Is Start-up Life For You?
Is Start-up Life For You?
Being the first product hire at a start-up is exciting in many ways, but let's talk about some things you might want to consider before you make that leap
I recently finished watching Silicon Valley, a show that follows a bunch of devs in Palo Alto trying to build a company from someone’s house/incubator. In typical TV fashion, it was a fast moving roller coaster.
The idea that start-ups are places that move fast and break things make them especially appealing to a lot of product people. Who doesn’t love the idea of being able to identify a motivating problem and define a product from scratch to address it? All without the constraints we are used to in big organisations (dependencies, tech debt, approval processes). This culture is synonymous with the early stage start-up. Indeed, when I was at Palantir, it was stressed that we never wanted to lose that ‘start-up mentality’. We were even given a copy of Peter Thiel’s ‘Zero to One’ in our onboarding packets!
When I had the opportunity to be the first product hire in a start-up I jumped at the chance. It was really enjoyable, it accelerated my growth and I made some wonderful friends. However, it was not the experience described in Silicon Valley product literature that I expected. Let’s talk about some of the things you might want to consider when making this leap.
Build a skills base before you do this!
The most important thing, especially early on in your career, is investing in your growth. There are plenty of great ways to do this outside of your role, but learning on the job is often the fastest and most effective way. This is because the learning is contextualised with measurable outcomes and live feedback from colleagues. In general there are 2 big buckets of learning on the job:
Learn by working alongside awesome product people
Learn by trying stuff and seeing what works
As the first product hire, your learning is squarely in the second camp. It’s ideal to spend some time before joining a start-up working alongside some great product folks and seeing how things are done. However, if this is not possible, there are some excellent newsletters (like Product Breaks!) and mentorship opportunities that can help partially fill the gap.
Just because there’s no PM doesn’t mean someone isn’t doing ‘Product’
In an early stage start-up, it will often be the case that one of the co-founders is product minded. They might not call themselves product people but will have a product mindset (i.e. thinking about the problem they're trying to solve and the customer value they can unlock). Product roles often come later, they are rarely seen as an essential. The most important thing for the founders is getting an V1 out of the door and finding product market fit. Lenny’s newsletter did a great piece on this which showed the average start-up hired their first PM at the 2-3 year mark. All this to say, by the time you join, there will be people already doing essential product tasks.
Like any new role, you should be sensitive to the political landscape. Product is such a broad reaching role that, by definition, it means stepping on some toes. Here are some key questions to ask to get the lay of the land:
Which elements of the role are currently being covered and by whom?
How long have they been performing this function and to what extent do they see this as a part of their role?
Are they aware of what a product manager does? Have they worked with PMs in the past?
What are the current outcomes from how they’ve approached it, what’s working? What isn’t working?
Once you understand the above, you can start figuring out where it is important to invest your energy for the first few months. You’ll likely have different reactions to you doing your job depending on the role.
Some (exaggerated) responses from my experience:
Engineering - “oh thank goodness, user stories!!”
Sales/Founders - “What do you mean you want to ‘validate it’, I used to just be able to tell the devs to build it!”
Marketing - “welllll marketing really does need to own customer interactions but we can pass the notes back to you?”
Carefully managing this transition is really important. You can burn relationships early on if you aren’t strategic about this. In the Mean Girls musical there’s a line “when you’ve got less you’ve got more to lose… wait that’s confusing”. This is correct. In a start-up, every relationship matters more because there are fewer people, and fewer workarounds when a bridge is burnt.
A good stakeholder management strategy is to focus on the areas that are most critical and where you can add value fast. Once you’ve proven yourself, people will be much happier to loosen control on key parts of the role. For example, there was a feature request that would have been very costly for the team and delayed what the business wanted to do by at least 6 months. By doing some simple discovery tasks like user interviews, data analysis and user testing I was able to show that it was not something customers were willing to pay for. This created trust and an acceptance that some degree of product discovery and experimentation was required.
While carving your role, it’s important to pick your battles and not let your pride get in the way. There are some meetings or forums that might seem critical to you. For example, a quarterly meeting to gather customer feedback on the product. I ended up wasting a lot of time trying to get invited. That time could have been spent with that stakeholder actually focusing on the customer outcomes we agreed mattered. Crucially, it wasn’t even the hill to die on! I got far more by reaching out to a variety of customers every week and building relationships in 1:1 sessions. Don’t let your pride get in the way, and also recognise that you don’t have to rely on existing processes, you can build your own to reach even better outcomes!
Start-ups aren’t a blank slate!
It’s important when thinking about the kind of start-up environment you would like to be a part of, you take the profiles of the leadership team into account. Just because a company is new does not mean that hires won’t bring legacy ways of working with them. As the first product hire you’ll be working across the whole company, even more than you usually would in another role! This means that being aligned with the CTO isn’t enough, you need to consider the other leadership roles. At a minimum, have a peruse of LinkedIn and get a feeling for the kinds of working environments that have shaped influential stakeholders’ working ethos.
As I said above, you want to find the areas where you can add value quickly and prove yourself. However, only going for the low hanging fruit without asking the big questions is a recipe for disaster. Improving development processes won’t matter if you just speed up the team’s ability to build the wrong thing. You need to get to grips with the product vision and strategy as a top priority. I don’t think this is unique to a start-up, but it is especially impactful in a start-up when the company is betting it’s survival on the make or break of one product’s direction.
Will Larson recently said that product strategy always exists; it's just not always written down. He emphasised that engineering, product, and business always have a strategy, although it might be hard to articulate or be applied inconsistently because it's not documented. Therefore, your first step should be to understand what the existing strategy is. The most effective way I found to do this was in workshop settings where you’re essentially getting the strategy out of heads and onto post it notes. Even if the strategy isn’t great, these sessions will almost always highlight that different stakeholders haven’t actually been aligned on what it is. People find this incredibly valuable.
After you know what the existing strategy is, you can evaluate it and start to improve it. Afterall, product strategy isn’t supposed to be one big effort, it’s something you continually adapt and change through your normal cycles of continuous discovery. You’re better able to do this if you know the current one inside out and can defend any proposed changes in that language.
Are you ready to make the leap?
Ultimately, whether or not you want to be a first or early stage product hire in a start-up is up to you! It can be a great way of taking the product fundamentals you’ve developed and applying them independently in a leadership role. It can give you extra confidence to handle ambiguity without direct peer support. However, the start-up life is not for everyone, and not all start-ups offer the same opportunities. It’s important to understand the kind of start-up you’re joining (not just the TV kind), how to shape the product role once you’ve joined, and how to be strategic from day one of the job.
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