On Why There Are Only 2 Roles In A Startup
You don't need a Product Manager. You need Growth.
I have worked on startups for a LONG time…I know startups.
Ok, I’m 29, it’s not that long, but I have been grappling with startups in some shape or form for over a decade, arguably 2 decades if you consider youtube channels and other side hustles.
I started as a content creator (music, videos, game content) on the pre-to-early social media internet, but quit too early on a ton of promising ventures for you to have heard of me. I then moved on to games and websites, and then apparel and social media influencing (again, quit too early), and finally, I landed on working for someone else before becoming a founder and then a growth guy at a seed-stage startup.
My titles along the way have been data scientist/engineer, product manager, technical product manager, founder, and then growth guy, and while I acknowledge these are different, I’d really argue that you could split these up into two categories, with one mattering more than people ever realize, but first lets talk about San Francisco.
What People Think The Roles At A Startup Are
If you’ve spent any time dating in San Francisco, I’d first of all like to apologize to you on behalf of this great city. I’m so sorry for your loss, for the wasted time, for what you saw.... While you’re picking up the pieces from your broken sense of self and deluge of regrets, you might have noticed that there are really only like 8 job titles people have out here.
Consulting something
Finance something
Customer Success
Sales
Marketing
Design
Engineering
Product Management
If you don’t work in one of these 8, I regret to inform you that you don’t live in San Francisco because you can’t afford it. Maybe you actually do work in some ninth thing, but I don’t believe you.
Obviously the first 2 aren’t startup jobs, but the other 6, yeah, those are tech jobs.
The Actual Roles At A Startup
There are only 2. Not 6, not 3, 2.
We’ve all heard the famous Design, Engineer, Product trifecta, but what if I told you those are all working toward the same thing? And what if I told you those aren’t even the most important thing/things (depending on polymorphism).
Product
Product is one of the roles.
Wait, wtf, didn’t you just say product wasn’t one of the roles, or it was 1/3 of the roles? I’m confused.
Well yeah they’re different and the same.
Product means you’re on the build side, the internal side.
Your role as a product person is to think about creating some thing that solves some problem for someone. You turn entropy into order that’s valuable.
Sure you have different day to day tasks depending on your job title, but you have the same goal: build a thing that solves a problem.
If you’re an engineer or a designer, you’re creating the thing and making it work predictably, and if you’re a product manager, you’re drawing the map and holding the compass.
Everyone in Product should hopefully be thinking about making a thing that solves a problem for someone.
Growth
Growth is the other half of the equation. It’s about taking whatever the KPI of your company is and making it BIGGER.
It’s about figuring out what the thing people want is, how to tell them about your thing in a way that aligns with what they want, and how to keep people using your thing.
Growth is thinking about usage of your thing.
Growth is sales, marketing, partnerships, customer success, and also sometimes product, but it’s product with a focus on getting more people to try your thing, come back to your thing, and share your thing, sometimes calls product-led growth (PLG for short).
The main metrics in Growth are top of funnel, conversion to active/paid, retention, and referrals. There are other metrics involved, but end of the day, you’re trying to crack the code on maximizing those four, with some emphasis being placed on whichever one matters most to your KPI.
How Growth and Product Play Together
To recap, Product consists of engineers, designers, and product managers building a thing that does what the market wants it to do e.g. deliver as much value to the target market.
Growth is about getting that thing in front of a target market who wants to keep using it and tell other people about it.
Sometimes Growth leverages Product to grow important metrics by changing the thing, and sometimes Product leverages Growth to figure out what thing to build and when to build it, but generally they operate independently and just share information occasionally.
Working in Growth
In Growth, there are really 3 things you think about:
Defining the metrics - what metrics matter
Tracking the metrics - how do we get that data, and where do we look at it
Growing the metrics - how to we make the metrics go up
Defining the metrics is usually solved for through a mix of experience and critical thinking, and isn’t so much doing as much as thinking.
You want metrics that are actionable: Sign ups is useful for high level health checking, but conversion from landing page → sign up is actionable because you can do stuff to directly change that.
