Moving from engineering to engineering leadership requires that you start using different tools.
The priority becomes scaling yourself, aligning stakeholders, and inspiring action. As such...
You end up writing less code and start writing more values, principles, and patterns.
The elegance of your architecture becomes less important than the eloquence of your words.
The things you say become less important than the sound of your voice when you say them.
I often find people working with young startups who are not quite sure how to position themselves, their equity holding, their influence, and their accountability in the business.
It's essential to label people's roles and responsibilities correctly. It has many benefits including a) smoothing out day-to-day operations by making areas of responsibility and accountability clear b) accelerating fundraising by helping investors understand whom to talk to and whom they're investing and c) helping key employees feel valued and incentivized to give their blood, sweat, and tears to the business by ensuring they have the right title, responsibilities, and equity.
Here are some key roles that are often conflated and confused.
Operational (co)Founder: Someone who's played an instrumental role in the formation of the company (likely taking on significant risk at the beginning by working without pay) and (crucially) will continue to play a full-time operational role in the business moving forward. This person should have a meaningful equity position.
Non-operational co-founder: Someone who may have contributed to the initial formation of the business but has other commitments that limit their availability to participate in an operational capacity. They might play a role on the board or provide capital as an investor (see below for definitions) but are not involved day-to-day. This person should have a minor equity position for their initial founding contribution (+ any additional equity they earn through capital investment).
CEO: (Very) Ideally a (co)founder. Plays a full-time key operational role in the company. Makes key decisions. Leads essential operational workstreams such as fundraising, hiring, vision/goal setting, etc. Once capital is raised, is (very) ideally only involved in running the given startup and has no other operational roles in any other business. Must have meaningful equity.
Investor: Provides capital and some non-operational support (advice, intros, reputation, industry connections etc). Collectively all the investors can have meaningful equity in the business but must not have a larger position than the operational founders.
Board member: Either an external (wasn't involved in forming or investing in the company) key industry professional who can help steer the business or a key representative(s) from the investor group. Might also include a non-operational founder who has seniority, domain expertise, and perhaps provided initial capital.
1 person can perform multiple functions in the business and, as such, be attributed equity from multiple pools/reasons.
However, it is value destructive to the company for someone to have the title and/or the equity of another role but not properly and fully perform the duties of that role.
As such, it is against their best interest to do this since, whatever equity they hold, will be under-valued or ultimately be reduced to zero when investors and other operators choose to under-invest or walk away entirely.
#equity #fundraising #jobtitles #strartups
There is still so much confusion about what Product Management is.
I'm a film nerd. So let's use a film production team as a metaphor for the Product Manager.
Executive Producer = CEO. They have an idea. They have money. They might even have a script.
Set Decorator/Costume Designer = Brand and Product Designers. They design beautiful things.
Set Builders/Camera Operators = Engineers. They build amazing things.
However, if they were all sent to a movie set they'd fail to make a coherent movie.
They need a director.
Director = Product Manager. They have a vision for the story they want to tell. They have an emotional journey they want to take the audience on.
They work with the set builders to build the right kind of physical spaces that support the action.
They work with set decorators and costume designers to make sure there's a consistent color pallet and design language.
They work with the editor to make sure the story makes sense and key moments are emphasized.
They make sure all the amazing craftspeople are making the same movie. They help them stay aware and aligned around the key emotional beats of the story to ensure that the audience walks away with the intended catharsis - laughter, fear, excitement, delight, and more.
That's what Product Managers do for users.
When you become a bigshot founder of a scaleup, your every word and behavior is closely observed and acted on.
This gives you the power to do a lot of good, and the power to do a lot of damage.
I've started working with some incredible scaleups that are each, in their own right, changing the world.
Part of my work, however, includes working with founders to adjust their engagement with the expanding team so that their superpowers are used in the best, most constructive way possible.
As a founder in this position, you must move from "getting shit done" to "building the thing that builds the thing". This means that your primary strategic levers to drive change are not cutting code or running products, but rather explicitly defining a great culture, communicating high-level business priorities, establishing effective ways of working, and funding teams to succeed.
The primary way you tactically interact with individuals day-to-day moves from telling them what to do, towards reviewing work and encouraging everyone to be more aligned, more ambitious, and more effective in their decision-making.
By doing this, you show your team that it's their job to come up with bold answers that move the needle, and you give them the space to do their very best work.
It's hard to make the switch, but make it you must, or you will ultimately thrash your team and deliver sub-optimal results.
One of the secret advantages of startups is that they are founder lead.
This makes it possible for them to act faster and bolder than companies lead by non-founder CEOs.
Why?
Because founders enjoy nearly limitless authority to make bold bets and get the company to follow.
Non-founder CEOs have to build a business case and bring the rest of the org with them.
Founders tend to have a seemingly endless well of ambitious change they want to create in the world and in their company.
Non-founder CEOs tend to be incrementalists who count beans.
