Product Management in Big Tech vs. Startups: Product Manager Role Differences

The differences in the approach to product management of startups and top tech companies.
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Although product managers are generally responsible for the end-to-end development of a product or project both in the startup and in the big tech world, things do differ significantly in the way product management planning and execution is approached in startups as compared to the big tech environments.

1. Responsibilities
The product manager tends to wear *all* the hats in startups, and any gaps between concept and its successful execution are ultimately the responsibility of the PM. Product managers at startups therefore often tend to be the CEO, COO or CPO of the company.

In comparison, product managers at big tech companies are largely responsible for alignment and execution: bringing different individuals and groups into the overall project direction and ensuring cross-organizational support for the project throughout the development lifecycle.

2. Decisions
In startups, the product manager is often the main decision maker; whereas in big tech, PMs are usually unable to make decisions unilaterally and the bigger the product or initiative, the more people and departments may be involved in ultimately making the decision.

In a startup environment, many decisions are made quickly (with the PM making a lot of these decisions) simply due to the quantity of things that need to be done at any given time (due to multiple constraints, such as finances, market forces, customers, investors, etc). The cost of not making a decision could be the difference between life and death for the startup. In order to survive, the decision making velocity for product leaders in startups therefore *has* to be very high -- with a lot of decisions being made, frequently, often without an abundance of data.

Whereas in big tech companies, presenting the decision in the right way and actually prioritizing *which* decisions to focus on takes the most time (and is arguably the most important function) for the product manager. Therefore, PMs in big tech will be spending a lot of their time making sure that they're actually focusing on the *right* decisions.

3. Focus
Both in startups and in big tech, product managers have to say "no" often. :) But the way the "no" is delivered and decisions themselves are made is different; namely:
+ in big tech, you will need a lot of data to convince groups and individuals, and make sure there is alignment and buy-in on multiple levels to say "yes" or "no" to a particular product or initiative;
+ in startups, you may often make decisions based on sparse data, or even on intuition alone (coupled with a strong understanding of your product, company, and user!)

4. Scale
As a startup, you may not have many (or any) customers or revenue, whereas top tech companies have millions or billions of users and incoming revenue. As a result,  the way startups and big tech companies deal with scale is completely different: the startup product manager may be able to oversee all aspects of development by themselves; with the capacity and ability to talk to each customer one on one and continuously do things that *DON'T* scale.

For big tech, conversely, it's vitally important for product managers to focus almost exclusively on how to scale a solution to x1000 or x1000000 while maintaining the quality of the service or product: how do you maintain the customer connection (in terms of legal, customer service, logistics, etc) while reaching huge swaths of the global population?

[haarismian]

I have not found any single PM training resource as well put as your videos! Thanks Alex

[jeromevishal]

Hi Alex! Thank you for making videos related to PM. Can you make a video on explaining the career growth of a PM vs Software Engineer? Like how many product manager become group product managers/ what is the ratio of PM: engineers.

[sumitsagar]

Too many references to other videos man. Dropping off here.