Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 168 posts

Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?

#1

Post by 1729 »

To add more context to my question, I’m currently in a product leadership position at a ~300 person SaaS company and I found my way here by way of a semi-decent exit as part of a startup’s founding team. However, I have been considering a switch to a much bigger company (Microsoft, Google, AWS) of late. All I’ve ever learnt over the last decade has been by operating in a capital constrained environment. Moreover, I don’t have a lot of reserve energy in the tank to direct it at another startup after 10 years of blood, sweat and toil.

I often find myself thinking of and seeking out experiences from my peers at these behemoths on how decisions are made and products get built there. On one hand, I’m scared of slowly going further away from all my learnings as an entrepreneur (a lot of which haven’t come easy!!!) but on the other I feel like not having had relevant experience in the right BU/product within a big co is limiting my field of vision. What are some things I should consider before switching?

Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?

#2

Post by sumanthvepa »

Having gone the other way, from Microsoft to entrepreneurship, I would say you are better positioned for success. For the most part your skill sets will transfer over to product management in a large company fairly easily. Some things are different though. You will typically be responsible for either part of a product or one product in a portfolio. As such your product or feature's future depends not just on how it is doing in the marketplace, but how it does relative to other products and features in the the portfolio. So you need to work with your managers to evangelize and promote the product within the larger organization as well. You'll have be able to justify its existence, very robustly with a lot of data. Much of the mid-level product managers function within a large company comprises of this activity. This may seem wasteful to you, coming from a startup, where the verdict of the market was everything, but this is how large companies determine how resources are allocated. Eventually the market will determine the future of the product, but for many product managers in large companies, that success or failure will not occur in the duration of their tenure. So one thing you need to focus on a lot is networking with the internal power structures of the company to build support for your self and your team. You have a huge advantage in this respect as an acquisition. They have paid good money to bring your team in, so there is significant awareness of who you are. If you are careful, and politically savvy you can leverage that awareness, and initial goodwill into strong long term support for your team and product.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?

#4

Post by marceloabsousa »

From your context description it sounds like you need some extended holidays to put things in perspective.

For me, the biggest difference is that processes in a big co are designed for any single individual to be replaceable. As a consequence, everything is bigger than you and slower to change even if for the best. This is exactly what you're trying to achieve in a successful start-up as it starts with everyone being irreplaceable (to some extent) where you can make a fundamental difference in the future of the company.

Being part of a successful company sounds exciting and you can learn valuable information to apply in other settings but I found that in start-ups you have a lot more room to learn than in a big co. This is because instability in a start-up is very visible and directly accessible (you'll run out of money in X months) so you must timebox everything. However, in a big co instability is more implicit and you can't fail as much. Also unless you can get a fairly high level position at a big co, you won't be able to get "very" relevant experience into building/working the right product because a lot of strategy is not discussed bottom-up in those companies.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?

#5

Post by austincheney »

Here is what it means to work at a big company:

* Things work slowly, so relax. There are many people that have a hand in every aspect of a product decision.

* At a startup you are actively changing the world. That’s done now. Put that completely out of your head. You are cog in a machine. Instead focus on your assigned product, help your teammates, and just learn to relax.

* You, the individual, are not important. The product is important, the department that delivers the product is less important, the teams that comprise the department are less important than that, and so on. Again, accept the reality and just relax.

* Do your best. Unlike at a startup, generally you will have time to get things correct. This is the difference between competence and others who struggle to get things right and always appear to be in a hurry. There is no reason to be in a hurry.

* Expect insufficient test automation, lots of regression, and plenty of repetition. Also expect everybody to be an expert that is in a hurry and things in a unique way. Just be patient, politely nod, and just relax.

* If you are good at systems automation then learn to automate away as much of your job as you can. Use the now increased free time to contribute to documentation and internal knowledge repositories. You will find that a lot of the documentation can be automated as well.

* My employer has something like 270,000 employees so it’s forgiven if you have no idea what all of those people in your cubicle farm do. You need to actively spend at least 2 days a month answering those questions.

* Just because you are at a big company does not mean you are safe. I have been in a large established super well known .com that failed. People get laid off even when big companies are healthy.

* If you don’t like being bored and are highly risk adverse you might find the big company life highly depressing. A lot of my advice here is to just relax, but I hate relaxing.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?

#6

Post by brudgers »

The biggest thing is that you don't really know anything.

_You weren't in the room when the decisions were made and there is oil tanker momentum based on those decisions.

_You don't have a clue as to who is who. People within the organization know each other in non-obvious ways. There is an invisible informal network built of many years, organizational structures, and projects.

_You don't know which project is whose baby. Two equivalent approaches are not equivalent when one has backing and the other relies on natural selection.

None of these is bad. It's just the nature of blindly encountering an elephant. Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?

#7

Post by codegladiator »

austincheney wrote: post #5

Here is what it means to work at a big company: * Things work slowly, so relax. There are many people that have a hand in every aspect of a product decision. * At a startup you are actively changing the world. That’s done now. Put that completely out of your head. You are cog in a machine. Instead focus on your assigned product, help your teammates, and just learn to relax. * You, the individual, are not important. T…

Can't agree to this more. And depending on the size of the company, it might not be just few weeks, things which you would think should have been done in a month might take up to a year. And meanwhile everyone WILL keep talking about moving fast.

People will keep coming in and going out and you would end up have the same conversation with many people many times. And everyone will try to suggest "one change" at a time.

And there is nothing wrong with all this. This is just how big companies work, you cant fast-forward any of it.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from a startup to a big co, what should I be aware of?

#8

Post by AnimalMuppet »

There are systems and processes for everything. The plus of that is that there's a lot less winging it, and that you can just hand a bunch of stuff off to people that know how to do it. The minus is that you have to learn who those people are and how to activate them, and it can take longer than just doing it yourself.
Post reply on HN