Leading a startup’s tech or product team is full of challenges. The amount of uncertainty can be overwhelming: what will happen next month, next year, who will I need to hire, what are we going to build?
Here I will cover a pattern I have seen with Product teams in startups: how they grow and how they share their responsibilities over time.
Stage 1: Founders
Startups don’t typically have a Product team from day 1. They often don’t even have a dedicated Product Manager. Rather, one of their founders (sometimes more than one) will be filling that role.
These ‘product founders’ (as opposed to more commercially-facing ‘sales founders’) may not see themselves as product managers, nor have a title of Head of Product or similar. But they will be combining their many other responsibilities with ones you’d associate with a product lead: shaping the product direction, drawing up mockups, deciding on feature priorities.
Strictly speaking, this isn’t ideal considering the importance of product direction to a startup, with the initial need to find product-market fit. But it often is a necessity with very little time and resources available.
If you find yourself in that situation, consider the following:
Think about all the responsibilities that ‘Product’ covers; are you missing any critical aspect of the Product role?
Consider moving to Stage 2, or even better, Stage 3
Stage 2: Head of Product, plus 1
Once a startup begins to find product-market fit and traction, the importance and breadth of the Product role becomes more evident. A frequent outcome is for the product founder to dedicate her/himself to product management.
With a title of Head of Product, Chief Product Officer or similar, she/he will focus on fulfilling each and every responsibility associated with the product function. Until this becomes so much of a strain that the decision is made to hire someone to help with that workload.
What I have seen happening then is for the responsibilities to not be clearly defined between the Head of Product and the new hire. Or, that the new person just picks up bits and pieces that the Head finds too time-consuming (or less complex, less interesting?). As a result, the new person doesn’t have a clear role, confusion exists around who-does-what, and the Head of Product can still be a bottleneck for others.
Suggestions:
Look again at the responsibilities of ‘Product’ - make sure you are not missing anything critical, but also divide up these responsibilities between the two of you
Make sure that each person’s responsibilities make a sensible whole, and thus define a clear role for each of you
Think about the future: given the new person’s role now, how will it change going forwards?
Have a plan to move to Stage 3
Stage 3: Product team
Over time the Product team will grow and flourish into a fully-fledged team. At that point it is key to understand what each team members is responsible for. Hence going through an exercise of understanding all Product responsibilities but also defining clear roles within the Product team.
Having been through that exercise a few times, I have seen the following roles as the most common:
Roles within a Product team
Product Managers (PMs) provide overall leadership for one or several products. The Head of Product (or CPO) will likely act as a PM, while also managing the whole Product team
Product Owners have a more tactical role, in particular helping on a day-to-day basis the development team turn the product vision and roadmap into reality
Product Marketers act as a glue between the PM and the market and marketing team - they can actually sit in the marketing team in terms of line management
Designers work closely with the PM and PO on shaping the product before (and while) it is implemented
As always, this is not a definitive list. Your situation will vary, the key point is to go through this exercise:
Identify Product responsibilities
Define roles which cover all of these responsibilities
For clarity, aim for a minimum amount of overlap between roles
But also define the roles in relation to the relative strengths of the people in your team
Finally, be wary of making the Product team a silo - rather, make sure Product people contribute to cross-department teams.
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