 Hi everyone. I'm Matt obviously. So before we begin, I did want to get one more question that we didn't do through Slido, which is, is there anything that you guys specifically want to know about? Is there anything that you guys really are here to get? A lot of you, 62% roughly, are starting their careers, starting your careers? So is there anything you're really looking for besides kind of understanding bigger versus smaller companies and how to frame your career? We'll start on this side, anybody? Yes? Okay. Got you. Okay. Moving from a smaller to larger company, anybody else? Yes. Engineering to product? Okay. Okay. Sure. Great question. We will definitely handle that one. The rest of it I will try to get to. If you don't think that I did afterwards, I'll be around for a little bit. So feel free to ask me and I can look very confused at that point. So yeah, so let's jump into it. Obviously, you're here to talk about navigating large and small companies. This is a little bit about my background in terms of why I'm kind of relatively qualified to handle this or to answer this question. The largest company I've worked for is CGI Federal. It's a government contractor, mostly in the defense space. 70,000 employees, really, really big. I knew maybe 50 of them. The rest of them were very opaque and on a lot of different projects. We'll talk a little bit about kind of being that small cog in a big company. All the way down to bump. Does anybody remember bump, by the way? Okay. Awesome. So when I was there, it was about 35 employees and that included the interns. So that's kind of the gamut. What are we going to talk about? You can see a complete list here. Obviously, we'll have a Q&A at the end. But I kind of wanted to break this down into the different facets of the career kind of spectrum, right? So all the way up there's your manager's manager and the executive leadership team all the way down to your manager, you, and then kind of let's get more about like what you're looking for, right? Your growth and skills, your life, money, because that's the difference between small and large. Kind of what does that mean for the career arc? And then I'll give you some miscellaneous and random thoughts that I have. So this one, what's the difference? What's the difference between a big company, small one? What is a startup? That's one that kind of a lot of people ask. Nobody really knows what it means. It's provocative. So generally my philosophy for startup is less than 200 people, less than five years old, no more than somewhat proven at the very most. It would be a little more of a risky bet for me to put my career into. Focused on growth in terms of users and customers, they're still trying to find that footing. What is going to bring a lot of people in? What are the metrics that are going to get me more people so I can actually prove that this is worth doing and that other people should join? And not as focused on revenue. So typically this has like kind of a venture capital funding model where you have other people investing in your company, you're not getting money directly or you're not getting the majority of your money directly from your customers. From here, I still kind of lump small companies into this general framework, but smaller companies in my mind have more of a sense of this is exactly what we're doing and we're going to drive towards that versus like, we think this is the right way, we still have to do a lot of customer development. So customer development is more literally talking to your customers and finding out what they need. Big company, obviously this is where it gets kind of murky because a big company could be anything from 500 up to 70,000, right? So let's start off with, if you guys have questions, by the way, just jump in and ask. We'll do Q&A at the end, but if there's anything on a specific slide that piques your interest, let me know. Executive leadership, at a small company, they might not have a lot of experience. So that kind of filters down. Everything in the company goes kind of top down. The tone comes from the top. So if there's not a lot of experience, that means that starting at that top level as a PM, it's going to be a little bit more changing quickly and often. It's not exactly a one-to-one correlation, but you'll find that a lot of times in the executive team doesn't have a lot of background in their field especially. They're going to kind of jump around a little bit, a little bit of chasing the shiny object. A lot of this, I'm going to preface, by the way, of kind of moving through the rest of the presentation, is from my own experience. So keep in mind that it's a little bit skewed towards the companies that I've been with, not necessarily every single company out there. At a large company, you usually have leaders with a long established background. So for example, I'm at StubHub right now, and a lot of the leadership team that we've been bringing in have backgrounds in sports and athletics and concerts and concert management. So they bring that industry knowledge in. Also, at larger companies, usually at the top level, there's a bit more executive searching going on. Smaller companies, you're trying to find the right person. Larger companies, too. But larger companies typically have a large executive recruiting firm that they can work with. The other thing is that larger companies, specifically public ones, a lot of times the focus, and this is something that I found very true, is on shareholder value and risk mitigation, which means let's make sure that when someone does something, we're protected. And if we have shareholders, they're protected, and we're going to maximize returns for them. That doesn't mean they don't focus on the product, but this is another, this is kind of a larger part of what their focus is versus a smaller company where they can focus specifically on the product and on the people. So what do you want to look for in a leadership team when you're kind of judging a company, when you're looking to go wherever you're going to go next and beyond that? For a smaller company, try to find one with a leadership team that has a pretty good background in the field that they're in. Figure out who's backing the company, what are the firms that are backing the company if it's VC backed, right? So is it, there's a lot of big names in the valley, do those names, or the partner who's in charge of that company, do they specialize in that area, or is it a smaller company that might not be known for the field you're in? What is the background of the board? So most companies have an executive board that's different from the leadership team, so leadership team is more like kind of the C level, and the board is more there to supplement that, they meet more on like a quarterly basis. What is the background of the board? Do they have experience in the field you're in? That's pretty important because they can help guide the leadership team to certain goals or not. For everything, try to find something that the field, sorry, there's a lot of relevance between what the leadership team has done in the past and what they're doing at your company, or the perspective company. And then as you get larger, what have they done? Because