Push It Forward Revisited
When in a small company it is SO easy to get tied up and fall into “traps”. These may include things like running long release cycles, creating too much documentation, etc…
When many people are wearing numerous hats around the company, it’s easy to lose priority on where you need to spend your time. The key for me relies on a couple of things:
- Are we listening to our market?
- Are we driving our products where the market tells us?
- Are we making sure to continue to innovate in addition to acting on market data?
- Are we pushing the product forward?
The innovation point is key, because (in a start-up especially) you don’t want products to grow stagnant unless you want them to grow stagnant. The market is nascent, a lot of revs will be driven internally unless the early adopters turn into early majorities and so on.
It’s a tricky balance between managing a development schedule, internal / external roadmaps, and making sure everyone is properly versed on what your products do. My philisophy is, everyone in a small company has to wear their Product Manager hat at some point or another.
If you look at the “typical” product manager job description, there is simply way too much on there in order for a single person to be great at the entire job. The thing at a small company is, a PM shouldn’t be expected to actually do all of the things tranditional brand / product manager would do. Understand them yes — but do them…not really possible.
Since everyone is so involved in all products day-to-day, it’s easy to get folks on the PM bandwagon. The difficulty for management is a) making sure people understand product management and b) making sure people don’t start stepping on toes and going overboard.
There are some rules I live by having been in two software start-ups now: what the founder says goes, and what management says goes. They are simply not looking to PM’s to make sure a specific product has a good P&L. That’s the responsibility of the business, not a single PM.
I’m putting some thoughts together on what the typical software start-up PM role looks like. I’m feeling the blog vibe a little bit more lately, and my wheels are starting to turn…
Happy Friday, everyone!
