Thread by @varun_kirti

The Startup Product Manager — Building In A Hyper-Growth B2C Environment

A thread... (1/20)

How does a startup that’s growing at a breakneck pace look like?

It’s chaotic, often gruelling, and definitely not for the faint-hearted. The business is growing so fast that everyone is playing catch-up. (2/20)

Tech systems aren't ready for scale, the org structure doesn't seem optimal, there are never enough resources vis-a-vis the company's ambitions, hiring doesn't scale fast enough, collaboration across functions seems messy, and competitors are trying to outwit you. (3/20)

There are multiple crises to deal with at any point in time. (4/20)

How to thrive as a Product Manager in this environment?

Building products in this environment is challenging, yet exhilarating, and can become a career-defining experience. (5/20)

Product Managers often enter these environments imagining that building products according to a structured playbook (things that they learn from product management books and courses!) will help them create impact... Nothing can be further from the truth. (6/20)

Thriving in this environment is largely about mastering 3 things - Prioritization, Speed, and Communication. (7/20)

When discovering problems to solve, PMs identify plenty of them in any product area. Choosing to solve the few that create 10X impact is a superpower. This prioritization isn't always an analytical exercise but a healthy mix of data, user research, intuition & judgment. (8/20)

Forming hypotheses, and testing them with users through a variety of techniques such as user research, surveys, usability tests, etc. is essential. (9/20)

Intuition and judgment become especially critical in non-deterministic product areas like customer activation, engagement, conversion, etc. where making product decisions is not obvious just based on data and user research. (10/20)

In deterministic areas like acquisition, order management, and supply chain among others, data-backed decision making works the best. (11/20)

Speed is the non-negotiable secret sauce in a hyper-growth environment. In this environment, product iterations are inevitable, knowing how to solve a specific user or business problem is never a linear exercise. (12/20)

Taking a long time to build a product feature is counter-productive as the market landscape shifts rapidly, and the problem you are trying to solve might not even be relevant if you take too long to solve it. (13/20)

Another important aspect is product learning. Pace of learning is determined by the pace of experimentation. The faster you learn, the quicker you can iterate your product to create 10X impact. (14/20)

So, right-sizing the scope of your product iterations to optimize for speed rather than exhaustiveness of use cases is critical. (15/20)

In a hyper-growth environment, the thing that breaks the most often is communication, both within a product team and across teams such as design, engineering, business, marketing, etc. (16/20)

PMs who thrive have a knack for knowing how and how often to communicate to keep everyone aligned without impacting speed and quality of decision making. (17/20)

They often over-communicate with key stakeholders, and figure out a good balance of using synchronous (in-person/virtual meetings) and asynchronous (written communication) channels. (18/20)

Communication can seem like a time overhead but is essential in creating impact especially when the size of cross-functional teams grows large, which often happens in a hyper-growth start-up. (19/20)

Effectiveness of communication directly determines the ability of a PM to create impact as it enables high-quality decisions & brings in CXO-level sponsorship for big product ideas. (20/20)

#ProductManager #ProductManagement #Startups #innovation #technology #Communication