usually, again, more experience, so kind of where have they been in the past and what have they done? If it's a middle-sized company, it's like what have they scaled in the past? So I'll give you a kind of a direct example there, it was a kind of a more in the middle, but at Wikia, we had a CEO at the very beginning, actually his last day was my second day, and he loved building up companies from really, really small to kind of medium, but once they hit medium, that wasn't where his expertise was, or his interest was rather. So we had a new CEO who's really really interested in saying this is the growth, this is where I'm going to take this kind of company that's proven itself and just ramp it up. And then the other thing to look out for is turnover rate. If you look at a company and they have a relatively high executive turnover rate, think a little bit before you go. So we'll talk a little bit, any questions on executive leadership? The whole company is, but especially at the top, if tone comes from the top, what you'll find is if you have a high turnover rate, or at least what I found, if there's a high turnover rate, then a lot, it starts to cause a little bit of like confusion at the middle levels, which filters down to kind of all the levels, including all of us's PMs, kind of even from like junior PMs, although senior PMs. So when you have turnover, the initiatives that one person started kind of stop or stall, you have other people trying to fill those gaps, which means they're not 100% focused on all the other areas that they're normally focused on. You have a search going on that brings in a new person who might have different objectives, and then everything, kind of a lot of the work that you've done, kind of slowly shifts away, and then the new objective comes in, and I've got a ramp up on that. So it's not the end of the world to have people kind of turnover, but if you have a lot of turnover, it might mean that either A, the company's not doing well, because why are people leaving, especially at the top, who know a lot more about the strategy execution and kind of health of the company, but also it can start to have this kind of trickle down effect throughout the rest of the company. In your experience for a small startup, how many people are too much in an executive leadership team? I think it depends on the size of the startup, right? So if you're 35 people, if you have, we had three at bulk, we had three people, and that worked pretty well, right? We had technology, we had, sorry, we had technology, we had kind of general and we had product, and general was able to go out and fill different roles kind of externally, and then we had product and tech inside, and then product kind of also acted or the general rather acted more as like kind of operations when they were internal. So that worked out really well for that size of a company. When you get to a few hundred, obviously three, you know, a couple of hundred people, three is like 70 people, right? Three people aren't necessarily going to be enough to manage everybody. As far as direct reports, I think it's like five to one is a general generally good ratio. So if you start with a number of people, you don't want to have like 30 people reporting, sorry, if you start with like, you don't have 30 employees reporting to one person. So that's kind of a way you can back into how many people would be, kind of answer it. It's a little bit of a murky, I know answer, but it really does depend a little bit on the size of the company. Yeah, we'll talk about that in a little bit in terms of big, small and small to large. I think one thing to kind of maybe clarify that point is being careful of, so I guess in the last 10 years, it's less so now, but kind of maybe three years ago was it was a lot, a lot more. There was a lot more VC funding and it was a lot easier to get. So there were a lot of classes that had, you know, like Stanford, Berkeley, etc. that had people coming out and they would, hey, you had a great idea, you did a class where you proved that this thing worked, do you guys want to run with it? And so making sure that the people who are kind of leading the company actually have experience, especially managing companies. When you look at Google, and I know it's easy to point to the big ones, right? Larry and Sergey kind of stepped back and had Eric come in because they knew that they were a little too junior to manage it. Eric had a lot of experience, right? So that's kind of the thing to look for is the person leading this, do they have experience, especially in this field, but are they able to actually lead a company? Does that make sense? Well, I wouldn't assume that someone who comes from a big name company says they're going to have a better experience or be better at what they're doing than someone that comes from a smaller company, or sorry, from a non kind of brand name company. I think a lot of it depends on your manager, which we'll get to in a second, and also what that specific person has done. So it's not that they have a solid background that they've come from top tier companies. That's, you know, historically better in terms of they've been pre filtered in a sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean that people that haven't come from those backgrounds are just as qualified. There's a question. Sorry. Cool. There's a question over here. No, cool. I don't necessarily think that rebranding is a flag to look out for. Stubhub's actually rebranded a couple of times in the last five years or so. It's not necessarily a bad thing to rebrand. You want to make sure that the message you're sending is matching your audience. I'm not sure if I could follow the first part of your question. I think that answered more in a second. Gotcha. I think there's a difference between a pivot and a branding change, right? A pivot generally refers to we're changing our direction. We wanted to do X. It didn't work. We're going to do Y. That doesn't necessarily mean that management did a bad job. And if you see some turnover there that they, you know, it might mean that the project didn't have fit, right? So product market fit is everyone's familiar with product market fit, right? Yeah, like that's you have to have that. So it might just mean that idea that everyone was chasing was wrong. Now that may or may not mean that the management team is going to be the right one for the next for where you pivot to, right? Cool. So let's talk a little about your manager. So the smaller company. I found managers, your director manager be a little bit more hands on and involved in what you're doing a little more guiding. And they kind of manage down and across. So what that means is they manage more to you and then to kind of their their peer level. And they're more direct in their communications. It's a lot more one on one. It's a lot more in person. It's a lot more communication with them to their face, not over email. I've also found that in a smaller company, the managers are a little bit less experienced. None of this is necessarily bad. So keep that in mind. These are all just comparisons between larger and smaller companies. At a larger company, they manage down, up and across. So the difference is they