post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Customer

How behavioral economics can improve product strategy

Product Roadmap

Why most product roadmaps fail: Phil Hornby (Product Leadership Coach) – ProductTank Porto

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

Join us at #mtpcon London in 2025 – mark your calendars

Connecting fans to creators at Spotify (Dariusz Dziuk, Product Lead, Spotify)

Why teams often struggle with OKRs: A conversation with Jeff Gothelf

Deep dive: Crafting your product vision and mission

5 ways to invent and simplify as an AI/ML product manager

Imogen brings more than 10 years of experience in print and digital to her role as Director of Content Strategy for Mind the Product. The core of her experience comes from 10 years working as an editor for Bauer Consumer Media, a division of Europe’s largest privately-owned publishing group, and as Head of Content for Benivo, an award-winning startup.

Director of Content Strategy

Imogen Schels

<p>In this <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/membership/prioritised/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Prioritised member</a> session, Product Leader and Director of the Association of Product Professionals, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/ant-murphy/?originalSubdomain=au" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Anthony Murphy</a></span>, shares key insights into dealing with product in organisations at different stages, from startups to large enterprises. Focusing on the critical aspects of how the role shifts between them, Anthony offers tips on how to adapt your product management style for different environments and how to more effectively manage your product as it cycles through the product lifecycle.</p>
<h3>In brief:</h3>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Just as products go through a lifecycle and mature and scale in decline, so too do organisations</span></li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Your role as a product manager will differ depending on the stage of your organisation</span></li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">You will need to adapt your product management style for different environments and as your product moves through the Product Lifecycle</span></li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">In a startup you&#8217;re a big fish with lots of ownership and control, but you&#8217;re faced with a lack of process and support</span></li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">In a Small Medium Enterprise (SME) you go from a sole product manager to a team, a few customers to 10x customers, and leadership is challenged with now leading a portfolio</span></li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">In an Enterprise organisation you begin to customise and juggle, managing products at different stages of the lifecycle but as a product manager you&#8217;ve access to more support </span></li>
</ul>
<h2>Org maturity</h2>
<p>Anthony starts by framing what he means by org maturity. Just as products go through a lifecycle — mature, scale, and decline, he says, so do organisations.</p>
<p>These 3 stages are:</p>
<ol>
<li>Startup</li>
<li>Small Medium Enterprise (SME)</li>
<li>Large Enterprise</li>
</ol>
<p>So how do you adapt your product management in these stages? Anthony explains the benefits and challenges to be aware of at each stage and offers some tips.</p>
<h2>Product management in a startup</h2>
<p>At the beginning of the organisation cycle, we&#8217;re talking about a startup and it&#8217;s at this stage that most product managers will find they have a lot of freedom to own the product and make decisions. Something that can become much more difficult as organisations grow. You&#8217;re also a pretty high-profile product manager at this stage.</p>
<p>Then come the challenges.</p>
<p>For one, says Anthony, there&#8217;s a general lack of process as you begin to build the organisation. As the first product manager too, you need to be more of a journalist as you&#8217;re required to wear many hats (and switch them regularly).</p>
<h3>Tips for startup product managers</h3>
<p>Anthony shares some tips to help product managers in startups to manage the challenges at this stage of the cycle:</p>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Get on the same page as your founders</span>: Spend time with them and ensure you&#8217;re all going in the same direction because the second you become misaligned, they will try to take back control of decisions, ultimately causing friction.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Take it one day at a time</span>: In a startup, you need to be focusing on the vision but, because there&#8217;s going to be a lot of change, it&#8217;s important to take things one step at a time — you don&#8217;t want to have to unpick everything over and over again.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Leverage the community</span>: Product management in a startup can be a lonely role as you might not have the support you need. Instead, go find it at product events and within the product community.</li>
</ol>
<h2>Product management in a Small Medium Enterprise (SME)</h2>
<p>As the product starts to scale, the product manager&#8217;s role needs to scale too. From a sole product manager, you now become a team and you start to gain more support. You also start to become part of the product rather than owning it. Your organisation begins to shift from being highly volatile to hyper-growth.</p>
<p>As you begin to grow, you go from just a few customers to 10x customers and you start to move away from having a single product to having a portfolio of products.</p>
<p>Then come the challenges.</p>
