Why and When do start-ups need a Product Manager?

The fun and challenging part in running a start-up is that you operate with uncertainty and scarce resources – money, people and time. Which means it is critical that every effort is really thought through to ensure you are maximising the return for the effort. Most importantly, your product offering or solution has to be meticulously crafted based on a solid understanding of customer problems, business goals and technology options.

Do start-ups need a product manager?

More often than not, in the early stages founders themselves work as product managers. If they are successful, then day-to-day management decisions take over, leaving no time for on the ground product management. The team grows, user base increases and the product gets more complex.

This is where a product manager can make a difference. Operating in a sweet spot between business, technology and user experience, the product manager takes an initial idea, guides it through several iterations using market insights, data and stakeholder feedback, until it takes the shape of a full-fledged solution. The focus is on addressing ever-evolving market needs while delivering on the business goals. Agile methodologies and a metrics oriented approach are key tools in their arsenal.

The product manager ensures that scarce resources are spent on solving the highest priority problem and that it gets solved with as minimal an effort as possible. 

Here’s a simple example from my product management experience. When the Vedic astrology portal www.Jothishi.com was started, our goal was to build a product where users could register and request for an analysis of their astrological charts by submitting their birth details. When detailing out user stories, our development teams insisted on building a user management module with login, forgot password, reset password, user profile management, etc. It sounded perfectly rational to build the whole thing at the same time because that would be faster than building it in stages.

But, what if we’d built all that and users didn’t register? All that effort would have been wasted!

It took some convincing to get the team to agree to build only the registration part first. So, we built the user registration part and all the other things to complete the basic end-to-end user flow. Once we had about 100 registrations in the first two weeks, we built the ‘forgot password’ capability. We added ‘Edit profile’ when a kind user e-mailed us that they got their profile info wrong.

So at what stage should start-ups hire a product manager?

It makes sense to separate the roles of the founder and product manager in the early stages itself so that it frees the founder’s time to focus on fundraising and other strategic aspects. It also avoids launching products that don’t resonate with customers, and other costly mistakes that stem from lack of proper user research and planning.

More importantly, getting a product manager on board in the early stages of a start-up instils a culture of good product thinking - listening to customer needs, solving customer problems instead of building features, creating flexible roadmaps and experimentation. Starting out with a tested Minimum Viable Product (MVP), adding on incremental changes is much simpler than reworking on a launched product that doesn’t meet market needs. 

So if you are an early-stage start-up that has found a product market fit, and plan to scale operations focusing on a lean product build, the time to get a product manager onboard is NOW. A skilful one with a unique mix of business acumen, tech savviness and customer orientation can prove to be an invaluable investment for your venture.