manage up. A manager at a larger company will spend a fair amount of time managing up to set expectations, make sure everybody's on the same page. We talked a little bit early about confusion and making sure that everybody has the right information. So most of the larger companies I've been at, there's always been some sort of, okay, these, this group or this person thinks that our roadmap is X. It's actually not quite X or I'm not sure why someone thinks that this is a feature that works in a certain way when it actually works a different way or that we're planning on doing something later on that other people don't know about. Or I need to work with the internal marketing team to make sure that everybody knows what we're building. So they're more kind of making sure that everything is aligned across the board and managing up to their managers so the expectations are correct. Hey, something happened. We lost engineering three people left or, you know, we found these major issues that we had to fix. Our roadmap has now changed versus managing down to you, which is a lot more of that guidance. They're a little less present typically because they're in a lot more meetings managing across and up and they're generally more experienced. Wider focus comes back into that point around managing across. That's really kind of the biggest piece is they are looking at all these different parts of the business and there's all these different teams, right? You have marketing over here. You have, so I'll give you an example of stuff, but we have app marketing, right? Which is just so I'm on the native team, right? So just to manage the marketing for the mobile apps, app store, etc. We have general marketing, how we're making sure that users know we have mobile apps and know how to download them, know where to go. There's also the analytics side to work with the analytics team to make sure that we have all the data we need and that other people have the data they need about what we do about our part of the other company. They have working with design in UX to make sure that everything is smooth there and they understand that roadmap coming up. They have the engineering side. They have the QE side. So you can see like just kind of across the board. There's a lot more teams that need to be kind of in meetings and have discussions so that everybody's on the same page. So their focus is a lot more split among different things which leads back to kind of being less around directly. That being said, I've definitely been in larger companies and my managers have been there a lot. So it's a little bit depends on the company but in general these are kind of the differences. So what to look for in your manager? The biggest thing is that you connect. I've definitely been on interviews where I just really didn't understand what the hiring manager was telling me. And I asked at the end, I said, OK, so you want something that does act? He's like, no, no, no. I want something that's why. I'm like, this is probably not going to be a fit. So from the very beginning, make sure that you kind of understand what your managers what your potential manager is saying because if you don't understand at the very beginning, the rest of your journey there is going to be really difficult. They should believe that personal growth is important. So I've had some managers that are really, really big into how can I grow you? I've had some that are like, all right, great. Glad you're here. Here's everything you need to do. And so it's less about kind of making sure that you kind of have that foundation to go somewhere else and really be productive. So another thing is being interested in the team's health, not just the product. So again, some people are really like, hey, this is what you need to build. Go do it. Other managers are, hey, how's the team feeling? Does everybody feel like they have the resources they need? There's a lot more communication. Everyone's on the same page. Typically, one trait here that I found that's really, really good is a manager who will let you know about what's about to happen, right? So managers have a little more access to higher-level information about where the company's going, what's going on, what are they doing, what are changes that are occurring. The best ones that I've found are the ones that are going to bring the team together in your weekly meeting or your bi-weekly meeting and say, hey, just let you know this change is going to happen. We're going to start shifting focus probably next week or the week after. I've also seen the don't tell anybody and then everybody seems to know at the same time. Ideally, they have experience in managing teams. Caveat here is one of my best managers actually was pretty young, pretty new. But ideally, what I've seen is if there's experience managing teams, they know how to kind of bring you up and they know how to integrate you into the rest of the company and make sure that you have impact beyond just your team. So that's something that I would look for if you can. Selfless, kind of a little bit of a gimmie. You want someone that is really going to be more about helping, not more about helping you out, but more about helping you out than less, but not necessarily their whole goal isn't going to be to help you. Their goal is to manage a team that builds a product. Oversight. So to smaller companies, this is, most of you guys probably know this, but you just do more. You have more of a hand in different aspects of your product and that's actually, there was a question about transitioning from smaller to larger. This is one of, at least for me, one of the things that was a little bit more difficult was letting go of some of that. There's a whole division that does marketing. It's not my job to write the copy. There's a whole team, people that do the copy. So it's letting go of some of that ownership and control. This is, you're building a product or you're building something, you're putting your energy into it. You kind of want to make sure that it gets out to the world correctly. When you're at a larger company, there's teams dedicated to working on that. So you kind of have to, you work with them, but you kind of ultimately have to trust them and they have the final say. Also with smaller companies, you have more of a product knowledge across the entire product. The product's usually only but so big. So you kind of have a little bit more depth across the entire product. So that's whether you have a front end and a back end or a B2B side and a B2C side. You have a mobile app and a website, right? You get a little bit more holistic view. At a larger company, oh, sorry, more autonomous in both what and how you do things. So generally, and we'll see this in a second, as well in a later slide, you have autonomy in getting it done. That's your job. Your job is to figure out how to get it done. And we'll talk about being scrappy in a little bit. That's what it is. At a larger company, it's a little bit more prescriptive and that goes back to risk mitigation. Things have to be done a certain way, right? Legal has to sign off on this. So you don't have as much room to just kind of like go, put something out there, see how it works, then come back