As a PM, I always wondered what taking the founder plunge would feel like ๐ฅถ Then last year, I finally did. A thread on what early stage startup work has taught me about time, money, team, and what I do all day: ๐งต
Some background: 9 months ago, I left my comfy VP Product job @Optimizely to start something new. I'm itching to unveil @MeetGamma in a couple weeks and look forward to sharing more on the ups and downs of building from scratch. But first, 5 early takeaways from my new role.
1. โฐ Time is different. As a PM, you're always feeling the pressure of some made-up deadline. Quarterly OKRs, a fixed date launch, your big user conference. But now as a founder, that's all out the window. The only urgency is what we choose to create for ourselves.
For us, that means we move both slower and faster. Slower, because we take the time to be confident we're building the right thing and building it well. More prototyping, more pivoting, more polish. Faster, because we avoid the mad scramble that faux urgency tends to create.
IMO very few product teams really break out of what @johncutlefish calls the Feature Factory. cutle.fish The pressure to release something every quarter + measure success on # of widgets shipped is profound (and then you factor in promo cycles, job hopping, etc.)
As a startup we do WAY more prototyping + throwaway code. We know that everything will change as we learn, but also that small tech choices could bite us years in the future. We've built the same things now 3-4 times from different angles, getting a little better each iteration.
In bigger orgs, staffing tetris leads us to break up teams as soon as they launch. And who gets promoted for polishing an existing feature? This model is a recipe for mediocrity, and I'm learning that rework is essential for taking something from good to great.
2. ๐จโ๐ฉโ๐งโ๐ฆ Hiring your own team. Duh, but probably the most underrated difference. As a PM, your team is usually assigned, not chosen. Some of us are better than others at poaching the best folks for our squad, but you're always at the mercy of x-functional managers for staffing.
As a founder, I get to hire whoever I want. "Get to" is of course a double-edged sword because hiring is brutally hard. But still, the choice is yours, and for me the chance to build a team with no duds is an incredible opportunity. The velocity + happiness difference is huge.
Longevity makes such a difference too. Matrix orgs treat eng/design as interchangeable cogs and swap often. But when you hire an early team, you select for belief in your vision + commitment to stay focused on the problem for years rather than months. That passion compounds.
3. ๐ธ Money is so different. Starting with your salary ๐ฅด But also every aspect of raising, budgeting, and spending cash. As a PM, money is abstracted away from you. This is mostly a blessing, but also means that you waste all kinds of time on things because you can't spend $.
Simple example: how many times has your big launch been delayed because of some stray dependency on another team? What if you could just...pay them $10,000 to do it? Money forces incredible clarity about priorities and tradeoffs of scarce resources, but big cos lose that tool.
Startups have to do this. Need a homepage? Pay an agency $X,000 to make it for you. Need specialized skills? Contract someone for 6 weeks. Need advice? There are very smart people who will happily trade their time for your equity.
There are many pros/cons to part time or short term help, but now that I'm in startupland I find it bizarre that PMs can almost never pull in outside help for their projects, even when the cost is tiny relative to their team's weekly comp, or the time cost of a single all hands.
The flipside of this is a huge amount of brainpower spent on stressful stuff that has zero to do with product. Salaries, rent, budgets, runway, fundraising, invoices, ๐ด. And you gotta buy everything. Whiteboards, post-its, chairs, snacks. Never been to Costco so much in my life.
4. ๐ป Hands on. As a PM, and especially a manager of PMs, I found myself drifting so far away from the actual work. My contributions were indirect, long-term, and frankly hard to pinpoint. If I'm being honest, this had me pretty burned out and depressed after ~10yrs in the role.
Now, my role is ~25% PM/design, ~50% developer, and 25% random other stuff. For me it's been incredibly refreshing to get hands on and see the concrete fruit of my labor every day. I wish PM jobs let you play more of this hybrid role, for both mental health and productivity.
Even when I'm doing traditional PM work, it feels great to be hands on. It reminds me of my first years as an IC PM sweating the details of one feature at a time with a small focused team. As you move up the PM ladder, you drift farther and farther from actually...making stuff ๐ข
And it's not just me: all our roles are fuzzier. Our designer writes code. Our engineers are in Figma. Everyone's job is a jumble, we all care about the details, and that builds way more empathy in the team and (I hope) craftsmanship in the final product.
5. ๐ Outcomes > story. So much of what's written about startups comes from the skewed perspectives of VCs that you'd think all founders do is create pitch decks. So I was surprised to find the reality is almost exactly the opposite. I do so much _less_ pitching every day.
As a PM, you're constantly selling a story around your product. To leadership, to your team, to GTM, to customers. You get promoted by convincing your bosses that you had impact - particularly because actual causation is so hard to judge in large orgs.
Startups, OTOH, can only hide behind slides for so long. TBH this is what scared me most about the jump. I'm great at telling stories and sucking up ๐ฅฒ But none of that matters now, because the harsh reality is it doesn't matter. People either use our product or they don't.
The upside of this, besides the obvious financial one, is that you get to actually work on things that matter, not just things that your bosses want. It's not "what can I sell to my leadership" but "what can I sell to a customer", and that's the much better question to be asking.
Hope this helps other PMs in my positioning thinking about taking that icy plunge. The water's pretty warm so far! Will try to share more as I get deeper ๐โโ๏ธ
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