Embrace The Chaos: Austin Yang Speaks The Truth About Early Stage Startups
Product leader Austin Yang explains that working at early stage startups is more than just about opportunities for innovation.
By Tremis Skeete, for Product Coalition
For those who love the idea of diving into a career where you make an impact immediately — joining an early stage startup is a dream come true.
In the right circumstances, early stage startups are a great adventure; But according to Austin Yang, Lead Product Manager at Softr — he wants you to understand via his LinkedIn post, that sometimes, even dreams and adventures have nightmares.
Austin explains that working at an early stage startup is so much more than just being immersed in opportunities to grow and do real innovation.
You will have to go beyond your specific job role, and you’ll have to share the burden with everyone else in the startup to ensure company success.
Do you still want to join an early stage startup? Then you better let go of predictability and order, and get ready to embrace uncertainty and chaos — because innovation at a startup is a messy adventure. I hope you’re comfortable with ambiguity.
Read a copy of Austin’s LinkedIn post below to learn more:
If you’re a PM [product manager] looking to join an early-stage startup because you want to have more impact, here’s what you need to know:
1. Be ready to get your hands dirty.
You’ll have to do many of the following — create mockups in Figma, hack together MVPs with no-code tools, write marketing emails, piece together some JavaScript from Stack Overflow, answer support tickets, Google “what exactly is GDPR and SOC 2” 100 times, and even close some sales deals.
“This isn’t a PM’s job” will not be a valid excuse. No one is doing only their job at this stage.
If you just want to do “strategy,” this isn’t the right place for you.
2. Embrace the chaos and fix it.
Your data will be wrong, tools will be missing, and an unexpected fire will start every time you go on a coffee break.
And process? What process?
If you can’t deal with the chaos, you won’t last long. But if you just accept the chaos as is, the company won’t last long.
You have to embrace all the mess while simultaneously finding ways to improve it.
3. Be a domain expert.
As a PM, you’re not hired as a domain expert. You are hired as a product expert to help take the founders’ vision to the next level through good product management practices.
But to do that, you have to spend a lot of time understanding the domain you operate in, why the founders see things a certain way, what biases they have, what signals they are missing, etc.
If you can’t demonstrate a similar level of domain knowledge, you won’t be trusted to make crucial product decisions.
4. You are responsible for upgrading your skills.
At an early-stage company, you likely won’t have a senior product leader to define your career path and offer the mentorship you need.
If you can’t proactively find ways to upgrade your skills, you will be the one that gets “upgraded” as the company scales to the next stage, even if you did a lot to help the company get there.
I know this sounds cruel, but it is the reality. Even founders get kicked out when their skills can’t keep up with the company’s growth.
Having said all that, joining an early-stage startup can be an incredibly rewarding experience.
If you find these points exciting rather than daunting, you’ll have the opportunity to play a bigger role in shaping the product, work on a variety of fun projects, and most importantly, do all of this without any big corporate bureaucracy.
