How to deliver value at a startup? — Just ask

4 min readJul 17, 2021

Companies now have countless resources to find talent, and the same (after about sixteen months) can be said of job seekers at the moment. Start-ups, for instance, require just one piece of good news to come up, and the hiring floodgates well and truly open up! For the purposes of this blog, let’s talk about the little ones — the up-and-comers…

From the talent perspective, here’s a scenario

You find an ‘in’ — maybe your buddy over drinks told you his team’s hiring. Maybe you were ‘shooting your shot’ over a cold email. Hell, maybe someone at the company (a recruiter, a peer, a CEO) reached out and wanted to give you a shot
You manage to wow — they see one or more of the following(or all — if you’re not willing to admit to a weakness)

Tekkers (technical skills)
People skills
Growth mindset

You get your damned visa sorted out. If you don’t need one, well, skip(ugh)
You get hired on baller dough and even better stonks

What next?

Having been fortunate (mostly) to have been able to work at three start-ups so far in a very young career (yes, I refuse to be called old), here’s some things I’ve picked up:

Start-ups DON’T have everything figured out. And that’s a GOOD thing. If they do, or they say they do — be very concerned.

It speaks to either of the following

No growth mindset at the leadership level
They’re a mid-size company moonlighting as a hyper-growth startup
They’re (knowingly or otherwise) misinforming you — which maybe their ‘pitch’ to bring you in, if they’ve seen that you like structure and organization around you

How can I help?

The first question I’ve typically asked myself is — how can I help and how do I stand out?

At my first company, I came into a PM organization that needed an executor — something my manager Victor Vilmont repeatedly stressed. A ‘ground worker’ that got things done, while my mentors and leads focused on larger-scale, long-term strategy and, in one case ‘field work’.

At my second, I came into an engineering organization that needed precisely one thing — coordination between Eng and Product — someone to help execute the Product strategy laid out by the CPO and CTO, while working closely with the magicians.

My role at Team #2 (more visibility) — B2B2C

At my third and current company, I’ve stepped into an engineering organization that in-housed its first official PM, and one that didn’t have a product management function about 3 months before my arrival, and was still getting the Product team off the ground. The team consisted of a two-man army — a CTO(+HR+Eng lead+CPO+Manager) and a PM (+EM +UX researcher), and one that didn’t have its structure figured out.

Now, the above diagrams, of course, are an oversimplification — drawn without taking into account many of the aspects, nuances, skills and investments into a pretty busy role. And for those specifics, I think there are a million better blogs out there.

Before talking about Team 3, I want to share the results of a personality test I took today.

Why is this relevant? I either know (or don’t care) about Dhiraj’s personality

Here’s why

The challenge faced by Company #3 was one of no ‘Product team’ and no ‘process’ before our first PM, and no ‘prioritization matrix’ before my arrival.

Keep in mind

I’m inexperienced. I’ve been fortunate to work from the ground up on a product team as it was being formed, but never been the one helping frame the processes
I’m not an organized person, and it has typically been a hard barrier to climb in the early days of being a PM as evidenced by my Sprint Planning piece and the below results

I score in the 9th percentile of ‘Conscientiousness’ — well, it means I am not the most organized person around, but better than the messiest. I’m also a man of just average intellect — or thereabouts. Ugh.

Which means, the company hiring me to be part of the process revolution.. is….. not what I (at all) expected? How did this happen and what could I do?

Again, it came down to the same question.