How a Product Owner’s Life in the Start-up World Looks Like
A place full of opportunities and courage to take risks can be the perfect home for Product Owners
A place full of opportunities and courage to take risks can be the perfect home for Product Owners
After eight years in the corporate world, I felt I needed a radical change. That’s when I exchanged certainty for uncertainty. In 2016, I got my first job in a start-up, little I knew what was ahead of me. My first start-up experience embodied the most intense period of my life and the first moment I could be a real Product Owner.
Start-ups bring endless learning opportunities. To thrive, they have to prove an idea can become a real business, yet the time is limited, and you get to run. That’s why it’s an environment where taking risks is part of daily life. In a start-up, you can be sure of radical changes in a short time. It’s never boring; it’s dynamic and fast, though it can be pretty stressful.
“You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down. “— Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder
Let me share with you how is the life of a Product Owner in a start-up environment. By the end of this article, you should grasp what it is like to be a Product Owner in a start-up.
The Beginning
In 2016, I was a Senior Product Owner in a massive corporation of a hundred thousand employees. The truth is, I was bored. I felt trapped, day-in, day-out; nothing would really happen. Our pace was too slow due to bureaucracy, and I couldn’t bear that any longer. That’s when I decided to move to a start-up that existed for a couple of months and had no more than thirty employees.
I left my old corporate job on a Friday to join the start-up the following Monday. I decided to have a calm weekend and prepare mentally for my new challenge. On Sunday, I got my first feeling of what it means to work for a start-up. The CEO called me and said, “David, my wife is sick, and I am in the hospital with her. I won’t be in the office tomorrow. Therefore, I want you to come to the hospital, and I will onboard you from here. I am waiting for you at 08:00 am, don’t be late.” He hung up, and I thought, “This journey is going to be funny.”
The next day I went to the hospital, and we met in a cafe there. The CEO came on time and told me, “I’ve got only a few minutes for you, but I will be brief. We have ten million USD cash, and we burn a million per month. If we don’t find a way to generate revenue, we are dead in less than a year. I want you to find a way of increasing our conversion rate and reduce our acquisition costs. Talk to the CTO, and figure that out. We will talk again in some weeks.” He stood up and went away, and I had no time to ask any questions.
It’s Up to You
Different than the corporate world, start-ups don’t have well-defined plans. Start-ups have only ideas and funds to transform them into profitable businesses. How you make that happen, it’s totally up to you. Herb Kelleher, the co-founder of Southwest Airlines, said:
“We have a “strategic” plan; it's called doing things.”
Coming back to my onboarding, I was puzzled about what my next steps could be. I had to change how I was used to thinking. I neither had time to do a deep analysis nor create a detailed plan. Time was not on my side, and every minute would count. Therefore, I decided to do the following:
Understand the business: I created a business model canvas and a value proposition canvas to understand why the business existed and how it functioned. I figured that out by talking to the start-up founders.
Talk to real customers: we had a lot of data, Google Analytics, Mix-Panel, Tableau, and so on, but I wanted to understand real people instead of only data. That’s why I talked personally to twenty different customers.
Identify opportunities: I had to identify possibilities of creating value for our customers to increase our conversion rate and get a step closer to profitability. I found the most relevant insights by visiting our customers and observing how they used our products.
Brainstorm with developers: as I walked a mile in our customers’ shoes, I decided to share what I observed with developers. We searched for solutions to solve our customers’ problems.
Get things done: we had to validate our assumptions and learn what would work for our customers. Ideas are worthless until something can come out of them.
“It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.”
— Scott Belsky, Behance Co-founder
Be Quick or Be Dead
Creativity is vital in the start-up world. As a Product Owner, I relentlessly searched for alternatives to validate our assumptions as fast as possible. Coming from the corporate world, we often tried to build “MVPs,” but in reality, we never implemented a real MVP; we always focused on building software instead of validating assumptions. Well, that was not the case in the start-up. Let me share a real example with you.
Our business was to help car owners sell their cars for a fair price. We would inspect their cars and put in an auction platform to make that happen, where car dealers could place bids and eventually buy the car. We had my assumptions to validate, here are some of them:
Car owners are willing to have their cars on an auction platform to get an offer after an hour.
Car dealers are willing to buy a car without seeing it physically.
How could we validate these assumptions? Building a product for that would be time-consuming, and it could lead to a waste of our precious resources. Our approach had to be more creative. We did the following:
Create a simple landing page targeting car owners who want to sell their cars.
Create an inspection form to evaluate the cars.
Create a WhatsApp group with car dealers.
Share the inspection forms and car pictures in the WhatsApp group.
Make an auction within the car dealers in the WhatsApp group.
We managed twenty auctions with this approach, which resulted in two deals. But the most relevant part is what we learned. We understood what increased the chances of car dealers buying the cars and what reduced them. We also understood how to encourage car owners to bring their cars to us. That was our MVP and the basis to build a platform that resulted in thousands of monthly deals.
The MVP phase was stressful for everyone, but we wouldn’t be able to progress in a meaningful direction without that. I’d be lying to you if I’d say everything was easy. We struggled a lot to make the business a success. I don’t recall a week I worked less than sixty hours. Yet, there’s no single moment in my life I learned more than those intense months.
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” — Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder
Inspect and Adapt
The only thing you know in a start-up is that you don’t know anything. You get to experiment with different solutions and learn what works and what doesn’t. The ability to pivot solutions and drop useless features is key to success.
Coming from the corporate world, I could say we were pretty good at inspecting our issues, yet we barely adapted any of them. But in the start-up, we took Scrum seriously. We accepted we didn’t have all answers upfront, and we often inspected and adapted, even if that meant throwing away the work of our last Sprint.
The critical aspect of inspecting and adapting was not falling in love with any solution. For us, a good solution produced value for our customers. If our customers couldn’t benefit from the solution, we would understand the why, and then decide what to do. In some cases, we’d adapt to something meaningful. In other cases, we’d pivot to another solution, and in more extreme cases, we’d drop that.
“Make mistakes faster.” — Andrew Grove, Intel Co-founder
We learned that it’s worthless trying to solve all of our customers' problems. It’s critical to identify the problems that are worth solving. That means it’s relevant for the customers, viable for the business, and feasible in technical aspects.
My Key Learnings from the Start-up World
The start-up experience was a game-changer for me. I understood the importance of validating assumptions as fast as possible. Also, I understood what it means to take risks. As a Product Owner, I had to trust my guts and strive to get the results we pursued.
Being a Product Owner in a start-up means that every day will be intense and exciting. You always get a chance to do something new and move towards the unknown. Your learning speed is key to your success.
One of the most critical learnings to me is how to transform an idea into something. It’s about the execution, not about the idea itself. Yet, you’ve got to pick carefully which ideas to explore and which to discard; not everything is worth investing your time into.
After five years of being a Product Owner, it was the first time I didn’t feel like a Backlog Owner. I was responsible from end to end. I felt empowered to make any decisions I needed to deliver value. I felt the burden on my shoulder of what it means to be a real Product Owner.
To close this story, I will bring a quote from Seth Godin:
“The only thing worse than starting something and failing… is not starting something.”
