Differences in Product Management in startup vs mature companies
How to hire for the right mindset and attitude
Maybe you are a job seeker trying to get into product management. Perhaps you are a hiring a product manager. Where you work or who you hire varies by the context of the hiring situation.
It’s important to understand that hiring the right person for a critical role is more about the mindset and the attitude of the person. Unlike engineering, where you could hire the best coder and still deliver, product management is less about specific skills, frameworks, or even a specific experience from past. Product management is a unique role that is an amalgamation of business skills, customer skills, problem solving and how one applies them at a specific company or a situation.
If you are a startup loking for a PM, then hiring someone who has only worked in large established companies may not be the right choice. You could get lucky if you find the right mindset. And vice versa, if you are large enterprise B2B software company, hiring someone who has only worked in startup may not be be the best idea.
There are exceptions of course. Some people just adapt to the situation whatever you throw at them. And that’s my main point. Find the person who can fit or adapt. Don’t just assume someone from a big name company might work out.
In this article, I talk about the differences in product management at startup vs a more mature company. This will help you as a job seeker to determine if a startup is right for you at this stage, or if you are a hiring manager what type of fit you are looking for.
I had the fortune of working in B2B product management in a startup (6 years) as well as mature companies (5+ years). Product management is very different in these two sized companies. For definition, I consider startup to be pre market-fit and a larger company that has found PM fit and growing.
Here are some differences in these two sizes, as a PM in terms of
Goals
Tasks
Traits
This will help you as a hiring manager, hire the right mindset & as job seeker, understand where you will shine.
Goals
Startup
Key goal is to find product market fit Or find a way to pivot if the hypothesis is invalid.
Mature
There are multiple goals when you are PM in a larger post PMF company. They could be to scale product for large number of customers, comply with enterprise needs like security, privacy, improve/add features that help retain or add new logos, create upsell or cross sell product opportunities.
Tasks
Startup
The key activities in a startup are customer discovery and validation. As a PM, you are figuring out the problem space, the solution workflow, the goto market fit, personas, use cases, pricing and much more. These require faster experiments on your hypothesis testing.
You are laser focused on your next milestone which could be as small as “Get 20 paying customers”. Every task , meeting, effort is towards the next milestone.
And because you are small, you are expected to do the grunt work to release your product. Sales enablement, demos, dummy data, collateral etc etc. It’s a long list.
PM in startup require creativity, patience, dealing with ambiguity and ability to move forward without too much reflection time.
Mature
While the basic PM discipline largely remains the same in a larger company, the scopes are different. You are now in a mostly known problem space. You are still figuring out new features or improvements. But you also have many more paying customers that need attention.
One of the changes now is to manage and synthesize the large number of inputs from support tickets, customer feedback, NPS, sales inputs, competitive feedback etc. You need a mindset of figuring out a different kind of pattern and prioritize ruthlessly.
Now you have to worry about the impacts of your changes to existing customers. If you have enterprise customers new requirements for compliance, security, accessibility will need to be addressed. This is the time to build an operating cadence and prepare for future growth.
And there are more stakeholders to work with during launch. You are not responsible for writing the press release or sales enablement but you do provide the inputs.
One big difference in a larger company is your calendar is now filled with meetings where your cognitive contribution is less than 50%.
Traits
Startup
A PM in a startup needs to deal with ambiguity. They are in an unknown space and trying to find a a fit. It’s like a treasure hunt without a map. You move fast and discard whats not working. Your personality needs to embrace the “growth mindset”. There is no time for reflection.
Mature
Now you are in a known space. You know precisely what to go after. It’s about execution. You will go through management layers, approvals, processes. Decision making is slower. There is communication overhead as you deal with many people. This is way different than being in a startup.
Final Note:
While both company types hire for product management, there are differences on who you hire or work for.
If you are company looking for the next PM, be mindful of your stage (known vs unknown) and hire someone who has the mindset of learning and can deal with ambiguity. Domain knowledge can be learnt.
If you are a job seeker, search within on how best you work. Can you deal with ambiguity? Or do you need a structure? Then decide on who you want to work for. I see many PM of larger companies debating whether to join a startup. I have no doubt you will learn a lot. But question yourself, if this is something you can deal with. It’s a culture shift.
