Program Management for Your Startup & Scaleup Survival
My good friend and founder of Valore Labs , Peter Amalraj, is an active startup adviser. He shared some frequently asked questions related to Program Management and Roadmap Delivery from entrepreneurs . Here is a recap of the chat.
Most startups have Engineering, Product, and Sales/ BD. Some startups have part time or interim head of HR and/ or CFO. Do you think we need a head of Program Management too?
Good question — the answer is “maybe”.
What are the telltale signs that my startup needs a VP of Program Management?
When your team starts to feel the following,
VERY Chaotic —ok it’s normal to be a bit chaotic.. but chaos can become a problem when it starts to hurt key customers. Support Team found out new features from Customers. Sales Team sold something that’s in beta or worse, discontinued. Projects were cancelled or “deferred” more than occasionally. Duplicate or conflicting features were built. New release brought down the site or partners’. Features delivered are not what were asked for.
VERY Inefficient — again, fast growing companies have a higher tolerance for some inefficiency, until it starts to HURT our ability to deliver. When you start to have lots of back and forth within project team and with stakeholders that result in many undesired major rebuilding or removal of features, hard work and long hours will no longer offset bad planning and coordination.
Lack of visibility — that deviate customer focus to internal matters. it takes an effort trying to find out what is being worked on, what’s coming next, and why some projects have gone missing. How projects are prioritized is a mystery. Product Managers (or Project manager, if there is any) spend most of their time tracking down status or putting out fires for only “top priority” projects at the moment.
Misalignment on Strategy — to accommodate various asks from different stakeholders or major clients, R&D team has to peanut butter resources. The roadmap looks like tossed salad, instead of a balance meal. Team is uninspired or unsure about the product strategy and/or company vision.
Should a company hire Program Management when they hit certain size?
Not necessarily. The key deciding factors include product and platform complexity, and nature of client base. For example:
- A freemium B2C company with many small experimental projects may not need a Program Management for their 100 member engineering team as they likely can afford to endure some of the pain points discussed earlier.
- A B2B company selling into larger clients has more sales and brand factors at stake. A predictable streamlined delivery process and articulated feature roadmap is essential.
- If you are dependent on suppliers and partners, you will likely need a PMO exec to build an integrated delivery & operational process.
The rule of thumb goes back to the 1st question — do we feel these problems need to be fixed now?
Are there any external factors impacting the decision?
Yes, there are a few factors as well.
Typically rapid growth demands efficiency to avoid the disproportionately higher number of pain points discussed earlier. An experienced Program Management leader is skilled in building the process & automated systems to handle alignment, planning, tracking, and communication.
Another factor is when you plan M&A and other integration with partners. You’d like to build a playbook for repeatable best practices to avoid disruptions of these events. (see Process is a Product for Efficiency)
What skills and experiences should we look for in this role?
You’d need someone with
- Experience in all core skillsets of PMO job family (see post here). One most important skill a PMO exec brings is the ability to build an efficient process that spans from strategic planning, delivery management and go to market.
- Hands on skills to learn the actual delivery practices at your company and build the delivery culture, process and tools that work for you.
- Leadership skills to coach, mentor, and hire/ build a team who will run this day in and day out.
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Originally published at scaffoldcorp.wordpress.com on June 29, 2015.
