Product Management in Small vs Large organizations
Published in
4 min readJun 19, 2019
What to expect if you are a Product Manager in Enterprises vs Startups
This article represents my opinions based on personal experiences working at large MNCs, mid-size companies as well as startups. I will dive into the specifics on how startups/enterprises operate, what PM skills you need to strive, how roadmap planning and execution happens.
Startups
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BASIC DIFFERENCES
- At a small company, your challenges are resources and attention.
- You don’t have enough Engineers, Designers, money, you have to gather your own analytics, write your own copy, etc.
- You don’t have to deal with internal politics. You have a small team to work with and everyone is concerned about user growth and what real users think about the product.
- Open-ended job description, chance to dip your toes into doing new things every day. Be a generalist and help different teams in the company.
PM SKILLS NEEDED
- Dealing with resource constraints
- Comfortable with stress and tight schedules without much mentorship.
- Maximize the value of engineering/technical talent
- Comfort with rapid failure. Ability to iterate or pivot rapidly
- Creative enough to experiment without spending a lot of money. Being a creative, innovative force inside the organization
- Strong aptitude communicating directly with customers/users to both provide support but more importantly to solicit feedback
- Putting on different hats (Marketing, Design, Copy Writer).
- Easier to cultivate the product-led organization mindset.
- Easier to reach out to users/customers to get them interested in alpha/beta tests.
ROADMAP & EXECUTION
- Ability to contribute to the vision and goals of the company based on your market research. Ability to make a large impact
- Is pretty short term 6 months, with long term problems to solve. Priorities can change within a month.
- New client requests can derail the roadmap, especially when the product is growing.
- Getting into new industries/verticals will also need the roadmap to be flexible enough to adapt.
- Define problems and workshop with the engineering team to develop solutions. Autonomy for developers to innovate and solve the problems.
- No standard process to frame the roadmap it's mostly a PM and the founders brainstorming together.
- Product Manager and the team has the ability to choose the release date when the feature is ready and this gives autonomy to release often to the market and gather quick feedback.
ENTERPRISES
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BASIC DIFFERENCES
- Bureaucracy will slow you down and it could be one of your biggest battles to fight.
- You always have to go the top asking for approvals on initiatives. Multiple levels of approvals slow down the products ability to go to market fast.
- Ability to delegate and trust others on your team completely without micromanaging.
- Resources are not usually an issue, a business case will be required to form a new team or change the team structures.
- Dedicated teams for User Research, Design, Copywriting. It's more of a handoff process than working through it with them.
- Fixed job description with a set of tasks and KPIs that you would be measured against.
PM SKILLS NEEDED
- Understand and perform toward higher-level enterprise level goals.
- Most of the vision and goals are handed off from the top level and you might not be able to influence them. The impact made might be a small fraction of the whole product.
- Navigate bureaucracy to get stuff done. Comfortable with slow, often frustrating, progress
- Maintain diplomacy and communication across multiple stakeholders with different perspectives.
- Understand that failure is not always an option.
- Great traditional management skills (often also Project Management)
- Harder to convince stakeholders to be product-led if the organization is not strongly supporting that mindset.
- Harder to reach out to the users, a formal procedure might be in place to collect feedback or might just need to rely on analytics.
ROADMAP & EXECUTION
- Long term planning is required 2 years at least to get features locked in.
- Product Requirements (sometimes PRD) have to be properly defined, approved and executed.
- Formal process to establish the roadmap, get approval from business stakeholders and dependent teams.
- Budget allocation and release planning happens even before the roadmap is executed.
- Some times features are handled or teams operate as Projects.
- Releases are not too often and are planned by a release team and you have to commit a feature to a particular release by following all the deadlines.
- Companies usually have separate teams to handle marketing and copywriting, PMs need to collaborate and review.
It's not all black and white. You might have come across different situations at bigger companies or startups. Different people strive in different kind of environments. Some people prefer to have autonomy over fixed processes. Some people hate constant change. So you should evaluate the kind of setting you that would suit you best. Or if you decide to try both like me, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Hope my insights were helpful.
You can reach me on LinkedIn.
