Leading a product team in a startup is very different from leading one at a well-established enterprise. Having joined Mixpanel in the early years and growing with it for close to a decade, I’ve learned that priorities change as you move from startup to scale up and then mature into an enterprise.
Startups: Prioritise ruthlessly
Startup companies are at a stage of their business where they are constantly experimenting to find product-market fit. The importance of product-market fit isn’t something to brush off — a 2019 CB Insights study found that “no market need” was the top reason why startups don’t succeed.
This is crucial for product teams and you need to be ruthless in prioritising product differentiators that allow you to solve user problems that your competitors can’t (or in a way that they don’t).
When you deliver a product that does that, your early customers become your biggest fans. They’ll value your product and that will make up for areas where you may be a bit rough around the edges.
This happened in the early days at Mixpanel.
There was a time when if you forgot your password, you’d actually have to write to someone in Support to manually reset it for you. At that time, we (rightly) concluded that our success wouldn’t hinge on the availability of a self-service Forgot Password flow and focused our resources on other, more impactful product features.
Scaling up: Listen to your customer
Once your business starts to scale, the focus switches to matching innovation with follow-through. This is the time when you’ll need to start ironing out the little kinks.
At Mixpanel, we were so far ahead of everyone else by this time. The mistake we made was that we branched out into more things when we should have been focused on building more depth in our product and fixing existing problems. Innovate on doing what you already do better; not on doing more things.
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As you grow, your customers become your most valuable asset. Their complaints, feedback, input, and feature requests are all invaluable sources of information that inform your product strategy. Take time to listen to them and understand how they’re using your product and what they’re using it for.
Enterprise: Stay nimble and think like a startup
So what happens when you’re an established player? You’ll find yourself on the other side of the fence. Where you were once the hot, innovative startup that’s disrupting the market, some startup is now disrupting your business.
That’s why it’s important to stay nimble and innovative even as you grow. One way to do this is to keep decomposing your teams into units that can function efficiently, almost as if they were little startups within your company.
For example, Amazon tries to break their engineering teams into “two-pizza” teams — essentially you’ll only need two pizzas to feed the entire team.
In my own experience, when it comes to software development, a unit consisting of a product manager, a designer, and a few engineers functions really well. This unit can make its own decisions without a ton of authoritative coordination with other people.
You’ll certainly need to balance this autonomy with the broader corporate vision. An example of this is how Netflix aims for “context, not control” (you can take a look at their culture deck here). This balance is built by instilling a sense of purpose.
If your teams know why they’re doing what they do and how that feeds into the business’s success, they’ll make decisions on their own, yet stay aligned to the company’s goals. The key is to make sure that you don’t fall into the trap of endless meetings, check-ins, and red tape that make your company slow and bureaucratic.
There’s nothing quite like watching your product team and business grow from startup, to scale up and progressing on the path to becoming an established enterprise. My experience at Mixpanel has been a rewarding journey that’s both inspiring and creatively satisfying.
The trick is for us, as product leaders, to keep as much of that agile one-team atmosphere and focus that helped to drive our growth while learning to cede responsibilities to our teams as they continue to build on what we created.
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