adopted clearer terminology so we’re all speaking the same language when we say things like a business “offering” or “product”
• We’ve completed two rounds of user research that informed upcoming product improvements

The efforts above are the foundation we’ll continue to build upon, as improvements to how we work will always be iterated upon. Additionally, we’re closing out the year with renewed energy for the work that we’re doing together to improve the lives of our customers and to continue strengthening our Jetty Culture.

What’s next?

As I reflect on the challenges we were facing as we embarked on this initiative, it’s clear they’re not unique to Jetty; companies of every size and industry experience similar challenges. It all boils down to relationships; both building them and caring for them and I’d highly recommend you consider how to be intentional about this at your own company. In this time of great change, as many reflect upon their personal priorities, this essential element of work cannot be overlooked.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”

~ African Proverb