later. With larger companies, you have a little bit more of a limited knowledge base. You're focused on this part of the product. There's someone else that's focused on this part and someone else that's focused on this part. And there's a whole team that's focused on this. So you really kind of get to know one area very well. So an example there is at Subhub, like I said, I work on the native app. I have a couple primary focus areas and one of those is selling. So when you look for tickets for a secondary ticket market, there's buyers, there's sellers. So I focus on the listing side. How does someone take a ticket that they have, get it into the system so somebody else can buy it? I have much more knowledge on that than I do on the buy side, right? There's a higher need to influence versus own. Own is in quotes. Everybody should kind of realize, product, you don't really have any authority. Everyone kind of follow that? Right, yeah, it's all about influence. In a smaller company, it's a little bit easier. At a larger company, it's a little bit harder. And that's because different teams have different goals and different metrics and different things that they need to hit. And they're also getting a lot more asks from a lot of other departments. So in a larger company, because there's more teams doing more things, everybody's kind of getting bombarded with different ideas and different needs. So your need to go in and be able to influence their roadmap is a lot more important or it's a lot more necessary, versus really kind of having more ownership over whether it's the copy or the QE schedule or something like that. What I found is larger companies, it's a little more shepherding projects through. This is a little bit more related to where you are within the company. So obviously the higher up you are, the more say you have. But generally, and this kind of comes back from when I was a little bit earlier in my career at larger companies, it was a lot more about making sure that I knew what to do and I could just kind of bring it forward. More competing priorities. We kind of talked about this a little bit with the need to influence. It's kind of two directions, right? It's you trying to understand and influence other people in their competing priorities and it's also the competing priorities that you have. So in a smaller company, you have usually less customers, less users. You can focus on a smaller number of things. Versus a larger company, you have all of these different departments coming to you. So you have to manage your own priorities as much as you're asking other people to take your priorities to their team. And of course in larger companies, it's a lot more revenue accountability. Obviously that's a little bit more towards the higher end, but yeah. So first thing, and this is, if you have a good manager, they'll tell you this as well, meet people, get coffee, get lunch, find when they have some free time. The two things I would do, one, learn the product. You should usually, before an interview, you should go in, check out the product, download it, or go to the website, use it a little bit, ask for a demo account if they don't have one, or just sign up for a trial. But meet the people that are working on those teams, find some similarities. Like, hey, oh, you like soccer, I like soccer, right? And just find a way to connect with them. It's a lot easier to ask for help or want to help a friend than it is someone that's just in a random team that you kind of have seen here and there. At some level, a lot of it's almost sales, right? You're selling the need that you have for your team to someone else and they have to buy into that. So that's, there's a few people that I just have really, really good relationships with, and they know that I'll also try to take care of them when they say, hey, I need you to implement this, right? And I can go back and forth and say, hey, well, I can't do it this way, but I can probably get some resources if we frame it like this and if we kind of scale it back, I can maybe get it slotted in X time. So that kind of friendship, if you will, is really what takes it a lot further. If you're coming as a program management team, if you're at a, so, you should be interacting with your engineers and designers. I think that's the first thing. Yeah, so you're saying it's you, there's a program manager and you never, it's like a black box to the rest of the company. Right, I mean the social part's fine, there's, you know, hey, can you do this? Right, there's a little bit of that. Yeah, that's where it gets a little bit murky, especially kind of back to your question about larger and smaller companies, you typically have a lot more of that program management, project management role. And at larger companies, there's usually a person that does that. I'm just, I don't have a lot of experience where I don't have, where I have a black box, right? Mostly the companies that I've been at have been pretty good about whoever's kind of in that program management silo, or that vertical, there's still a lot of transparency both ways. When you think about project management versus product management, project management is like the who and the when, right? And product management's like the why and the how, right? Like why are we doing this and kind of how are we gonna get done with the functions and features? So if you kind of separate those out, that should kind of help because you should be working with the stakeholders, right? If you need something from, if I need something from the buy team to help with this, so I need the buy team to, for example, give me a way to access all the current listings so that users can see what the prices are so they can price accordingly, right? I should be working directly with the owner of that team. If that means that I say, hey, program manager, can you help me to create a meeting and help me kind of make sure that we understand their needs and our engineers are working with their engineers and everything is synced up, that's one route you can take. I mean, I've done that before. So they're again, they're charged with like the when and kind of or like the who's working on it, but you're still able to go and say, hey, I need to talk to this person to make sure they understand the needs that my team has and I'm representing, you know, what the user's needs are. Does that help? Cool. Generally you have less control. So, sorry, going back into the presentation from the questions. At larger companies, your oversight is again, narrowly focused. This is to reinforce that point from earlier. You only control your area. You can influence others, you can ask for help, but generally you have less control and whereas a smaller company, you own a lot more of the breadth. This is just an example of the control sometimes. So, what to look for? This is actually less in your control. So it really depends on the team, the company initiatives and the culture. Company initiatives will also change over time. So one thing to just be prepared for, not necessarily something you can do anything about, but just be prepared as you move through your career, especially if you're starting. It can be a little bit of a shock when you go in and you've