On startups and having an impact
If you ask people why they want to join startups before they join one, one of the most common answers is, "I want to have an impact". You can have a larger impact on a small growing company, they believe. I believed. My experience has shown me this is true.
When I first started tracking my product's revenue more closely, many quarters ago now, I remember comparing it to the numbers I used to see in my investment banking days. I once worked on a deal that raised $200 million in equity and took just 48 hours of work. The numbers we come across in a startup are a tiny fraction of what I used to see. But you know what? I remember thinking that you can take my product's revenue numbers and draw a fairly direct line to the team - at the time, just 4 engineers and me. Of course, the product's success depends heavily on the support of the rest of the company, but the feeling of direct ownership was real. I felt like I could say, I drove that. I was not doing it as a cog in a gigantic machine with a long, white-shoe history and well defined processes that had been performed by tens of thousands of employees. I felt very much that if I did a better job, things - not just for me but for the entire company - would be better, and if I did a worse job I could actually put a lot more at risk.
Everyone wants to have an impact. I used to think you had to be doing some kind of save the world work, and for some people that's what it takes. But for me, I have come to appreciate that impact really means feeling that you have unique influence over outcomes.
As for what generates that feeling, I believe it has to do with creativity.
Early on, I remember having to prepare slides for a checkpoint meeting and asking, "Is there a template for this type of deck?" The response was, "You could create one?" We now have all kinds of templates, but back then, I was constantly inventing new ways to do things because they just hadn't been done before.
These days the most creative part of my job is probably defining what it should be. As a Product Manager, I go to work each day and there are things to respond to - analyses for why something happened, questions about how something should work, custom requests for whether something can be done - and also, of course, getting features to ship. Responding to things has a way of expanding to fill whatever time is available. The challenge is to create space for planning bigger, thinking forward. What should the product be doing? What should the team be doing? What am I not doing now that I could be doing that would kick things up a notch? Lately, it's been about reaching out to people in functions I don't usually work with to better understand how different products and functions should interact.
If you feel that you can shape your job to reflect your thoughts and beliefs, if you feel you can infuse it with your originality, and you see it pay off in results - products ship, revenue increases, morale rises, satisfaction increases - that feels like impact. We come back to one of my favorite ideas - how can we do what we are.
