Product guy != Entrepreneur
If you want to start a company some day become a product manager today
- startup sage(s)
Well, I was a product manager who started up. And starting up was unlike any other job I had in the past including being a product manager.
The sages are not entirely wrong. PMs are accountable for results. They are expected to navigate the idea maze for a product, identifying opportunities and risks as early as possible. They are conversant in the language of multiple functions, ensuring that developers understand what sales needs and designers are cognizant of customer support concerns. PMs, I think are the Claude Makaleles of their teams. All of this is good training for a startup founder.
But a PM is not a CEO — not even of her product. There are many things needed for a successful startup, some even more important that the core product, that I as a PM was not good at.
1. Team Building
Of all the decisions, the hardest to get right and toughest pivot away from, was putting together the team. The key, I now think, is to align the individual’s reasons for joining the startup with the ability of the team to fulfill that objective.
When I talked to a potential hire, it was relatively easy to get a sense of why they are interested. Some wanted to be more than a cog in a machine. Others wanted to solve a hard problem. For others, it was about the professional and monetary upside. But even where I knew aspirations did not match, it was hard to walk away because one additional hand on the deck seemed like a good tradeoff.
Just like an MVP there is a Minimum Required Team (MRT) for every startup. And a PM role does not help in putting it together.
2. Honoring resource constraints
As a PM I depended on my engineering, sales, and support counterparts to keep me honest on the cost of my ideas. Because I knew they would put in the right constraints, my question always was, “Why can’t we do X?”
As a founder though I had to be the judge, jury, and the executioner for non-existent resources and often found myself either being super conservative or too cavalier in decisioning around resources. The most common trap was to prioritize an unknown cost over a known high cost, assuming the unknown to be small. The result was that we went down some pretty dark rabbit holes while leaving some sure wins on the table.
Getting work done
A good PM gets the donuts and gets shit done. In my experience, this often translates into getting mindshare from different teams and functions. But it rarely involves getting to the brass tacks of managing people to get work done.
Having never managed a team before, when to push and when to hold back with my team was something I had to learn from scratch. The easy fallacy I often fell into was assuming that more pushing would translate into higher speed. And often this went against the very reasons they had joined in the first place.
Communicating without a shared context
Every document, presentation, and excel sheet I presented as a PM was done within a shared context. There was no need to step back and explain why a downward trend on a metric was a bad thing. Or if the metric is the right one to look at. Or what does an acronym mean. This allowed for a significant efficiency in communication.
With a blank slate, however, I found my communication often falling short of the mark. Unstated assumptions caused unnecessary back and forth on issues. Getting to the right funnel took a significant amount of time. And in every analysis, we always asked if this was the right thing to look at.
In hindsight, this was the right question to ask, and it was right to pay the cost. The thing I wasn’t aware of was that unless explicitly stated in communication, these discussions often happen as post — mortems.
Selling from a position of weakness
A PM is a seller of ideas. But I forgot that I often did so from a position of strength. My colleagues had some respect for my knowledge of the domain and the product. Further they understood that my opinions directly or indirectly could shape what they worked on. In many ways I was often not convincing but tipping people over to my point of view.
However, when I was selling my startup to an investor or product to a customer it was the opposite. The person across the table was listening most likely because someone called in a favor. I had very small time window to convince them that listening to me could be useful.
Having talked to multiple sales folks, this is their bread and butter situation. Not so for a PM.
