Startup PM, Big Co. PM
I’ve been a PM at a 70 person company, which was bought by a 1,500 person company. Then at a 60 person company which grew to 450 people and was bought by a 95,000 person company. I left that to run product at a <20 person company.
There’s one similarity between all of these roles: delivering continuous value to users and winning more paying customers.
“Great PMs win games.” — Adam Nash
The difference between the roles at various company sizes are the challenges you face in achieving those goals.
At a small company, your challenges are resources and attention. You don’t have enough Engineers, Designers, money, you have to gather your own analytics, write your own copy, etc. People in the outside world haven’t heard of you and probably don’t care about your struggle.
At a medium-sized company, the challenge is prioritization. Now you have a team that can build just about anything, but you need some part of that team to build your thing. Some of the challenge is competing projects, but I find it’s often organizational. You’re a “growth” PM, trying to beg borrow and steal resources from “mobile” and “web” PMs.* And now you have attention, but with great sales comes great bug triage.
At a mega-corp, the challenge is organizational. Some other organization has a product they believe to be competitive. Or others are jockeying for power with your boss and actively rooting for you to fail, taking every chance to undermine your efforts. Or you need some piece of technology or tiny amount of effort from a team whose incentives aren’t the same as yours.
All that to say, company size has a direct relationship to number of resources, but an inverse relationship to an individual PM’s ability to execute on her or his own.
So the continuum of skills that define a PM’s success from small to large companies range from execution in the face of scarcity to delivering value in the face of compromise.
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* Heads of Product, please please consider an organizational structure more original and less obviously flawed than this.
