Stage 1 : Founder Led Stage (Visionary Centralization)
In the early stages of a startup, a product is a direct manifestation of a founder’s vision. The founder has a strong belief about a solution that addresses a business challenge. The founders define the solution, go to market strategies, sales processes and the overall ecosystem. The founder is everything – Chief Product Officer, Lead Salesperson, Primary Researcher and even a UX Designer. In many cases, in the absence of strong technical team, they may even dictate the early stage technical architecture.
However, this stage is typical of very small organizations and is usually short lived. The organizations are in high stakes pursuit of a strong Product-Market Fit (PMF). Speed and conviction matter more than processes.
The Reality for Product Managers: The “Order Taking” Phase
Formal product management is usually absent in this stage of maturity. If present, product management is ofteneither viewed as a luxury – or worse, a “process bottleneck”. Product managers, if hired, often find themselves in role of a “Pseudo-PM” because the founder/CEO serves as the “real” product manager.
- The Roadmap: The roadmap is within the founder’s head which evolves on the basis of the last conversation they would have had with a prospect or the most recent customer fire.
- Discovery v/s Execution: Product managers primary role isn’t to discover “the What” or “the Why” in this stage, but to focus on “the How”. They are an execution specialist who work along with the founders and transform the vision into reality with surgical precision.
The Tactical Burden
Product managers are very tactical in Stage 1. They act more like Project Managers, spending time with JIRAs, unblocking engineers and writing technical specs. They cannot take independent decisions about a feature without consulting the leadership.
The Strategic Risks: Founder’s Trap
Though the early stage benefits from the sheer competence of founders, it can eventually become a barrier:
The Scalability Bottleneck: The product becomes overly dependent on the founders capacity which results in slower growth once the founders cannot oversee every detail.
The Talent Gap: Hiring seasoned and strategic product managers at this stage is difficult because the roles lacks autonomy and independent decision making.
The Pivot Tax: Constant shift in “mental roadmap” usually lead to high technical debt, fragmented implementation and band-aid solutions.
Survival Guide: How to Thrive in Stage 1
If you find your self in a founder led organization, do not fight with the system – instead embrace it.
- Adopt an Apprentice Mindset: These organizations are the best boot camps that a young product manager can ever get in his/her career. You are witnessing first hand how products are built from zero to one, quick strategy formulations and rapid validations.
- Shadow your founder. Attend customer interviews – don’t just scribe meeting minutes. Observe how founders pitch the product, solve customer’s problems, handle objections, define new features and prioritize when resources are not in abundance.
- Build Trust Through Execution. Product managers earn the right to “Discovery” by being exceptionally good with “Delivery”. Once the founder trusts with delivery, they will soon offload the discovery to the product managers.
- Influence By Data, Not Opinion. At this stage, you cannot influence your founder with any subjective argument. You can only influence by using “hard data”. You should focus on designing a data collection framework so that you measure KPIs and present evidence that speaks louder than any subjective argument.