Steven Bladeni moved from strategy to product leadership within a large corporate, to leading internal incubators, before transitioning into Head of Product and Chief Operating Officer roles in the startup world. Steven chatted with us, and shared some thoughts on product leadership in corporate and startup environments.
Building the Team
Regardless of the size of your organisation, as you move into product leadership, there are some universal truths – your success now depends on your team. More about team achievements and performance. Less about your personal accolades.
Your first step is to build your team.
Unless you are starting your team from scratch, in both startups and corporates, you will inherit team members. So you will need to get to know them, and assess their fit.
Then the differences between corporate and startups start to become more apparent.
Corporates
- Larger budgets, and ability to hire specialists.
- More mentoring.
- Access to support functions, like HR, Legal, etc.
Startups
- Limited budgets, and more T-shaped generalists that can span across functions.
- More hands on training.
- A lot more do-it-yourself – want to hire? Go write that job ad.
Advice
Get to know your team, their strengths, weaknesses and aspirations. Where are the gaps? Will you fill them with another hire, training or mentoring? If you can, get a specialist for the things that really matter to you.
Create the Right Culture
Now that you’ve put your team together, how will they operate? It’s time to set the culture. Collaboration is almost a given. But how do you create a healthy tension, and ensure it is effective? And does that look different in different organisations?
Collaboration is encouraged, but sometimes too much. Seeking consensus will get you there, but sometimes it will just take a lot longer to get there.
Corporates
- Leaders prefer to control, rather than empower. Whether due to governance or legacy, the control and accountability can be hard shackles to break.
- Challenging the status quo is accepted, within limits. You can design a safe place within your team, but as you move wider, more politics come into play.
Startups
- The founder cannot do it all themselves, so it is essential to empower staff. Set the team in the right direction, and let them go.
- Amongst a small team, people are less likely to question the authority of the founder.
Advice
Trust the person with the most domain knowledge.
Manage your Stakeholders
No matter where you work, there will always be stakeholders to work with. And there will always be some decisions that are made, that you don’t agree with. Whether that be from an executive leadership team, or a founder. Either way, you need to know when to suck it up, and move on. But also get your team to move on.
Corporates
- There will usually be more stakeholders in corporate. From brand, legal, support, sales, and maybe even the cleaner.
- With all these additional stakeholders, there is much more rigor to the decisions.
- Slower decisions
Startups
- Although there may be fewer stakeholders in a startup, it could be just one key stakeholder – the CEO or Founder, who is passionate about the product, and with strong opinions of what and how things should be done.
- Less process and rigour, which can make for faster decisions.
Which path is better?
There’s no right or wrong answer here. Both corporate and startups have their benefits and drawbacks.
Corporate environments can give you the opportunity to learn from more experienced leaders, expand your toolkit and build good habits. Startups allow you to utilise your toolkit, and embed product thinking at an early stage of a company, and take it to the next level.
It’s more a question of which is a better fit for you, the stage in your career and what you are looking for to be fulfilled.
Thanks again to Steven for sharing the insights!
Resources
You can see the slides from the session and below is the video. Plus find our summary of our other speaker, Claire Sawyers, on how to land a product job in a startup.
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