The dilemma of working for a large company vs a startup for aspiring product managers?
Let’s first look at what are the various stages of a product management career.
Here is a quick visual of the career progression of a product manager.
A product management career goes through 3 major transitions if you will.
When you first start out you focus on tactical work or simply just shipping features (not even products just yet). Then once you have built a little rapport with the team and your manager, shown that you can deliver features. You then progress into working on larger projects with a much bigger impact.
This could be an associate PM role right out of college or a product manager role first starting out.
Once for few initial years, you have worked on shipping products then you are giving a bigger responsibility to work on projects that have multiple moving parts and some aspect of product strategy, and even if the strategy work is not “officially” assigned to you — great Product Managers think from various angles and will also think strategically for their projects.
Once you have delivered one-two large-scale projects end to end. You can now be ready for multiple projects or start to mentor junior PMs (if any on your team)
From here you are basically working for multiple projects for a single product or multiple products growing into more senior roles.
So to quickly summarize, you have got 3 Major transitions —
- Tactical work aka shipping products
- Strategic work aka working end-to-end on products plus mentoring
- Strategic work at the organizational level - a team of PMs reporting.
Whether you work in a startup or a large enterprise company this is how the PM role pretty much evolves. Now before I dive into the pros and cons of each.
Let me ask you, how would you like to build your foundation of product management career?
Let’s explore the pros and cons now.
My closing thoughts — Apart from these another very important factor I believe is critical in the success of PMs is learning.
I highly suggest PMs start out at large companies that have well-established PM programs that can offer growth — even though your role will be dedicated to certain products and you won’t have visibility into all aspects of the product, you will still be around Sr. PMs who can mentor you and you will chance to learn product management best practices and build your soft skills also.
Thank you for your support!
Yours Truly,
-Nazuk
