Growing As A Product Manager In A Startup Environment

Mindsets I’ve adopted working in a fast-growing company in 2019

I started working in a start-up company right off my university graduation with a computing science bachelor degree as an entry-level technical delivery specialist. Within the first six months, my company raised capital and started growing in size rapidly. Ever since then, I have witnessed multiple rounds of layoffs and more investment within the company.

It was chaotic. No matter what position employees were in, it was very easy to get lose sight of the company’s direction and start to lose faith. For me, I saw this as a valuable environment for me to grow, due to the fact that there was a lot of areas that I could make an impact on, despite that there were certain that I couldn’t. With the determination, a forward-thinking mindset I had and the blessings from my managers, I was promoted to become one of the product team members.

As a product team, we placed ourselves to be in the front position to turn our cost ineffective service-based model into a scalable software distribution model (SaaS), while maintaining the flexibility in customization of our product. It was an extremely difficult problem to solve, but more importantly, we had a product vision.

After 1.5 years of being a product manager and almost 4 years working in the company, here are some of the lessons I learnt through my growth.

Think big picture and be a leader of my team and company

Working in a fast-growing company meant that teams always had to make changes and adapted based on different factors. As a result, it was almost impossible to keep processes and documentation up to date. Therefore, it was extremely important for anyone to proactively collaborate and bring new ideas to the team in order to work together in the most efficient and effective way.

I am a strong believer that no one should be restricted by what they could contribute based on their core responsibilities. In addition to my own team, being a leader of the company means that I was constantly thinking of what I could do to help the company to move forward. Especially in an environment where core responsibilities are often not clearly assigned to a position within the company, I needed to be willing to act on the most important problem, whether or not it was within my core responsibilities.

Throughout my time as a product manager, I acted in multiple roles on top of being a typical product manager. I facilitated team retrospectives for multiple teams in order to help them learned from their mistakes. I also led the transformation of the developer team into cross-functional team structure in order to eliminate silos and foster knowledge sharing between developers.

Ultimately, I saw my team’s success as my own success.

Get as close to the team as possible and speak their languages

As a product manager, it was essential to communicate clearly about the product to all members of the company. However, not all members spoke the same language as to what the product meant to them. Having a deep understanding of how teams operated and their general day-to-day helped a lot for me to communicate product changes to each of those teams.

I was responsible to lead new product releases from gathering the team members to understand what we were releasing to how we were going to communicate it to the rest of the company. The question I always asked myself was “What does this release mean to different teams and how should I communicate that to them?”

In the early days, I was having a lot of trouble understanding why some members of the company never knew anything about the product releases, despite having release notes and announcement on multiple channels. I figured out that one of the reasons was that I wasn’t speaking their languages and didn’t know what they needed to know.

All these realizations would never happen if I didn’t get close to the team and understand how they operated.

Being transparent with my team

I believe that how transparent I am reflects in how much I trusted my team. I find the most important part about transparency is to acknowledge my faults and weaknesses. In an environment where team collaboration is the key to success, admitting to the difficulties I was facing empowered the team to help me out.

Especially as a decision-maker in the position of a product manager, how I behave and deal with problems will also influence my teammates to do the same.

Leading myself is the most effective way to lead a team.