Our startup at an offsite where we graffitied a wall in SF

Before joining Lyft, I worked at a YC startup for several years in Business Development, Growth, and Product Marketing roles. I was employee #18 when I joined and we eventually grew to ~40 people before being acquired by Lyft in 2017. We built a good product with millions of app installs, but we never found a path to becoming a billion-dollar business. VC money is a bit of a double-edged sword in that sense - after raising $35M, it was billion dollar exit or bust for us.

Regardless of the outcome, I look back on those days fondly and probably through rose-tinted glasses. I got to work on an interesting product, help build a company from the ground floor, and do it with coworkers that I loved being around.

At a small startup like ours, everyone wore many hats. I was very flexible with my job title and focused more on providing impact to help the company grow. This probably slowed down my career trajectory a bit when it came to interviewing for another job, but it allowed me to learn a lot and try a bunch of different roles. After coming to Lyft, I found that many of the things I learned at the startup translated well into my career at a large tech company. These are the three lessons that I found most useful.

1. Bias for Action

At a smaller startup, nothing moved forward unless you worked really hard to push it forward. We didn’t have a profitable business. We couldn’t just sit back and let the business run while we slowly figured out what we wanted to do. Every day that we didn’t make progress felt like we were sliding backward with the clock ticking.

This sense of urgency and ‘bias for action’ doesn’t seem as natural to many employees at larger tech companies. I’ve seen time and time again where a small blocker will delay a project for weeks. People seem to accept it more readily whereas at the startup we frantically looked for a solution.

Many times, my manager(s) and teammates at Lyft were pleasantly surprised when I took the extra step to find a solution quickly. Sometimes we’re so focused on process at a large company that we don’t realize how it may be slowing us down unnecessarily.

2. Extreme Ownership

The term ’extreme ownership’ became so overused in Silicon Valley that I think many people still roll their eyes when they hear the term. It became popular when the book Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win was released in 2015. The book talks about how the concept of extreme ownership helped the author’s SEAL task unit survive in Iraq. Founders and tech gurus on Twitter started parroting lines from the book and it got old real fast. Still, I’ve taken a distilled version of extreme ownership to heart and I think it has helped in my product marketing career.

From a PMM perspective, I take extreme ownership of the relationship between the customer and their experience with the product. Every team is supposed to think about the customer, but I’ve found that oftentimes teams don’t do it as much as they should. PMs, Ops, Eng should all be thinking about how their product affects the customer, but everyone is so wrapped up in building and testing and launching that the customer experience is sometimes forgotten. My mindset as a PMM is that I am the only one thinking about the customer experience from beginning to end. If I don’t raise the flag or don’t proactively think about the ramifications, then the user will have a terrible experience because no one else is thinking from their perspective.

Once you take extreme ownership, thoughts like “oh they’ve probably thought about this issue”, or “this team is probably taking care of this already” leave your mind. I found myself asking more questions in meetings, looking more closely at product flows, and I saw the team respond with more trust and collaboration.

3. Doing work outside of your role

One of the aspects that I really enjoyed about working at a startup was being able to step outside of my role to ‘pinch hit’ and unblock myself.

Being resource-constrained is commonplace at both startups and large tech companies alike. Tech can seem like an endless battle of prioritization and you’ll often be in situations where a cross-functional team isn’t able to prioritize your asks over other projects.

At the startup, I often spent time learning how to do a different job just well enough to get by initially. I learned how to make frameworks and basic designs with Sketch (pre-Figma days). When we didn’t have a creative team, I created basic animations that we used in our app instead of waiting for an agency. I learned just enough SQL to pull the simple data requests that we had.

This translated well into Big Tech because taking the first step is often that part that requires the most energy. By creating a v1 and getting a coworker’s feedback, you need just a fraction of that person’s time in order to move a project forward. In almost every instance, I’ve found that it’s easier for someone to review and give feedback than for them to find the time to start from scratch. As a secondary benefit, it’ll also make you a more well-rounded teammate if you’re able to think from different perspectives.

Conclusion

There are significant differences between working at a startup vs Big Tech. Most people will need to make adjustments to their working style in order to be effective at a larger organization. Much of the scrappiness and hustle that was highly valued at the startup must be replaced by process and organization. However, being able to retain some of the transferable traits has certainly helped my career.

I’ll end with this: There is a balance in everything. Taking any of these lessons to the extreme would be ill-advised since you’d probably become a terrible person to work with. Being thoughtful about them and carefully considering how to best implement these in your work life could help you become more effective at your job and pay dividends in the future.