You also want metrics to be tied to something important.
Running an e-commerce business? The amount of returns or 1-star reviews should be tracked, because those are going to affect conversion, retention, and referrals.
Tracking the metrics is usually solved for by adding scripts to pipe data into a database, and then examining that data over time. SQL + an analytics tool like Posthog are your friends here.
You might have a data analyst/scientist if you have complex questions or unwieldy datasets.
Generally you want to check your metrics at least once a week, and ask yourself if they’re moving in the direction you want, and if not WHY. Metrics are the heartbeat of the company, and on the Growth side you are the doctor and the treatment.
Growing the metrics part is what anyone who doesn’t have “data” in their job title gets paid to do, and it’s hard.
Again, this is sales, marketing, partnerships, strategy, SEO, messaging, pricing, and customer success.
Working in Product
Working in Product was nice because, especially at an established company, ambiguity is minimal.
In a typical medium-big company, you have a product roadmap and a steady stream of feedback coming from the Growth side to fill it up.
If you don’t, you usually have an idea of what questions to ask and which avenues you can attain the answers from, which can inform your roadmap.
If you don’t have either of those, your head of product or CEO should be able to lay a foundation for the roadmap and seed it with stuff from their dealings in Growth.
If you don’t have those things, no one should be building anything.
It should be a game where you know most of the rules and you’re just building to them. If you don’t feel like you know the rules, go do some Growth.
If you’re a Product engineer, it’s usually even more cut and dry—build X.
Building X has its own complexities, so I’m not pretending that Product engineering is easy (it’s not), but it’s more “make this feature that delivers value in a way that is predictable, useful, and reliable”, while also making sure you don’t mess up any other features that work alongside it.
The ambiguity is in how to build, not what to build.
There Are No Answers In The Building
Typically the Growth side of the house spends most of their time interacting with external actors—customers, competitors, partners, conferences, blog posts, industry newsletters, potential customers, etc.
You’ve probably heard the idiom “there are no answers in the building”, and if you haven’t, it’s a pompous way of saying “you need to go figure out what people want by asking them or someone who knows.”
This is where I say a product manager should be doing Growth. If the PM doesn’t have sales, marketing, and customer success chucking insights to them, the PM needs to go do those things until they understand the market enough to confidently build a thing.
In any case, someone has to talk to previous, existing, and potential customers to figure out what problems customers are having that your thing is in a position to solve.
So Growth is out in the market talking to customers, potential users, selling, marketing, and researching while Product is building the thing in a way that delivers the most value to those people.
My Time In Startup Growth
I’ve spent the last 3 years in Growth, first as a founder, and then as a Growth guy.
When you think of sales, marketing, etc. as a non-Growth person, you mostly assume it’s just talking and making ads.
If you’re bad at the job, that’s true. Even if you’re good at the job, that’s true.
I spend most of my time talking to potential or existing customers, creating content that could attract or clarify our value prop to customers, or thinking about how we can convey our value prop to our customers.
This week, for example, I spent a lot of time figuring out where people are dropping out of our funnel and discussing ways to fix it, designing an ad that conveys that we solve a problem while paying attention to using verbiage that aligns with how our customers talk and think, and discussing what our value prop even is and whether or not we should change the direction of the company to better align with something that resonates with customers (it was an important week).
It sounds like it’s a lot of intangible work, and it is.
But Growth is the only thing that matters to most startups still existing in a year.
I don’t know of any startups that failed because they didn’t ship enough on the Product side. Not one.
Maybe you built the wrong thing, but I’ll argue later how that problem stems from bad Growth.
In most endeavors, if you’re actually building the thing and care about it, your ability to ship Product is probably not the limiting factor in getting people to use your thing.
In a musical example (I also lead a rock n roll band) I can name plenty of unpronounceable rappers and whiny indie bands who are enigmatically famous, and it’s because they solved Growth.
The better your thing provides value, and the bigger the market, the less you need Growth, but even Adele needed to get her thing out there initially.