So many companies, so few competent product managers.
Why? Some reasons include…
A general scarcity of competent and experienced product managers in existence
Bad hiring practices
Lack of professional development investment in employees and a lack of service leadership in the team
A misunderstanding of the role of Product Management leading to…
Underinvestment in the function - spreading the PMs too thin
Assigning/attributing the responsibilities of product management to designers, engineers, marketing or “CTOs
Leadership that is too intrenched in their own domain expertise or too overindexed on revenue at all costs applying inappropriate pressure and prescriptiveness on the few PMs they have - sabotaging their efforts
Building an ecosystem/marketplace requires a broad range of considerations. Some that came to mind today when discussing the subject with someone...
1. Figure out your Personas/Stakeholders. Each one may (likely) require a different kind of marketplace, tools, messages etc.
2. If you're at an existing company, remember that you will essentially need to set up a company within the company. This is because all the functions at the company are likely focused on your traditional customers rather than your ecosystem stakeholders.
So you will need people/sub-teams in...
Product
Marketing
Ops
Support
Community
etc
3. Remember that ecosystems/marketplaces take more time to develop than you'd expect - so set expectations correctly with your leadership team.
This is because, unlike normal products, you can't just work with internal stakeholders to ship features for users. You need to ship features, then you need to work with partners to consume/act in a certain way, then you can give it to end-users. Then once you learn from user behavior, it takes yet more time to coordinate all 3rd parties in order to make changes and retest.
4. Ecosystems and Marketplaces need a wide range of key decisions and frameworks - including...
Clear definitions of stakeholders and per stakeholder:
Asset/use-case types
Distribution types
Policies/incentives/guardrails
Go to market/messaging
Community engagement programs (1:many),
Strategic partner engagement programs (1:few)
Generalized "Partnerships" and "Partnerships Teams" can really drive a lot of distractions for a company.
They will often find a wide array of interesting "Partnership Opportunities" that are either inappropriate, ill-timed or scattered across a wide range of possible strategic directions for the business.
It's far better and more effective for Product and Leadership to define specific areas where 3rd parties can add value and then develop APIs, programs, personas, pitches, and packages for those stakeholders.
The probability that your first product, value props, marketing messages, marketing automation, etc will work 100% effectively the first time is nearly zero.
Even if you spend endless time doing user research, gathering requirements, and so on (don't do that), you will have to pay close attention to real usage data and continue to optimize, optimize, optimize.
It's slow, painful, and thankless work. But it is essential.
It's beyond cliche to say that people are the most precious resource for any company.
It's also profoundly true.
Small teams of amazing people will out-execute large teams of mediocre people every time.
However, I’ve been spending more of my time with hyper-growth startups recently and they all have one thing in common right now: Massive hiring bottlenecks.
Here are some of my tips for accelerating your hiring process in these tough times.
Prioritizing
Discuss hiring as a priority at each all-hands meeting. Give an update on all of the subjects below.
Decentralize the problem. Encourage and empower each employee/team to source, interview and hire for their own team (as per tactics in this list)
Add hiring outcomes to performance reviews. Show your seriousness about making it part of everyone's job.
Add it to the onboarding education content for new hires (explain how to hire and why it’s part of their job).
Do lunch-and-learns to train existing employees on how to hire well.
Sourcing
Establish a great Careers page that explains the company's values, mission, and benefits.
Proactively target former colleagues and great candidates on LinkedIn. Pitch them hard. For example...
Great people often ignore recruiters. Have hiring managers send personalized, super leaned-in reach-out messages.
Invite candidates to come see the office or meet senior people in the company.
Invite candidates to have lunch with the team.
Do all of the above before the interview process even begins.
Incentivizing
Offer existing employees a meaningful bonus for successfully referring in their favorite former colleagues.
Make compelling offers to candidates. Recruiting is expensive. Losing a candidate over compensation packages is a very costly waste of time.
Interviewing
Do a quick hiring manager screen and as soon as they’re comfortable...
Don’t waste time. Do 1-day interview loop with all key functions followed by a debrief/decision meeting within 24 hours. You and the candidate should know the outcome within a few days.
Ensure the interview loop is well run so that the outcome is clear. The hiring manager should email all members of the loop and give them plenty of context about the role, the candidate and what specifically each person should be looking for (E.g. Sally, as Engineering Manager on the team, you're looking to understand how well this candidate will interact with your engineering team.)
Ensure the experience is great for the candidate - even for candidates who are failing during the interview process or fail to get an offer. Word of mouth should be awesome to encourage other candidates to interview too.
Closing
Get senior leaders to reach out and congratulate the candidate on getting an offer - perhaps even have the CEO do it.
Send “Love bombs”: The entire interview loop and the people the candidate would be working closely with should email and share their genuine enthusiasm about them potentially joining the team.
