Your larger competitor in a similar market has hundreds of employees. What are all of those people doing?
Say that your company has 25 employees. Yet your larger competitor in a similar market has hundreds of employees. What are all of those people doing? Are they just duplications of the same roles that you have, with more people in each one?
Probably not, in successful growth and larger companies. There is surely some duplication (more people are required to handle more customers, more product shipments, etc). Yet quite a few of these people hold a variety of positions that may be unknown to you. Positions that you've never thought about, but you probably should – even at your smaller size. The big company scaled in part because they did not merely swell their production team or their sales team. Instead, they added many varied functions to improve efficiency in every aspect of their business.
The successful, bigger company has streamlined everything, everywhere, so that they can produce orders of magnitude more revenue with only a few more production folks. So what's the difference? - you may ask. At the end of the day, they still need all of those extra people, whatever they may be doing. The key is that those unknown roles are crucial for growth.
Those extra people are maintaining the big company's competitive edge. They are refining their product from a dozen different perspectives. Take, for example, product managers, who are not another form of "middle management." They ensure that their production team is building every feature that is needed and nothing more, simplifying the work for the production team. They have vetted the best market, simplifying the work for the sales and marketing team. They monitor the market pulse and trends, simplifying the work for the R&D team.
Yet Product Management is not just for large companies. Startups benefit tremendously from early implementation of product management.
Your small S&M, production, and R&D teams need that simplification and clarification just as much as the big company. An effective product manager will streamline effort across your entire company, identifying what your target market does and does not need. So, how do you establish something like product management in a small office?
Contact us to start a conversation – Market Operandi can help.
Dr. Kendall Read, Early Stage and Photonics/Quantum Lead
About the Author:
Kendall Read, Ph.D., has extensive experience in commercialization, operations, and R&D at nascent startups in photonics, quantum, and medical devices. As a scientist-turned-entrepreneur who has navigated the various pitfalls at half a dozen different startups and advised many more, Kendall is uniquely positioned to understand the experiences of early-stage startups, and offer sage advice to technical companies entering early growth phases and commercialization.
Kendall has a Ph.D. in physics from Washington State University and a B.A. in physics from Carleton College, performing the majority of her dissertation work at the University of Michigan and IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center.