Member-only story

5 Things to Do as a Product Manager in Your First 4 Weeks at a Startup

Casey Reid
7 min readMay 12, 2022

--

www.flaticon.com

When I was first deciding to switch jobs, I was apprehensive about what it would mean to start fresh as a Product Manager at a new company. For one, my company sherpa˚ was only starting to hire a functioning Product Team and coming from a place where I had 20 other PMs to tap into, it felt a bit daunting. Second, the idea of having to build trust and grow relationships from the ground up felt like it would be another mountain to climb.

Ultimately though, I was and am still, very excited about the travel space. As the world opens up again, it feels particularly poignant to join and get excited about the potential for the product and the company and the opportunity to inject my own personal ideas around prioritization, process, strategy and all of the things I have been advising my clients on in my previous role. What ultimately lead me to leave a job I liked though was the founders, and the CPO in particular (Hi, Ivan!). As a Product Manager it is easy to get caught up in the buzz of the startup world and get completely taken away by waves of disorganization, no product-market fit and worse, bosses who have no idea what Product really is. In my case, Ivan and I chatted frequently before joining about our ideas and it felt very much like a collaboration as well as someone who understood Product, the company vision and…

--

--

Casey Reid
Casey Reid

Responses (1)