Why startups are career accelerators
Startups are fast-moving versions of their (much) older relatives — big corporates (or as our CPO Shaun likes to say, “hella corps”). Working at a startup and getting your hands dirty with new tools, directly impacting the success of the business, and exposing yourself to other areas of a business is a surefire way to accelerate your hard skills, your understanding of the big picture, and your career.
Thinking about potentially joining a startup? Read on. Absolutely convinced that big-corps are the way and not interested in startups? Read on and let me convince you otherwise.
Gain exposure to new tech
Startups are not anchored to tooling, language, or approach requirements, and encourage thinking outside the box where product differentiators are involved. Moving fast and freely is in their best interest, so focusing on a customer problem and the technical approach to solve it is often more important than making sure everyone is using the exact same outdated libraries.
Startups additionally allow you to build the critical context of when to use a tool or an approach, not just what that tool is, through debate, experimentation, or exposure. This experience and knowledge will allow you to take your learnings between industries and companies, creating clean system design, correct tooling choices, and knowing where to start.
Larger companies focus on homogeneity, forming an extremely well-trodden path upon which a set of well-known approved tools are used. They discourage (or even prevent) the ability to stray from that path. While it is possible to gain new exposure by hopping between teams periodically, this comes at a cost in the form of abandoning your team and starting over, or alienating others to the point of no mutual trust. Even within this homogeneity, big companies have a build-up of legacy baggage and complexity, drastically reducing their ability to move freely. Building a new small service within a massive network of outdated, incompatible, or incomplete micro-services isn’t fast or free. Don’t believe me? Watch this too real skit.
Be heard, make your mark
Startups encourage everyone to promote important and impactful problems for customers. At Visibuild, we use a combination of weekly WIP (work in progress) chats and Problem Docs (more on Problem Docs in a future blog post!) to help us communicate the root of the customer problem, why it’s important, and some potential ways to address it. These problems and solutions are synthesised from talking with customers, demoing prototypes, and internally iterating on ideas. From the point of a problem doc, building out and delivering the solution back to customers closes the loop from ideation to delivery. Being involved in helping define what’s important to the product and company both improves your critical thinking when it comes to product direction and is a whole lot more fun than just churning through tickets day after day.
Startups breed a culture of experimentation and ideation through the use of hack days, innovation sessions, or design sprints. These sessions focus on pushing boundaries by exploring new ways to approach and solve problems and are a core mechanism for product and personal growth.
Getting a hand into the planning process and getting your ideas executed at big tech companies is nigh impossible. 2-pagers, 6-pagers, PR/FAQs, impact estimation, effort planning, review meetings, and cross-team alignment, all to get to the point of your idea being deprioritised for the upcoming 12 months of planned work. Better luck next time! Profit margins, long-distance planning, and big egos all conspire to make it punishing to see your ideas out in the world. Experimentation at big corporates is also tough. Generally, managers are not incentivised to experiment. They commit their teams to large potions of work in advance and work through that backlog over the year, typically without built-in slack for much else. At these big companies where everything is decided by financial impact, experimentation (which is difficult to quantify) is routinely undervalued and deprioritised.
Understand how the sausage gets made
In a startup you work extremely close with customers, and the barriers that are usually in the way are removed. You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission or fill in any forms to talk to your users. There is a massive difference between talking to customers directly to understand their problems, and hearing that same information second or third-hand.
Drawing your own conclusions from customers, instead of blindly following one person’s opinion is what makes a diverse and complete product. Following that customer discussion through product ideation to completion and taking part in the entire journey is something uniquely startup. Peeling back the layers of the business, and understanding how each part functions will help you communicate and work more closely with those areas in your startups (or other businesses) in the future.
Understanding customers in large companies is like playing a game of Telephone, by the time the feedback gets to you, it has been reshaped by a bunch of people, twisting the original intent. Direct access to customers is often impossible. Beyond that, you’re discouraged from straying too far from your prescribed path, you’re either hired as a specialist or shaped into one. Keeping a foot in multiple camps, or exploring the process within the rest of the business is not typically possible.
Feeling stagnant, or think that the issues with hella corps mentioned hit a little too close to home? Then maybe it’s time for a change of pace, maybe it’s time to join a startup.
Thinking about stepping on the gas and accelerating your career? Visibuild is hiring! Feel free to visit our LinkedIn jobs, or to reach out to me directly!