Back to tech, there are a million cool technologies you haven’t heard of because they failed at Growth, and there are 0 cool technologies you have heard of that didn’t succeed at it.
“But I’m a Product Guy”
Every founder who didn’t want to spend the day coding but still wanted to work on a startup has said this.
“Being a product guy” is easy. Unless you’re Steve Jobs, everyone on a small team should be the product guy. Everyone should know what the market wants, and if they don’t, you’ve got a huge problem.
A Product Manager might ultimately be accountable for enforcing "what the market wants”, but you’re not going to make any substantial impact at an early startup by “being the product guy:”. You gotta do more.
Steve Jobs was not a product guy, he was a marketing guy, a vision guy, a design guy, a sales guy, and a product guy. He is a legendary product guy, but it’s the interplay between his product talents and his everything else talents that made him a genius.
While working on my own start up, I was the customer success guy, marketing guy, sometimes the sales guy, sometimes the product guy, sometimes the vision guy, sometimes an engineer.
Growth was our biggest problem, and sure, the thing didn’t end up being all that useful to anyone (we took a big swing in the VR/Crypto/Metaverse space, which I will write about in separate post), but again, that’s primarily a Growth problem.
Growth needed to go find a market, learn about the market and inform Product what to build, market to the market, and extract $$$ from the market. Even if you argue my product manager hat should have figured that out, the question of “how” always lands in the Growth realm.
Product teams build products. Growth teams ensure people use them.
The Annoying Side of Growth
Growth is challenging. At least initially, you’re going to battle with an unknown enemy and your only weapon is a hypothesis.
The Good Stuff First
The core of Growth is metrics.
Fixing a leaky funnel. Creating better retention loops. Coaxing people to invite their friends/coworkers. These are the fun parts of Growth.
Sometimes you adjust the product by tracking which steps on the user journey people are having issues with and fixing those (PLG).
Sometimes you change the pricing structure.
Sometimes you incentivize in other ways.
It’s fun.
The game is to optimize your metrics, and the arena is your product and the ways people interact with it.
The Vegetables
I had a high school physics teacher who would say that you eat the vegetables first, so that you can enjoy the mashed potatoes without the broccoli looming over your head. I wish that’s how Growth was, but it’s not.
The hard part of Growth has to come first, and that’s getting people to discover your product (Top of Funnel).
Nothing you do in your business matters if you don’t have people coming in the front door.
I used this analogy in our 2024 planning meeting: if Product is the food at a restaurant, Growth is getting people in the door, to the first bite, and keeping them through dessert.
No product change, no user experience, no killer use case will matter if you don’t have people taking the first bite.
Maybe it’s marketing, maybe it’s sales, maybe it’s word of mouth. If you don’t have people discovering your product, you don’t have a Product, because products have to serve people, and no people means no product.
You sometimes will hear about “The Build Trap”, which is a book, but also a great concept, and it captures the above use-case exactly. It’s when you have too many people thinking about Product and not enough people thinking about Growth, so you just build stuff, even though you’re unsure if people want it.
Building stuff can be fine, but without those outside-the-building answers, you’re gambling, and the odds aren’t even close to 50/50.
The Two Roles
This framework, although simple, is effective, at least for startups that are default dead.
Some startups, profitable ones with organic growth don’t need to think about Growth. They don’t even need to think about Product. Just keep paying the bills and you’ll keep making money.
But most startups are default dead. They don’t have organic growth. They don’t have a thing that effectively solves a problem.
To solve this, the first step is ALWAYS going to be knocking on doors. What are users saying? What is the market saying? What are competitors saying? What is the industry at a macro level saying?
Growth is problem number one always. Even Amazon spends $20,000,000,000 (that’s BILLION) a year and they are literally the biggest brand on the planet.
While there is nuance to all of this, whether you’re a junior member of a team, a new founder, or an experienced entrepreneur, being able to distill the complexity of a startup down to two things can help you diagnose the most pressing problems.
Are you building enough? Probably. Are you growing enough? Probably not.