Product Manager at a startup vs Big Company
Published in
3 min readOct 16, 2019
About 2.5 years back, I moved from working at a startup with ~150 people to a company with 17000 employees. Below are some observations about being a PM at a startup versus a PM at a larger company.
- Scope vs Scale: Moving from a startup to a larger company typically involves sacrificing scope for scale. At an early stage company, you’ll often be asked to own and drive broad areas. In my 3 years with my earlier company, I went from working as an individual product manager to leading multiple product teams across different platforms and diverse areas such as conversion, retention, User Generated Content etc. Roles at larger companies, on the other hand, tend to be more focussed. You’re typically focussed on a particular segment of users or a very specific problem and you go deep into solving this problem really well for your users. (PS: Even as we rightly eulogize the startup struggle, driving a 1% improvement for a mature successful product with a large user base is no less challenging and requires a deep understanding of your users and their pain points)
- Communication: I once heard a product leader joke that “You need to repeat your message until it becomes a meme”. As the size of a team increases, the complexity of communication increases non-linearly. In larger organizations, it’s easy for messages to get lost or distorted and so you need to communicate early and frequently. Overcommunicate! Always!
- Stakeholder management: Larger organizations are often less about “individual genius” than being able to “work the organization” to drive the most impactful projects. The best PMs I’ve seen at Booking are those who combine a strong sense of hard PM skills(user empathy, prioritization, data driven, product sense etc) with soft skills such as the ability to influence, great communication etc.
- Prioritization: Irrespective of whether you are at a startup or a larger company, you ruthlessly prioritize for impact. While larger companies have the luxury of taking several bigger bets simultaneously, this does not take away the responsibility of prioritization from individual PMs. At the best companies, teams typically start small and are scaled as the team starts to show success. So, even within a larger company, you’re often running your own little startup, fighting for resources and need to effectively prioritize.
- Innovate vs Iterate? Not really!: From outside, you’d imagine that larger companies have everything figured out and solved. From both my own experience at Booking and from friends at Google, Facebook etc, I’ve learnt that’s not necessarily true. Many of these larger companies have grown so rapidly because they’ve executed at lightning speed and have shown a single minded focus on the most important problems. For example, Facebook focussed on user growth for years and even after reaching hundreds of millions of users, their advertising solutions were rather basic. Since then, they’ve built one of the most powerful advertising platforms. No matter how mature a company is, there are large complex areas where you can innovate and drive massive impact.