got this awesome project that you're gonna work on. You've kind of figured it all out. You start building it and all of a sudden, hey, we're gonna switch focus, not in your control. So just be aware that it's actually not uncommon for those kind of changes to happen. Almost everywhere I've been, we've changed focus pretty quickly at some point, whether it's a quarter by quarter and we all of a sudden decided next quarter we're gonna do something different or whether it's just all of a sudden you come into work one day and they say, hey, this thing wasn't working, we're gonna just do that. Growth and skills. Start with large company this time. Balancing your priorities. We talked about that a little bit in terms of you have a lot more of them. Balancing other priorities. So understanding what someone else's priorities are and kind of influencing how you're going to manage what you need from them. Managing through the complexity. Again, a lot more teams, a lot more people you have to work with to coordinate. So for example, you'll work with a marketing department to make sure that your product is getting marketed out there. Then you'll also work with the analytics department to make sure that they're capturing everything. But you've worked with engineering, right? Because you had to make sure everything was tracked correctly. And you've worked with QE to make sure it was tracked, right? So all of a sudden one small thing kind of really bubbles up and all of a sudden you have a meeting with five people, right, instead of two, or you'll have five meetings instead of just one or two. Interpersonal skills, a lot more people, a lot more personality types. So that's definitely one thing at a large company. You can also have a lot of people with different personality types of a small company, but obviously more people, more personality types. Influenced skills we talked about. Patience, that's a big one. Back to going from smaller to large, small companies tend to move more quickly, large companies don't. So being able to sit back and say, okay, this thing isn't gonna happen yet or I expected this thing to happen, it's taking a lot longer than I expected. I'm actually, I'll go back to patience. There was a project that I was on, it was like a plug and play project. We were actually, we didn't have a way to handle customer service issues for the mobile apps. And so I found a solution. We can literally upload our builds to it and then you can go into a website and start playing with the apps immediately. It took a year to implement that. Because it had to go through all the proper channels that it get vetted through actually eBay security team stuff that's part of eBay. It had to go through legal, it had to go through the customer service team. We had to kind of change things to make sure we could get the right builds. So just at a large company, be prepared that things take a while. And also you'll learn a little bit more about strategy and some of that is just exposure kind of upwards. You're less buried in just getting things done and more kind of able to kind of see the bigger picture. And the other great thing about large companies is you get to see a lot more of the breadth. You get to go to a marketing meeting. You get to go to a meeting with, and again this is gonna vary company by company, but for me, for example, C to C selling versus B to C selling. You get to go to all these different parts of both the product and the company and learn more about how they operate. And the more you go to those meetings, what's really, really interesting is you get to see what their needs are and how they think about things. Which means that next time you go into a meeting with them, you can frame things in the way that's gonna make the most sense to them, which means you spend less time talking about what you're trying to do and more time talking about how you're gonna accomplish it. At a small company, figure you out and just be scrappy. Yeah, one of the things. Okay, I'll address it now. No, bigger company does not mean more resources. More money does not mean more resources. Hiring is hard everywhere, especially from an engineering perspective. So I've seen large companies, medium companies and small companies all have open headcount for engineering for months. It takes a while to get there. Also, company initiatives change. So in larger companies, because there's more initiatives typically that are running in parallel, you'll have the engineering teams kind of split up into those different functions. And so you think you're gonna start with this large team of people and it kind of whittles itself down a little bit. One thing that I really have appreciated about StubHub is we actually have a separate quality engineering team that's not part of our actual engineering team, at least on Native. And so it allows our devs to kind of have a little more time to focus on the building and not the testing. So that helps from a resourcing perspective. And at smaller companies, I've never had that. Actually, one company I was at, PMs ran, smoked out. We did all those tests, we did all the testing. So yeah, I would not assume, I made the same mistake. I walked into larger companies and I'm like, awesome, we're gonna have so many resources. And then kind of by the end of it, people were like, oh, you know, so why are you, you know, why are you interviewing with us? Well, that's like, we didn't really have any resources, right? So, okay, gotcha. So that's interesting. I've actually, yeah, most of the companies, even the smaller ones that I've been at have all still had education budgets and had, you know, travel budgets. And I don't feel that I was less able to grow from that perspective at smaller companies than I did at larger companies. Most people, I've never seen most people use those budgets, right? So even if you're at a big company or a small company, if most people aren't using it, the budget's still there. And people aren't going over, right? It's capped at a certain amount. And they usually, in the HR planning, they cover that, right? We're only gonna give this much for classes or this much for, cool. Is there, no? Cool, so finishing off a small company, it's a lot, I would say your skills are a lot more focused on execution, right? It's back to the figured out, get it done. I'll give you an example at Bump. We were trying to determine, let me step back. Bump was a company that you bumped two phones together and it would figure out, you know, who bumped and then how to transfer information back and forth. We were trying to figure out, would people bump with a business, right? Would you go into a coffee shop and would you bump with a device? Excuse me, and why? Just a simple kind of a research, very startup kind of question. Is this something people would do and if they would, why would they do it? What would make them want to do that? So what I did is I basically went into, we're located here, I'm gonna take this radius. I'm gonna say, what are the most popular cafes, what are the most popular fast food? Not big chain fast food, but like small fast food. What are the most popular versions of these types of establishments that we would target? What are the top 10 by ratings and reviews? And