From Meta to Founder: Navigating Product Management Across Tech Landscapes
Aug 8, 2024
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Elliott Poppel, a seasoned product leader from Meta and founder of General Collaboration, shares his insights on navigating the tech landscape. He discusses the drastic differences in resources and decision-making between large tech companies and startups. Elliott highlights how his time at Meta influenced his startup journey, focusing on user research and strategic product features. He emphasizes the agility of startups versus the rigidity of corporates and stresses the importance of understanding user needs for successful product management.
Elliott Poppel highlights the contrasting resource availability and decision-making agility between product management at Meta and startup environments.
He emphasizes the importance of comprehensive user research, which he adopted from Meta, to ensure products meet genuine market demands.
Deep dives
The Journey from Startup to Big Tech and Back
Elliot Popple's career reflects a unique trajectory, transitioning from founding startups to product management at Meta, and back to founding a startup. Initially, he experienced the challenges of being the first non-technical hire in a startup, ascending to CEO and guiding its pivot towards enterprise SaaS before selling it. His time at Meta, where he worked as a product manager for five years, provided him insights into operating within a vastly resource-rich environment, allowing him to engage with large teams and diverse product areas like ad tech, AR, and tool development. This journey has enriched his understanding of both the fast-paced startup culture and the structured yet resource-heavy processes of a large corporation.
The Contrast of Resources and Decision-Making
Elliot describes a marked difference in resources and decision-making between his time at Meta and running his current startup, General Collaboration. While at Meta, he had access to vast resources that enabled rapid prototyping and large-scale campaigns, such as celebrity endorsements for product launches, which is not realistic for a fledgling startup. At General Collaboration, decision-making is quicker, allowing for more agility as Elliot navigates the critical early stages of product-market fit. This transition highlights the necessity of being thoughtful about risks and making informed choices based on learned experiences from both environments.
User Research as a Strategic Focus
One of the vital takeaways from Elliot's experience at Meta is the emphasis on robust user research, which he previously viewed as a mere formality in early startups. At Meta, he observed how expert teams conducted extensive user research, and this has profoundly influenced his approach at General Collaboration. This startup prioritizes deep understanding of user needs before launching products, allowing a strategy rooted in genuine market demands rather than assumptions. Elliot's journey illustrates the significant impact that comprehensive user insights can have on a product's development, especially in the dynamic tech landscape.
The Path to Product-Market Fit
Elliot shares that his current startup is still on the journey to achieving product-market fit, a process informed by earlier experiences with both successes and failures. He reflects on previous startups' missteps, such as pursuing technology without a clear problem to solve or missing market opportunities due to over-focusing on a niche need. Now, with General Collaboration, he applies a more systematic approach to understanding user needs before growing his product, mirroring the thorough research processes he observed at Meta. Although currently in private beta, the strategic focus on understanding and addressing actual user pain points may increase their chances of finding a successful product-market fit.
In this episode, host Mike Belsito sits down with Elliott Poppel, a product leader who's experienced both sides of the tech world - from managing products at Meta (formerly Facebook) to founding his own startup, General Collaboration. Elliott shares his journey, highlighting the stark contrasts in resources, decision-making processes, and product development approaches between tech giants and startups.
Listeners will gain valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities each environment presents for product managers. Elliott discusses how his experiences at Meta shaped his approach to founding General Collaboration, particularly in areas like user research and making calculated bets on product features. Whether you're considering a move from a big tech company to a startup (or vice versa), or simply curious about the differences, this episode offers a wealth of practical advice and real-world perspectives on navigating product management across diverse tech landscapes.
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