Your startup needs a Product Manager and it’s probably you.
Let’s start with the basics. Here’s a high-level summary of roles and responsibilities on a software team:
Product Manager: Why
Designer: What
Developer: How
QA: How Well
Project Manager: When
There will inevitably be some overlap in terms of input and contribution, but that won’t change the responsibility. The Product Manager might have thoughts on “What” but it’s the Designer’s job to absorb & challenge that feedback and own the final design. And the Designer might have preferences on “How”… and so on. This bleed over is very healthy but it doesn’t change where the buck stops for that particular domain. You don’t fire the designer when the server crashes. (You probably shouldn’t fire the Developer either, haha. Just making a point.)
I’ve seen a general lack of appreciation for the discipline of Product Management across my entire career in Software Development. People see them as glorified Project Managers, just middlemen that schedule meetings and take all the credit, etc. To be fair to those stereotypes, I’ve met at least two terrible Product Managers for every one good one. It’s not a well understood field and there are no college education paths geared towards the discipline, like there are for design and development.
There’s also a power related issue. Product Managers make the important decisions about the product. It might be the Product Manager who needs to tell the CEO that what they’ve been pitching to investors won’t work, or won’t deliver the results the business needs. If the CEO doesn’t fully embrace the role of the Product Manager, and didn’t evaluate the hire based on making big decisions like these, there’s going to be a conflict. Of course, if things were working well in this hypothetical situation, the CEO wouldn’t have pitched anything until there was product direction alignment across all the stakeholders.
Who’s really the Product Manager?
I’ve never seen a Product Manager on the list of first essential hires at an early stage startup, specifically those with a 5 to 20 person headcount. Really, it’s the Developer headcount that best correlates to Product Management workload. A full-time Product Manager might be needed when you have 8+ Developers working fulltime. In small scale companies, you can usually only work on one important feature at a time and that feature might take two months. That’s six features a year and can easily be a part time responsibility for someone to own that roadmap.
Even (or especially) in small, early stage startups, the “Why” question needs a solid answer. Someone is filling that gap. That’s why the Product Manager might be you without you knowing it. Does the CEO ask the Lead Engineer which feature should be built next? If so, the Lead Engineer is also the Product Manager. Does the Designer decide what aspect of the product is top priority? If so, the Designer is also the Product Manager. These scenarios aren’t bad if everyone understands what the Product Manager role is and who is filling it.
There are some bad scenarios of part time Product Managers. It’s pretty common for a Salesperson to act as the Product Manager. This usually means that whatever a customer is asking for is top priority. This is bad for two reasons:
It’s common for these requests to come from a very small number of customers, often just one. So they are likely to be edge case problems.
The Sales domain falls outside of the Product Team and it’s unlikely that the Saleperson’s instincts will lead to a great product. And their incentives are much more short-term biased. Forgoing the easy win for the big bet will not come naturally to them.
Respect the discipline of Product Management.
The goal of this article is not to convince early stage startups to hire full-time Product Managers. The point is to recognize that someone is performing this role, and they might not know it. And since they don’t think of it as their job, they’re probably not giving it the priority it deserves.
If you think you might be the person on your team answering the “Why” question, or you’d like to be, here are some book recommendations:
Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
To stay competitive in today's market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap", cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer's needs.
In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You'll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small.
Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy
How do you develop products that people will actually use and buy? This practical guide shows you how to validate product and company ideas through customer development research - before you waste months and millions on a product or service that no one needs or wants.
With a combination of open-ended interviewing and fast and flexible research techniques, you’ll learn how your prospective customers behave, the problems they need to solve, and what frustrates and delights them. These insights may shake your assumptions, but they’ll help you reach the "ah-ha!" moments that inspire truly great products.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.
