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5 secrets of startup product management: what does a startup product manager do?
In part eighteen of this series, I want to go over what it’s like to be a Product Manager at a Startup. The startup product management route is another option that many aspiring PMs are considering today, given the personal and professional growth opportunities. Here is the previous post from this series.
Five Principles of Startup Product Management
1. Startup product managers are startup builders and product scalers.
As a startup product manager, you are solving problems and coordinating your team members towards common goals. Your responsibilities will revolve around helping ship products rapidly and doing two more things: helping your customers succeed and helping your startup scale.
You need to identify the problems you want to solve, narrow down the users you are targeting, communicate the surrounding context around the problem you are solving for to your team, prioritize the types of solutions you are forming, trust your key team members to execute, think about how to market and sell the product. That’s a lot. You have to do this constantly, and you have to iterate on this process.
Startup product managers are hired to execute and help define the vision that founders have. Initially, you will be picking up fundamental responsibilities of an early founder. Founders who start at the inception of a company have the very unique responsibility of also being the product visionaries and building what the company will sell. Startup product managers begin to take on more of those responsibilities. Startup product management is about building a product and thinking about how to sell the product. The level of responsibility you receive at a startup also comes with a new level of autonomy. You need to define a lot of these processes and collaborate across many teams to turn a vision into a reality.
See My top lessons from startup product management: the product mentality.