<p>For product leadership, there&#8217;s the challenge of introducing the concept of product portfolio management. And, as you introduce specialist roles (from a product point of view), you can expect this to create a new level of friction</p>
<h3>Tips for SME product managers</h3>
<p>Anthony shares some tips to help product managers in SMEs to manage the challenges at this stage of the cycle:</p>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Introduce process</span>: Look for opportunities to resolve pain points. For example, where a lack of process is causing issues, create process. For example, you might need to implement process around how ideas come in.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Be aware of shiny object syndrome: </span>It&#8217;s vital to keep an eye on retention whilst also servicing all the new and exciting opportunities coming your way as you grow.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Get </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">clear with your peers</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">: </span>Clearly define roles and responsibilities and get on the same page as each other. For more on this, check out Anthony&#8217;s article <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://antmurphy.medium.com/4-roles-responsibilities-workshops-to-bring-clarity-to-your-team-e1012218f703">4 Roles &amp; Responsibilities Workshops to Bring Clarity to Your Team</a></span>.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Become good friends with customer-facing team members</span>: As you scale, you move away from this part of the puzzle and it&#8217;s easy to become disconnected. Working with people in customer-facing roles can help you stay informed.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Be ready for change:</span> When companies are in hyper-growth this is also a stage of hyper-growth for your career too. You&#8217;ll find that your role can change rapidly. Be ready!</li>
</ul>
<h2>Product management in an Enterprise</h2>
<p>Now, at the Enterprise stage, you&#8217;re moving on from having product leaders to product management leadership teams.</p>
<p>As part of your customisation, you start to introduce more platforms which means you&#8217;re now starting to think about more than just customer base and product teams. Your focus now shifts to thinking about you optimise — how, with more horizontal teams, you can optimise the whole product point.</p>
<p>In your product manager role you&#8217;ll likely find that your impact increases (even though your scope narrows). You&#8217;ll enjoy more stability and career mobility, and mentoring becomes a thing because you have better access to people to learn from within the organisation.</p>
<p>Then come the challenges.</p>
<p>You go from high revenue growth to growth plateauing and you now have many more products to juggle:</p>
<ul>
<li>New products, those you&#8217;re trying to take to market</li>
<li>Highly mature products</li>
<li>Products that are scaling and growing</li>
</ul>
<p>It&#8217;s now time for product leadership to work out how how to effectively manage a portfolio with products in different stages of the lifecycle.</p>
<p>There&#8217;s politics to contend with too — misalignment and red tape start to impact process and slows things down. And, when you reach this size, cultivating new innovation becomes extremely difficult. With so many different teams and products (hopefully successful mature products at that) you need to be constantly iterating to ensure you&#8217;re building new products and services in new markets.</p>
<h3>Tips for Enterprise product managers</h3>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Understand what keeps your stakeholders up at night: </span>Here, empathy goes a long way. Remember, being a founder is not easy. Spend time listening to them because the more you can align your messaging with their goals, the easier life will be for everyone.</li>
<li><strong>Build a story from top-down to bottom-up:</strong> Anthony suggests asking people across the department questions like &#8216;what are you working on now?&#8217;, &#8216;how does this relate to goal X?&#8217; and &#8216;how does that fit into the organisation&#8217;s strategy and goals?&#8217;. Look at how the information you gather breaks down because as a product manager, it&#8217;s your job to make sure that people are still thinking about the bigger picture, and aligned to organisation&#8217;s goals.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Set up rituals:</span> It&#8217;s easy to get lost and forget what your strategy is. Create rituals around revisiting things and making sure you&#8217;re staying on top of things can help.</li>
<li><span style="font-weight: bold;">Get out of the building</span>: It&#8217;s easy, in a big enterprise, to get lost and forget to speak to your customers but it&#8217;s so important that you do.</li>
</ol>
<h2>If you take nothing else from this talk&#8230;</h2>
<p>Anthony closes his talk by reminding us that we spend a lot of time as product managers, trying to be conscious of where our product is in its lifecycle. But, he says, we also need to be conscious of where our organisation is in its lifecycle too. How your role operates, and how you behave in your role, will differ depending on the stage it&#8217;s in.</p>

core/freeform

Susana Lopes: Embracing a dual-track career ladder in product

Career clinic for product managers by John Cutler

Hiring product managers by Kate Leto

Identify and manage imposter syndrome by Phyllis Njoroge

From PO to CPO: How to drive your product career by Namrata Sarmah

Learnings from London: The secret sauce to hiring great product people by Kate Leto

Building the perfect product manager: A model for professional development by Greg Prickril

Navigating product management: Startup, SME and Enterprise

Imogen Schels