Founder-Mode product work
“A good product manager is the CEO of the product” - I never felt like that when I was the only PM in a startup. Instead of being in manager mode, I always felt more like a mini-founder of the product. I’ve heard that from others who are the first PM through the door. Here are the ambiguous areas early PMs have to get comfortable with.
Iterating quickly, finding strong signal in sparse data
It’s rare that a startup’s first few sales are perfectly packaged. In a lean startup model, or a major customer pilot, market feedback can cause huge swings in product strategy.
As an example, when I joined Captur, our ‘job’ as a product was to replace a manual process of checking images with AI, so that ebike rental companies could send fines to users who parked ebikes badly. There was a clear signal of value (paying customer), but the solution barely moved the needle on the underlying problem - people didn’t park any better.
We only found the strong source of signal after multiple iterations of discovery and experimentation. When we released our AI models as part of the bike rental app, we could give parking feedback to users before they leave their bike, improving compliance by 50%. That outcome was much more valuable to the micromobility companies we worked with; changing the product created an inflection point for growth.
The most common outcome is that feedback is mixed, and inconsistent. Learning quickly through rapid iteration is the key to converging on product market fit, and then later grow to win in the market. (3)
Wearing many hats, managing soft and shifting team boundaries
Moving the goalposts on roadmapping can cause friction: failing fast means dealing with failed bets. Worse - what you need from the team will shift as you change scope. These issues fall away when the startup feels like a high-trust culture, where each experiment is clearly understood in the context of the collective goal.
Building that trust can start by finding painful, sharp edges that occur when shipping the product - internally or externally. When I was the only PM at dimension, a 3D content production company, that meant running post-mortems with the whole team, not just engineering or production. In a different context, friction logging, retros, or regular demos have also helped here.
Critically, it’s also the PM’s responsibility to address the sources of friction that come up. More often than I expected, that meant getting to ‘good enough’ at the task that needed doing, since there’s no one better at hand.
Early PM roles rarely match the job description. Founder-mode product work means rapid experimentation, learning fast, and driving execution with the team you have. Done well, it creates inflection points in the company trajectory.
Relevant other reading
- https://a16z.com/good-product-manager-bad-product-manager/
- https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html
- https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-ship-like-a-startup
- https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#short-toes
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman%27s_stages_of_group_development
- https://amivora.substack.com/p/learning-to-make-decisions-in-a-new