Product Management Across the Product Life Cycle: Startups, Scale-ups, and Mature Companies

The product manager is more of an umbrella term for various types of jobs rather than a specific job itself.

Among the many ways to categorize the product manager role, my favorite is along the product lifecycle.?

I have worked at some of the top-tier companies during both the growth and mature product phases, and these are my takes:

Pre-product market fit phase:?

In the product management books, the recommendation is to start with the product vision first, that is, the ideal aspirational state of the product that perfectly solves the customer problem or need, and then reverse engineer from there.

The problem with a pre-product market fit product is that you don't know what the ideal state of the product that perfectly solves the customer problem is. If you did, you likely wouldn't be in this phase anyway. So you can't reverse engineer from the vision. What you need to do is start with a proto-vision and very quickly design, build, launch, measure, and investigate what happened to arrive at a more refined version of your proto-vision. You repeat this process until you have enough validation from customers that you understand what the ideal state of the product that solves the customer problem is.?

As a product manager in this phase, you'll be doing a fair amount of 'hacking', dealing with one challenge after another until things start to align. It's crucial to quickly define a proto-vision, ideally backed by your own experience or serious observation of a problem. Build and test swiftly, but be sure to plan for launch to ensure people will test your product. This may require investing time in enhancing your social media presence to attract potential users. Lastly, you'll need to engage in significant investigation, communicating with your users to understand where your product is successfully addressing their problem and where it falls short.

This phase is the riskiest one and, in my opinion, by far the most difficult. Some of the factors adding to this hardship are not directly related to the product management challenge itself, but to the life of the product manager, usually a founder or entrepreneur, who is in charge of the product. When there's no revenue, there's no paycheck for the founder. And without a paycheck, the founder must find ways to cover their bills, either by living frugally, accruing debt, or taking on side gigs or consulting work. Unfortunately, all of these strategies can diminish focus at a time when focus is everything

Growth phase or scale up

The main difference between a scale-up and a startup is that a scale-up has achieved product-market fit, meaning it has found a version of the product that meets the customer's needs well enough to sustain a business. Hence, a scale-up does have a validated vision and can reverse engineer from there to decide what to work on. However, the scale-up is usually adding co-products or satellite products to enhance the company's revenue stream. With these products, it typically needs to find product-market fit. But, because they are related to the main market, this task is usually easier. Equally important, a scale-up needs to perfect what it is already doing well, typically through a lot of experimentation (like A/B tests). This helps to improve the product and reflect that improvement in crucial metrics related to customer acquisition, retention, or better monetization, i.e., providing a superior revenue stream for the company.

As a product manager in these companies, you need to act swiftly. Some have a one-week sprint, so there isn't much time for planning. You need to conceive your experiments at the beginning of the quarter and hit the ground running. Prepare to execute the experiment, obtain some statistical validation (usually without overdoing it or being overly scientific), and fine-tune the product to improve the metrics.

Compared to a mature company (coming next), a scale-up is like an old movie played in fast-forward mode, where speed is everything and a certain lack of accuracy can be forgiven, as long as you are conscientious in your approach.

Mature product or mature company

A well-run mature company allows for situations where you can act calmly, rationally, and methodically to make the best possible decisions.

Here, the product vision is paramount. You have years and tens of millions of dollars of validation that guide you toward what the ideal state of the product should be to solve the customer's problem. Therefore, you can define that vision, reverse engineer, and choose to do whatever will further that vision. To do so, you will work on a strategy, a well-orchestrated plan to align your product closer to the vision, and you will select a north-star metric that will indicate whether you are moving in the right direction.

You may wonder why this is necessary or whether there is any challenge at all. Indeed, there are challenges. Markets change, competitors emerge, technology evolves, and consumer expectations shift, so the product vision needs to evolve. It is the product manager's responsibility to guide that evolution. Also, a product manager might manage a product within a system or a significant component within a platform. Although the vision for the larger system may be clear, the role of the component might be a bit unclear. This ambiguity provides an excellent opportunity to define the component's role to maximize the value of the assigned team and responsibility.

You will take your time to redefine the vision, write carefully crafted documents that will be revised by many peers, and when it comes to designing and building, especially for important initiatives, you may need senior leadership or board approval for your proposal.

Political skills (in a positive sense) become more important for the product manager. They need to work hard on building consensus and reaching shared understanding.?

Being detailed and methodical is beneficial. Your day will be filled with meetings, from start to finish, and you will juggle numerous tasks, from writing vision documents, future press releases, and go-to-market documents, to handling product owner tasks such as writing Jira tickets and running Scrum sprints or Kanban boards. In well-run companies, teams tend to function efficiently, often capable of running themselves on autopilot. This autonomy allows the product manager more time to work on tasks beyond simply managing the sprint.

Navigating the Career Path in Product Management

I hope this description helps you understand the various phases of the product lifecycle and the different types of product management jobs. If you're trying to break into product management, mature companies and scale-ups are often the most challenging to get into initially. They have established processes, a strong brand appeal, and a large pool of candidates to choose from. Some have formal programs to bring newcomers into product management, but many opt for individuals who have already gained their first experiences in the field. Working for a startup may present a good opportunity, but most startups fail, and some might not be truly committed to surviving the pre-product market fit phase, so choose carefully.