Rich PM, Poor PM: how resource environment changes your product strategy

I’ve worked at four different early-stage startups. I am used to the resource-constrained mentality:

Can we find a way to do this for free?

What’s the smallest possible investment we can put in to find out if this solution will work?

For Product Managers, this mindset has a heavy overlap with good PM principles. Try a cheap MVP first. Don’t waste resources on an unproven concept before it’s been in front of customers. It all makes sense.

I went to a talk with Jeff Seibert last year, and he mentioned that junior PMs at Google, Facebook, and Twitter frequently violate these principles. They throw out a bunch of experiments, identify something that moves the needle 1% (without a good understanding of why), report a win for the quarter, and move on.

I was surprised that PMs in these “top-notch” training grounds would be allowed to get away with… well… lazy thinking. Launching experiments without solid hypotheses is wrong… at best, you see short-term gains at the sacrifice of long-term understanding of your customers.

I’ve been thinking on this for a while (are those APMs really just throwing out thoughtless experiments?), and I saw something recently that made me wonder if Jeff’s critique was an oversimplification.

Most startups I’ve worked for have been deep in the trenches, still trying to create product-market fit or build the necessary infrastructure to keep the lights on. More recently, I worked at a true ‘growth stage’ company. We needed to step up our investments across the board to meet ambitious goals on metrics that we weren’t sure how to move.

Something broke in the “starvation” mindset of our PMs. It no longer made much sense to squeeze the team for 1 or 2 MVPs per quarter — what if one or both of them didn’t work? We’d put all our eggs in one basket and be out of luck if something didn’t work out. We needed to distribute our bets.

Our focus shifted from “learn something with absolute minimum investment” to “learn as much as you can with a moderate amount of investment” — which has a big impact on the product roadmap. Where you might have rolled out a social feed only on mobile, now you’re trying it on a few channels to see if channel is the deciding factor. Where you might have A/B tested around a single campaign, you’re now cranking out five versions to test all of your hypotheses simultaneously. This isn’t necessarily lazy PMing — when the focus is on finding a high-leverage metric impact opportunity as quickly as possible, it makes sense to crank out a higher volume of experiments if you have the resources to do so.

This shift in mindset is subtle, but comes on quickly. If your company feels like it’s under-investing in key initiatives… maybe the time has come to prioritize speed to solution over absolute cost.