By Jen Yip and Nadia Eldeib
In the pecking order of startup roles, “Product Manager” ranks right up there with ‘founder’ or ‘engineer.’ It’s become such a highly coveted title that product schools and online courses have cropped up all over the country to cash in on the demand – with promises to teach you how to build and ship software solutions from end-to-end and “mastermind great products.”
It seems like these days, everyone wants to be a PM. Everyone wants the PM title.
I’m not here to tell you that you don’t want to be a PM. But Smart Generalists optimizing for the vaunted PM title often overlook a much more crucial factor in deciding whether to join a startup: company growth.
Growth is the single most important selection filter for startup roles, because it not only contextualizes the job opportunity—it is the job opportunity.
At Renaissance Collective, we advise smart generalists to join a startup that’s on a high growth trajectory and offer to solve the most pressing problems for the business, regardless of title. This is the oft-quoted advice that Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google, gave to Sheryl Sandberg when she was job hunting: “Get on a rocket ship. When companies are growing quickly and they are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves.”
Optimizing for company growth
The entire startup ecosystem is predicated on growth: All of the best resources gravitate towards things that are growing, including talent and venture investments. If you want the best opportunities for professional growth and development, join something that’s growing.
Growth creates a frontier of new challenges and needs that emerge every few months. Product opportunities are organically created in growing startups.
There will be new feature launches and new product lines. If you join a high-growth startup to solve its marketing, customer success, or ops problems, there’s no reason why you can’t move to product when those opportunities emerge.
Imagine you joined a couple founders on their journey right after they released a successful product 1, which is now scaling. You joined to help build out a process for customer success/ experience around product 1. Now, it’s time for the startup to invest in products 2, 3, and 4. Well, the context you’ve built by working on customer success for product 1 combined with the trust you’ve earned with the founders make you well-positioned to lead or launch one of the upcoming products. Ideally, you’d explain to the founders when you join that this is what you’d like to do down the road, but for now you’re just going to pour yourself into whatever they need to make product 1 successful.
Take Salar Kamangar, a bio major from Stanford, who joined Google as its 9th employee. He had no experience or background in tech. He joined Google to set up the legal and finance functions for the company, then he went on to create the company’s first business plan, and from there, he became a founding member of Google's product team, and years later, the CEO of YouTube. Phenomenal company growth created opportunities for him to move into product, despite having a generalist background.
Day-to-day, your job will almost certainly be more interesting if you take a non-product role at a growth company versus a product role at a stagnant company. Growth also generates momentum around solving these problems as a team. When everyone is busy and aligned towards a common goal (growth), the entire team becomes more productive together and not as worried about individual recognition.
Problems of stagnation: lack of resources, internal politics, and adverse selection
If you’re only solving for a title role, you may find more problems than opportunities.
Companies that aren’t growing struggle to attract the best talent and raise capital. They lack an ever-expanding frontier of opportunities to parachute into. And when there isn’t enough to do, it can create an unhealthy dynamic within teams, where individual contributors compete for visibility and responsibility around fewer impactful opportunities.
Another reason to not be overly focused on getting a product title is that you’ll adversely select for startups that are willing to give you an important sounding title to recruit you. If these startups were really growing, they would be able to attract product leaders with an existing track record. A growth-stage startup will likely choose an experienced PM from another growth startup or, if they do take a chance on a smart generalist, it might be someone from their trusted friend or professional networks.
If you join something before it’s working, you could be really lucky and it could hit hyper growth after you’ve joined, but this is an unlikely bet. Remember: Having a cool title at a little-known startup won’t get you closer to that role at a fast-growing startup.
How to find a startup that’s growing
If you’re now convinced that you should be optimizing for company growth in your next career move, you’re probably wondering where to find these fast growing startups.
The short answer is: through people networks.
Follow the money: You can get some signal on a startup’s growth potential by digging into the investors around the table. Sign up for the Termsheet newsletter by Fortune for info on deals, exits, etc. If Benchmark has invested, it is almost certainly good. Other great investors are a16z and Sequoia – but keep in mind these firms place lots of bets, so use their investment as one datapoint. Investors who saw the deal and passed on it are also a good source for backchannel diligence. Investors who passed on a deal aren’t published, but if you know the right people, you can and should try to get this intel as well. Angel/seed stage investors that have well-regarded reputations and good deal flow can also be excellent sources of what’s really working, even in the early innings before anything’s publicly disclosed.
Use people signals: There are some exec-level operators – and you can probably identify them on Twitter – that you can use as high signal if they join something. These are people that could get a job anywhere given their past experience. For example, Mike Brown, who was the GM for Uber in Asia, recently joined Newfront as their COO. Camille Ricketts who built her reputation leading First Round Review joined Notion as their Head of Marketing. Allison Barr Allen spent 5 years at Uber as Head of Global Product Ops and recently joined Fast as a co-founder and COO. Operators who are well-respected leaders will usually flock to startups that are working. Since these operators are plugged into exclusive information networks, they will have heard of or been referred to these opportunities through people they know. These are people who could literally write their ticket at any high-growth startup. Follow their lead.
Use Breakout lists: Lists of breakout startups such as Breakout List or Wealthfront’s annual Career-Launching Companies list can be a helpful starting point to developing a candidate set of companies to dig into. The folks at XPO send out a subscription-based newsletter called “Breakout Startups” that targets engineers looking for their next career opportunity, but the companies they feature in their memos are highly curated and well-researched. One caveat: not all lists are created equal. Some lists are more reliable than others: Forbes’ 30-under-30 is definitely more of a popularity contest while the Breakout Lists we mentioned above are more legit.
If you don’t know who to look to for signals or how to gather that intel, Renaissance Collective may be able to help you (apply here to join us!). As a community, we work together to do due diligence on startups by tapping into the information that flows through our combined people networks.
Parting thoughts to the smart generalists out there:
If you’ve never fit the mold or chosen the easy path, let us remind you that a title isn’t meant to define (or limit!) your potential. It does not define the scope of what you’re capable of or what you’ll accomplish during your tenure at a startup. Nor does it limit the types or depth of professional relationships you’ll forge within an organization. So don’t make the title the focus of your career search.
Optimize for joining a growing startup even if you have to be title-humble when you join. If you do want to move into product, be upfront about your desire to take on more product responsibilities, and relentlessly drive towards opportunities to learn about and contribute to product. Build friends and allies across the org. When it comes time to advocate for more responsibilities – along with a commensurate title – be able to articulate your impact in a way that demonstrates product experience and aptitude. In startups, as in life, you own your story.
Thank you to David King, Henry Su, Jonathan Lai, and Robby Huang for all their contributions and feedback to this piece.
PS: In writing this piece, we found that we had so much more to say about how to navigate to product if you’re a smart generalist. If this is a topic that interests you as well, stay tuned for our deep dive on 3 credible paths to product in our next blog post!