then just drove there. Hi, my name is Matt, give a manager in. Great, hi, I'm working with Bump, this is what we're doing. Get it done, no one told me to do that, I just did it. That's a really good skill to have and we'll talk about that in a second. So execution, figure not getting done and trial by far, there's not as much ramp up time. Typically it's kind of get in and figure out the product, figure out what you're doing here, figure out what we need to get done to get there. It's a little less thinking further ahead and a little more thinking, how do I get this accomplished? Okay, now that's done. How do I get the next thing accomplished? So growth and skills, what to look for. If you're really high up, sure, if you're kind of this level, probably not so much. Realistically, the difference between a small and a large company, larger company there's just a lot more hoops to jump through to do that. For example, even doing this, I had to check in with Legal to make sure that it was okay for me to come in and talk and all that stuff. So you can't just kind of run out and try to do some of those things. You can research, like the emulator, the CS emulators that I mentioned earlier, those still had to go through all those channels. So I reached out and started the conversation, but the part of the reason it took so long and I couldn't just execute on it immediately was that. Even now, if there's an issue from, so some of the servers might spin down, making sure that we have monitoring and all that, I'm still working with, a year later, working with the ops team to say, hey, let's make sure the monitoring is working, or hey, we're having queuing issues. How do we solve these? Those teams, the ops teams, are busy trying to make sure the site's working and that people can log in and that internal employees can access all the tools that they need. So basically the larger the company, the more complexity, the things that are going on in parallel. Each thing gets a little bit less, so you have to have more people to work on it, which then it's just like building a bigger road, more people drive on it. Does that help answer? Awesome. So growth and skills, kind of what to look for. More doesn't necessarily equal better. So this is a question or a statement around specialization. There's kind of two ways you can look at things. You can either specialize in one thing, you can be the best in it. Or you can kind of take more of a general approach. One isn't necessarily better than the other. Sometimes it depends on the company you're going or that you want to work for. I've been at some that are like, hey, we're gonna give you a code challenge now. I was like, yeah, no, I think this has been great. Thanks for your time. But I've also been at companies where they still want that small level of proficiency to say I know how to use an API. I know how to code. Okay, I've done Python scripting. How did I do it? This is exactly how I did it, right? So more skills isn't always necessarily better. It just depends on what you want to do. That's something that you should think about in your entire career arc and I'll mention that again later, is do you want to be a generalist or a specialist? Because you can get really deep in something like security, right? You can get really, really entrenched in, okay, this is all of everything about two-factor authentication, everything about encryption, everything about secure protocols. Great, and if you want to work for a company that needs that specific skill, perfect. But if you do that and then you want to go to work for a company that kind of doesn't focus on that as much or doesn't have a need for that. If they need someone that's more front-end focused, it's going to be a little bit harder. Is there? No, okay. One thing to kind of think about is what am I going to learn here to get me to my next job, right? That doesn't mean that you should only go in and say, okay, I'm just here for my next job, but if I'm looking at a place that I'm going to put a few years of my career in, how is that going to help me later on down the road? Remember, we're talking about a career arc here. We're not talking about two years. We're talking about 20 or 30 years, right? Everybody should have a goal where they want to be. And it's okay if you don't exactly know, but you should kind of think, okay, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, this is where I see myself. And what is it going to take in different steps to get there? And where I want to go next, that I can spend a really good amount of time to give an employer my skills and also pick up some new ones where I'm going to like what I'm doing. We'll talk about day to day later, but also where I'm going to really gain something that'll make me more valuable and more knowledgeable moving forward. What skills do I not have currently? So back into that, it's not just what you're going to learn, but what gaps do you have, right? There might be like, oh, I want to learn these three things, but I actually don't know anything about this. And is that going to make me stronger here? I've seen people go back and forth between, for example, product and operations so that they can go and become more of a COO, right? They can go and they can come in and they can say, okay, I am now in charge of, you know, at the highest level, I've worked up my career and now I'm in charge of, say I have sales, I have operations and I have product, right, but they have experience through all of that. So that's more to the generalization, right? Am I continually learning new things that are important? So something more for a current job, right? Am I always, do I feel like, you know, if you've been here, you've been somewhere for a couple of years, am I getting new challenge, am I learning new things or do I feel like I'm kind of tapped out on growth? Look for a company, my advice, look for a company that really does want to move people around. So my manager's really good about saying, you know, one thing I want everyone on my team to do is not just stay in one place. I want you to work on different parts of that. So I'm working on sell now. I may be working on something else, you know, six months from now, but I'm going to learn the different parts of this process. Life, smaller company, usually longer hours, you're a little bit more on call. So even though you go home at, you know, eight o'clock or 830, phone rings at nine, you're picking up the phone. Life outside of work, interest, and this is just more kind of an interesting thing that I've seen, life outside of work happens a lot with the people at work. On the weekends, you're hanging out with people at work. It's not 100%, but it's just kind of an interesting thing that I've noticed that the smaller the company people bond so much that they end up hanging out a lot more outside of work, which also makes work way more enjoyable, not that it's bad at larger companies, but it's just like you're working with your friends, right? And a large company, there's a little bit more balance. You know, one of the things that I was told earlier on was, hey, you're going to come here and you're going to work hard when you're here, but, you know, five o'clock, unless there's an