What you need to know before taking a job as the first Product Manager

Getting your first job as a Product Manager is not an easy task, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience in the tech world. One way to do it is to get a job at a small startup and become the first Product Manager in that company. Usually small startups looking for their first PM will look for someone with specific experience in their industry, so a cyber security company will look for someone who has some experience in the cyber security industry, and has project or product management experience.

These companies will start hiring for their first PM when the founder who was in charge of the product until that point gets so busy with scaling the company, meeting investors and hiring more employees that they have to take some of the load off and give it to someone else. In order to get a job like that, there needs to be an extremely high correlation between the candidate and the company’s needs because the person they will hire will probably be the one building the product team from the ground up.

As I shared in my previous post, my first job out of college was at a small startup as their first employee and their first Product Manager. This was a challenging position that taught me so much, but I definitely wish I’d known some things before accepting that offer, just so I could align my expectations with reality. So in this post I’m going to share some takeaways for you to take into account in case you are considering taking a job as the first Product Manager.

You get the title but not the power

Usually, being a Product Manager means you’re in charge of vision, prioritization and leading projects. When you’re joining as the first PM, you’re probably there to be more of a project manager rather than a visionary or someone who makes hard decisions about priorities. If this is a small company, you are likely reporting to one of the founders who worked on the product before you joined. Because the company is still small the founder will probably still want to be in charge of vision and prioritizations, they just need someone to handle the day-to-day aspects of leading the product. That’s where you come in. This has both pros and cons:

• Cons: You don’t get to experience prioritizing or exploring where the product can develop to, and you mostly just need to make sure that someone else’s vision is being executed. This can easily feel like you’re just the messenger, holding no power at all, and can become increasingly frustrating with time.
• Pros: If done right, this is a great learning experience for someone who probably has little to no experience as a Product Manager. You get to execute features and see how decisions are made without fearing of making a huge mistake that will affect the entire business. And with time, if the company grows and needs someone to step up, you’re the person they will go to. You just need to work hard and prove yourself.

Take charge of your own training

To make sure you grow and improve your skills, you need to keep learning constantly, but because your job is so demanding most of the learning will be done after working hours. Read books, listen to TED talks, take online courses, be active in local Facebook groups, do everything you can to own your training process so you can quickly become the professional Product Manager you want to be. Another great option (and frankly a must if you ask me) is to find a mentor, someone from outside of your company that you can share ideas, questions and dilemmas with. Have a question that you feel is stupid and have no one to ask? Ask your mentor! Facing a difficult situation with your boss or the head of R&D? Ask your mentor! A great mentor can help you by sharing their experience and can give you an outsider’s perspective which will surely help you do your job better. A mentor can also help you plan your training and your future path to grow as a Product Manager.

Data is your friend

The product you are working on is probably still growing and trying to find product market fit. Your company might even still be trying to get enough daily or weekly active users. This is a great opportunity for you to start tracking your users’ behaviour and gather all the information you need in order to make informed decisions and to validate that the features you are building are helping your product or its user base grow. By seeing what makes a difference and knowing how your users are behaving you can justify spending valuable development resources on new features or improvements.

If your company is not doing anything to track and analyze data yet (and as crazy as this may sound, it’s very plausible) you should consider taking it upon yourself to own the data collection process, define the KPIs and reflect your findings to your higher ups. This will give you power to convince management that you can be trusted to make important decisions, because you’re backing your decisions with data.

Know when it’s time to leap

In the first few months you don’t have much to worry about, no one expects you to have the right answers from day one, they brought you so you can organize things and own the product process. But as time goes by and you get more and more experience you need to be careful not to get too comfortable as it will become very easy to stay a product manager with no power.

To level up, ask your manager to give you a project to lead from start to finish — from discovery all the way through execution and to tracking results, this is your chance to prove to management that you’re a great Product Manager. If you need a little help convincing your boss, here are a few things you can try:

• Start with a small feature and slowly ask to take on bigger and more strategic challenges.
• Suggest a few feature ideas that you want to work on, share with your boss how you would tackle that project, make your boss feel like they can trust you.
• Always use data to back your ideas and suggestions. If you can prove that it will help achieve goals it will be harder for them to say no.

Your boss might be hesitant at first or will try to say avoid giving you an answer, but remember that this is the only way you’re going to actually get real life experience — by trying, failing and succeeding. Keep pushing, eventually he will say yes. And if he won’t, maybe it’s time to leave.

I hope this article helped you understand what it means being the first Product Manager at a startup company. Do you have anything else you think first time PMs need to know? Share it in the comments below!