Tips to Become an Influential Product Manager at a Rapidly Growing Startup

By Kim Caisse

Much like an enthusiastic and determined hiker goes about clearing a usable trail through a forest, a skilled and insightful technical team member can size up the day-to-day business operations at their growing organization and seize opportunities to suggest product and other improvements that ultimately land them in an influential product management role.

A startup can be fertile ground for this. There is so much to do by so few people. Being hired to do one thing doesn’t mean you have to stay in that lane. Just ask Charlie Farison, Principal Product Manager at Cambridge Mobile Telematics, who provided the following tips:

Size Matters

Joining a startup with less than 50 employees provides opportunities for you to assess needs, fill gaps, and engage with your co-workers whether or not you start off in product management. Even if you begin in another role you’re qualified for, such as engineering, the small environment can enable you to angle for projects that combine technical understanding and client-facing work to achieve a large business impact.

Identify Improvements

Look for opportunities to make a direct positive difference for the company’s bottom line. For example, your manager needs to significantly reduce costs and sets an ambitious target for your team’s product. This is a chance to contribute and enjoy the rewards when that goal is met.

Influence Company Culture

Express an interest in helping shape your organization’s culture. You can do this by volunteering to be a part of the hiring processes. Your involvement could lead to recruiting, interviewing, and hiring from a more diverse talent pool for your team than existed in the past.

Priority Puzzle

Find important areas that others find less appealing and combine technical and people skills. Your manager may be consumed by other priorities, or co-workers may prefer to focus on technical aspects of the product. That opens up chances for you to do product-oriented work like working with customers or user experience work such as creating user personas.

Build Authentic Relationships

Get to know all of your co-workers—not only their roles, but also them as people. All activities and suggestions to strengthen the company, products, and culture may all be for naught unless you make conscientious efforts to build relationships with co-workers throughout your company. Conversations can help you find ways to fill in gaps and build cross-functional collaboration.

Keep Learning

Connect with a mentor at your organization who you can talk with throughout your transition into product management. This will make the journey easier. An experienced PM can help you understand product management and make suggestions for specifics like setting up a product release cadence and communicating it to customers.

Meet product managers from other companies. BPMA is a great resource for this because you can attend events, network, volunteer on committees, and find mentors through the mentorship program.

Read books about product management. You may be able to apply many of the ideas you read about almost immediately.

Kim Caisse has worked in content strategy and implementation, and recently transitioned to a workforce development role. As a volunteer with the BPMA blog team, Kim is collaborating to create informative, engaging content for the Product Management community.