Tuesday, June 5, 2012

The Startup CEO and Product Management

Product Management is a unique and challenging discipline, but working in product management at a startup is a bit of a different beast. I've always thought about writing a short book about product management at startups (or smaller companies), but instead I'll write some blog posts in an effort to see if I have enough strong content to aggregate into a book (let me know what you think).

Blog Post #1 - The Startup CEO
The Startup CEO - The startup CEO has sacrificed to build their company. This company is often times the embodiment of years of sacrifice and passion. This personal investment gives them a unique perspective as they have grown the company. The CEO role changes as a company grows from a single person who has to dig into the details across many details in the beginning, to a CEO that makes capital and investment allocation decisions at the product and strategic investment level.

The Challenge
I've seen startup CEO's get a little bit too full of themselves. I've seen them wear t-shirts that say things like "I'm the CEO, You shut up". As that new product manager trying to help your company create a more scalable development process (more on that in another blog post), you are also faced with a CEO who thinks they know everything and aren't afraid to talk directly to developers to get their request done.

Cause
Product Management is a fairly broad role. For some companies, it is simply writing requirements (or user stories) and then working with technology to implement. For others, product management is a broad role that drives the vision, roadmap, strategy, and business metrics for the product. The reality is that product management in a small company is all the former and very little of the latter. In fact, I've never been at a startup/small company where product management didn't initially report into the technology organization. You have to have developers to write software in order to launch your startup. Product managers are not required. Furthermore, the CEO isn't used to going through product management to get new features out the door, they are interested in making the current customers happy and attracting new ones.

The Tips
  • Realize and Accept - Trying to fight it and get frustrated will not help you. You have to realize and accept the fact that the CEO has invested a lot more time and effort in the company than you have. Try and figure out if there are other features that customers are looking for or the market is expecting. Perhaps there is a tweak or minor use case or feature that can be easily added to expand the CEO's request.
  • Understand the CEO's history - It is always helpful for me to understand the past experience of the CEO, just to try and get a better feel of how they may approach their work, etc. Do they have a strong marketing/sales background or is it more of a product/technology background? Understanding this will help you in communicating and influencing the CEO regarding features and roadmap.
  • Use Data and Testing - Hopefully your CEO is open to data and customer feedback. Try prototyping the feature and getting initial customer feedback to help shape your perspective and influence the CEO. For example, if your CEO insists that the tab that contains all of the analytics usage of your application is called "Dashboard", but your customers interpret the word "Dashboard" to mean something completely different than analytics usage, you may be able to convince the CEO that this would confuse your customers. CEOs should have a maniacal focus on the customer, so data from customers should increase your ability to influence your CEO.
This blog post is really just me sharing my thoughts on a spur of moment, but if you like it, then I'll continue with a series of blog posts of product management at startups/small companies. Feel free to share your advice, who knows it may show up in a book one day (with proper attribution!).


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