Maintaining
Don’t lower the quality bar. Ensure bar-raisers are part of the interview loop to mitigate bad hires for expediency,
Make sure that existing employees are engaged, motivated, and empowered to do their best work. Attrition is a killer. This might include firing low performers who are undermining team morale and effectiveness.
Like most professional investors, I don't tend to sign NDAs prior to a formal engagement with a company.
Why? There are a number of reasons that include...
Your idea is not unique. What's unique is the 10,000 decisions you will make to execute your idea between now and success and beyond
Even if people have the exact same idea, there are likely many, many ways to execute the idea producing many different kinds of companies each with a different niche/focus/go-to-market etc. Again, here, the execution is what matters.
Rather than people stealing your idea, it's more likely that you need to drag them kicking and screaming to it. The best people are too busy doing their own things to be going around taking other people's ideas.
Since I meet with a lot of companies in my role as investor and advisor, it's likely I've heard versions of your idea before and I'll hear many more versions in the future. If I choose to engage with these companies I could be accused of sharing your idea which - in fact - did not happen. This exposes me to unnecessary risk
It adds paperwork and friction to everything
It filters out Founders/companies that don't know what they're doing and refuse to be coached.
That being said, I will, of course, always act in a professional manner and treat the information I get as confidential and use it only in the best interests of the founders and the company.
Also, my formal engagement contract does have a confidentiality clause since, in those cases, I will be digging much deeper into execution details.
It is not to write code
It is not to design beautiful pixels
It is not to meet the needs of that strategic customer
It is not to make revenue
It is not to have a big launch
It is not to raise capital
It is to ship products that a large and growing cohort of users love, use, and recommend.
That’s it.
Everything else is either a means to an end or an organic byproduct.
As a result, your “vision”, your “job”, your ego, your personal preferences, or even the contractual obligations of your biggest customer don’t ultimately matter.
Collaborate hard. Disagree. Commit. Put it in the world. Learn. Iterate. Create value. Win or lose.
In B2B Sales contract negotiation hell?
Build such a powerful, delightful consumer-facing product with a simple onboarding experience and then ask them "did you red-line the Instagram contract before creating your brand page?"
The modern era of digital products and businesses has moved away from grand, bureaucratic brands and experiences, and towards delightfully human and simple customer journeys that speak to us as individuals.
Think Lemonaid for insurance. Slack for collaboration.
No Latin. No acronyms. Fewer forms. Less jargon. Less pain.
This is one of the secrets of disruptive tech companies. It's not just about an app. It's about a more human, user-centric business model and customer experience.
MVP, MVP, MVP. Everything's an MVP.
An MVP is a design requirement. It is not the thing you release.
You release v1, v1.1, v1.2
The "MVP" you release is the start of a journey - not the end.
What is your strategy for turning your MINIMAL VIABLE PRODUCT into a WORLD CLASS PRODUCT?
Maybe let's coin a new term... WCP.
Don’t let pressure demoralize you. Use it to focus you and elevate the quality of your execution. Crunch time is time to deliver, not time to fold.
You don’t need product owners.
Product managers own and run products.
You don’t need BAs.
Product managers triangulate an understanding of the requirements of the business and the market to make product decisions.
All these extra roles come from bigcos and only serve to add unnecessary communication overhead and dilute accountability.
Product managers: own and run your product. Don’t let others take pieces of the responsibility and accountability off your plate.
If you need help communicating with internal and external stakeholders, lean on your product marketing manager. If you need help with understanding the requirements of your customers then go talk to them directly and/or lean on designers, design researchers and customer support teams.
Equity: Give them a piece of the pie
Inspiration: Inspire action through the tone of your voice and the clarity of your vision
Leadership by example: You and your leadership team need to act as you want your team to act. Don't boss people around from the sidelines.
Cultural Values: Ensure your cultural values celebrate efficiency, effectiveness, fast-forwarding to the future, truth-seeking, etc.
Performance Reviews and other tools: Ensure your cultural values are embedded in your performance rubrics, hiring evaluations etc. Hold people to account to the values on a day-to-day and quarter-by-quarter basis.
Bar raisers: Ensure that interview loops have someone outside the hiring team looking that evaluate candidates from the point of view of cultural values and raise the bar on the average quality of the existing people on the team.
AAA players want to work with AAA players: Once you have great people acting in great ways it will get easier to hire great people.
Autonomy, Responsibility, Authority: Retaining AAA people requires that you give them autonomy, responsibility, AND authority so that they feel like the CEO of their thing.
One of the keys to leadership is being extremely precise in how you speak so that there’s no room for confusion, while also creating lots of room for your team to do their best work.
One of the common issues I run into with startups I advise is a problem with abstraction layers/granularity of planning.
Plans that are either too high level (E.g. Take over the world in 3 years) or too low level (E.g. ticket 1, ticket 2).
Remember to develop and maintain a mid-level plan that acts as connective tissue between high-level goals and extremely tactical tasks. This plan should represent milestones of meaningful, new value delivered to the market (E.g. "Introducing New Feature X").