Everyone should take product decisions in a startup
Everyone should take product decisions in a startup.
Not only product managers, or founders. Everyone.
Overcentralized decisions hurt.
For lots of pre-product market fit startups, it’s not clear who should take product decisions.
There is an easy answer to that.
By priority order it should be:
1. everyone
2. founders
3. specialist
1. Everyone
In theory, it’s everyone’s responsibility to make product decisions.
Onboard team members with empathy. Give them direct access to customers’ feedback. And train them to prioritize well.
Then everyone should be able to make great product decisions.
To be clear this includes engineers that should run customer support. Steve Jobs used to put a phone on Apple engineers' desks. Some calls would be re-rooted so them and they could hear feedback firsthand.
That’s the ideal approach but not the only one. Sometimes having a dedicated person makes more sense.
2. Founders
If you can’t promote the culture I mentioned in 1. then the best people to run your product are your founders.
In early stage, founders should make sure that the product matched their vision. They can’t afford to lose sight of customers’ feedback.
Exposing founders also helps to confront their vision with the real world. It’s a reality check. It’s also more capital efficient.
If having one or several of your founders isn’t an option, then go with a specialist.
Here is when this approach works well.
3. Specialist
You can centralize product decisions to a specialist. It can be with a product manager. Or by giving extra responsibilities to an engineer, designer, or anyone else.
This approach works for companies with an “execution play”. Companies with a very clear product strategy that just needs to be executed.
In my experience this works really well for copy-cat companies. In this situation you don’t need a vision-driven roadmap, more to replicate the business that exists.
This tends to work less with vision-driven companies that need to try a lot of things.
Lastly, there are situations where founders are too inexperienced to make product decisions. Calling this out and recruiting someone to handle this job is courageous. It’s often the best thing founders can do for their company.
I’ve seen that happening a few times, it works too.
There isn’t a single way to handle product decisions in early stage.
It depends on your culture, your founders, and the “play” you’re going after.
If you can go with option 1, do it.
In my experience companies with decentralized product decisions tend to execute faster. And make more informed decisions as they use more brains.
If you can’t go with 2. or 3.
The beginning of the year is a great moment to reflect on who should make product decisions in your startup.
If you’re pre product-market fit, I hope this framework helps.
Am I missing anything?
Let me know in the comments 🤗
