#Prerun in startup manager update

It was clear that nobody knew their role in the meeting or in the project, so they all felt like they should contribute. No one could answer who was making the decisions. Afterwards, everyone provided good, relevant feedback, yet it was unclear whose voice everyone should listen to. Clear responsibilitiesĭuring my first week, I spent more than an hour with 16 people, including 6 people from the leadership team, as part of the “final design walkthrough”. There was a lot needed to get everyone on track and motivated to hit our third launch date. I joined the Articles team as program manager about a year into the project, following a second launch delay. We’d seen this problem before – we launched our new Messenger product a few months prior and, while estimated to take a few months, it lasted more than a year. We underestimated what was involved in building and delivering this product. It was initially thought of as a three-month project but ultimately took over a year to get to market. Launching Articles was the first time we trialled program management – we had already missed two launch dates and the team was feeling the pain around the scale of delivery. How do you keep the process lightweight enough to add value without adding a bunch of overhead to product and engineering managers and wasting their valuable time with additional meetings, documentation, etc.? What we learned The challenge is in how we retain our culture and fluid ways of working while introducing just enough structure to avoid chaos. This required a level of coordination that we never had before.

In total, we had three product teams, marketing, sales, customer support, communications, growth and product education working on it across Dublin and San Francisco. We had to give customers an awesome first experience using the product, with updated support docs and videos, as well as figure out how the product would be packaged and priced. How do we retain our culture and fluid ways of working while avoiding chaos?īesides building Articles, the product had to be set up for market success. With more than 45 people across multiple teams and two continents needing to work together in lock step – this suddenly involves more than just shipping good product, quickly. Our principles of scoping small, shipping frequently and executing to six-week shipping cycles breaks down during these times, as we discovered when launching a brand new product, Articles.

#Prerun in startup manager update

Inevitably there are times where you need to build bigger features, launch a new product, or make an update that will impact more than one of your products. My colleague Mark previously wrote about how focus leads to silos as a company scales. But when you do, it can mean the difference between a product launch’s success or failure, whether you can deliver on your company goals or not. Complexity comes with scale, regardless of how hard you try to fight it.ĭetermining the right time and the best approach for introducing program management can be confusing.

Many startups hire for project or product managers, but at some point they should be thinking about program management, bringing on people that can help them manage all the moving parts of a complex release.

Shipping product is quick and easy when you’re in a small startup, but what happens when you have a massive team with too many cooks in the kitchen or if there’s one too many delays with product launches? Can your company handle such a situation?