emergency, 530, when your job is done, you go home, you come in the next day. So when I go home, I can go, whatever I want to do is fine. I don't have to worry about, am I going to get a call, do I have to go in, et cetera. The hours are a little more casual. Usually there's like working hours, like 10 to four, versus at a smaller company, it's like, no, you got to be here a little bit earlier and you got to stay a little bit later. Less happy hours, especially if the company's public. Obviously certain companies don't do that. I kind of split mentally. There's companies that are old, more established tech companies that have been around for a long time. And then there's kind of like that Google era of tech companies where like the employee happiness was a little bit more something that they paid attention to, or not rather than shareholder value, but also very important. So I've just kind of seen differences in companies that, and I've actually seen companies that as they grow and get even larger, they've kind of slowed down the number of happy hours. Generally it's less pervasive stress and things move slower. So there's always going to be deadlines. There's always going to be things you have to get done. There's always going to be, the person that's not getting done, what you need them to get done so that you can move your project forward. But generally because there's more people around, everybody focuses on a little bit less. So you don't have to worry about, did this, this, this, this, this, this and that thing get done to launch. These three things got done and I checked with everybody else and everybody else is cool. So what's it look for in life? This one's on you. But definitely think about the kind of lifestyle that you want. Do you want to be somewhere where you're putting a lot of time of the day into it? I will be very honest, there was a point for me where I realized I'm still really hungry but I can't work till nine every night anymore. I have hobbies, I have things I want to do. So that was one point for me where I kind of said, okay maybe I should go to a little bit of a larger company that has more of a casual working environment. Now that doesn't mean that I'm not necessarily still on my phone at 11.30 at night checking emails but that's a personal preference, not something that's necessarily dictated by the company I'm at. Money, favorite topic. Small company, typically you have your base salary, sometimes a bonus, you have ISOs, right? Incentives, stock options. Taxes are paid later, which means you have to make sure that you can pay the taxes on those when you decide to execute. And oftentimes the value of the ISOs, it depends on how big the company is and how many people have been there. But it's not just like okay I joined a company and there's 30 people. It's okay there's 30 people today but the company's been around for four years and over time my employee number is actually like 85. And if the 84 people in front of you are all executing on their shares, what does that mean for you? So that means the pool is a little bit less. So when you talk to companies and if this is part of what they offer, understand and there's a wealth front has a lot of really good guides on how to think through this. Other blog does. Think about what this means for like your compensation. Think about your total comp. Also with ISOs sometimes there's a lockup period, generally between 9 and 100 days but that basically means when they do go public, if they do go public, you can't sell for a certain period of time. Larger companies, RSUs if public. Taxes are taking your investing date so it says you're gonna get X then you look at your account the next day, after they've been released and you're like, why is it this much? Thought I was getting more. It's because taxes are generally taken out. And there's blackout periods instead of lock-in periods. So generally between, usually it's around quarter reporting. You can't sell the higher you are as a level when you're seeing more kind of towards the executive side. Your blackout period is larger. I'm not an attorney. I don't specialize in taxes. I just wanted to say, hey there's a couple differences to think about when you look at it. There's also large companies that don't have RSU or in the small companies that don't have ISOs. There's also something called an NSO which is a non-centivized I think. And those are treated a little bit differently. I think you have to wait longer to actually exercise them. So just the point of this is really think about your total comp, understand what you're getting into. Understand the value. Because you're getting paid to do a job. You're getting paid to bring your skills into a company. And maybe you're just starting, I think there was only a couple people that were just, sorry, nope. There's just a couple people over later. 62% of you are just starting. You still have something to offer. Even if you've never had a product job and you're going to product school and you're like, I'm gonna get into this and I'm gonna be an awesome PM. You're still bringing some experience. You're still bringing your ability to influence other people. You're still bringing your enthusiasm. You're still bringing your ability to just go and get stuff done. So that's worth something. So just make sure you understand kind of what you're getting as well. 60% of the, oh. So it grouped it by, I see. Paying attention, that's probably the number one skill you need. Also, I didn't do this, but I would definitely recommend get a notebook. Because it's really easy when you're a PM to go to a meeting and then start answering the other emails and Slack messages and all that. Go to a meeting with a notebook so you're actually focused on what different stakeholders need. Because when you go back and you're like, hey, here's your product. And they're like, no, no, you're missing three features. Not that it's happened to me, but that's generally a concern that I have. Like, oh my God, I make sure I captured everything this person needs. And you don't want to go back and constantly asking them for clarifications, right? Because they've got a lot of stuff they're doing too. So money, again, what's looked for, totally depends on you, but just think about the total comp. Earlier on, some just general thoughts that I've heard, not necessarily all these are mine, but just in general. Earlier on, experience and growth might be worth more to you than mine. So I'm willing to take a pay cut or I'm willing to take lower than I would really, really want right now in order to gain this experience. You're getting paid for the job you're about to do and the experience you're bringing, not necessarily what you did before. That's important to remember. You need money to buy the ISOs and to pay the taxes on them. And to balance the comp against your life. So I've had friends who are like, oh, I really want to work at this great company, but they're, you know, 40 miles away. Well, okay, that's cool. Do you want to move down there? No. So do you want to do a 40 minute commute or a 40 mile commute? No, and it's not worth it. So just think about money isn't everything. Think about the rest of your life. So now we'll get a little bit more into the actual career arc. Start small or smart big. Start small or start big. Moving up, what do you want to do and where do you fit? And specialization versus generalization. Traditional advice is actually to smart start big and go small. When I graduated, that's what everybody said. Learn all the great business processes from like the best companies and bring them into a smaller company. That was good. That actually worked out pretty well. But for me, it left me really kind of unfulfilled. So I started my career with CGI, which was a 70,000 person massive government contractor. And I just, it wasn't there. Right, maybe that was for conscious, maybe it was because of the type of company or the project I was on, et cetera. But I really felt like I needed something a little bit more engaging. So that's when I went from there to Bump, which was a 35, so pretty much the ends of the gamut for me, right? And when I was there, that's where I got really, really scrappy. Like I mentioned kind of the earlier example about the device we were trying to build. I brought some of that with me to every company I've been at, right? Some of that, like I'm gonna get this done. That's the project I mentioned about the emulators. No one asked me for that. No one said, hey Matt, CS has a problem where they can't do this. I was like walking around one day and I'm like, oh, well, don't the agents learn how to use the apps? Like, no, they're not allowed to have their phones on the floor, right? That's a pretty standard customer service policy for agents on the floor. They can't have their own personal phones. So how do they train up? Well, we have training every, so it's like, so they don't actually get the latest features that we're building, so when a customer calls in, they don't know how to handle it. And they're like, well, we have these reference documents, so they have to go open up a PDF, put the customer on hold, figure out how this, it didn't make sense to me. So I went out and found a solution. So every company I've been at, I've tried to bring something that wasn't just the product that I was working on, that was valuable to the company. If you can do that, awesome. You will be loved by a lot of people. You will probably envied by a few people. And as you move through your career, you can start to explain yourself having the story of not just doing the day to day, not just doing what you're asked to do, but really bringing more value to the company. What do you want to do and where do you fit? This is something that you have to kind of figure out around where you ultimately want to get to. Do you want to be at a really, really small company and really leading it from the very, very top? Do you want to be at a medium-sized company and kind of a mid-level manager? Do you want to be at a large company and be kind of middle manager? Do you want to be a large company and be the CEO or chief product, et cetera? All those are fine, but balance it against what are your goals in life? And then we talked a little bit about specialization versus generalization. There's a book called, I think, Is It a Dip? I remember reading a book once and it was kind of like, if you're not really good at it, don't do it. Like just focus on one thing you're good at. That might work for some people, but some people, some of you, might want to generalize a little more. It's interesting, I want to touch on this one because I remember there was one period of time where I was interviewing and I heard back from one company and they said, you don't have enough user focus. All of your stuff has been kind of like middle and back and like B to B, but we're really looking for like B to C. Really for someone that can like go into the customer, right? And like a month later, I was talking to someone and I was like, oh my God, you have a great background for this B to C product, right, and it's like, okay. So one company, I wasn't enough for what they were looking for, another company, I was like exactly what they were looking for. That goes back a little bit to the generalization and specialization. Different companies are gonna want different things, but how you kind of want to pitch yourself and how you want to brand yourself is important. So what's it look for in a career arc? Answer the following. Where do I want to be in any years? What skills do I need to get there? How do I progress to get those skills? Where can I get those skills? And then we'll go to the next slide. Final thoughts, what do you want to do day to day? I'd worry less about the field specifically. If you go into drones, is that gonna be like the thing that makes you, right? More about the position, what are you gonna do? You can go to a drone company or medical company, for example. Are you gonna learn more in one or the other? That's what I would look for, especially earlier on in your career, it's about building up your abilities and your skills, not so much about doing something that's really cool and really awesome. That doesn't mean the really cool and really awesome things aren't worth doing, but I would definitely think about what am I gonna learn here? Do you want to be more technical or less technical? I'd like personally try to be somewhere a little bit in the middle, but I've definitely seen PMs who don't have any technical background do really, really well, because they go in and they ask the engineering team, what did you mean when you say this? We explain how this works. Well, why is that solution better than this solution? Not that I'm questioning you, but want to understand it. I generally take the philosophy that you're here as a developer specifically. You're great at your job, that's why you're here. You're the expert, not me. So I'm not gonna tell you how to do it, but I am gonna tell you what I need you to do. Some people are gonna be more technical. Like I said, I've had interviews where it was a coding challenge, and I was like, this is not gonna go very well. It did not go very well. It was more than mildly embarrassing. So, but you don't necessarily have to take that route. Now after that, I mean, since then I've gone and learned more, so I've become more technical. I've written APIs, or not I haven't written the APIs myself, sorry, I've managed the APIs getting rewritten. I've learned Python. Those are things that I highly recommend that if you're interested in anything technical and you want to step up a little bit, stand out a little bit, just learn basic coding skills. Learn, understand how functions work, how variables work, how operators work. Just to be able to talk through it, not that you're gonna be able to start, oh, developer's sick today, I'll fill in. Like it's not what it's for, but you can at least have a better conversation. Find out who makes decisions and where they come from. In general, decisions should come from, or product decisions, what you need to build, should come from users. It should come from your gut, it should come from data. It will also come from top down. It will also come from partnerships. It will also come from business development. Each company's a little bit different in how they focus it, but just understand for if you're evaluating a company, how does this company make decisions? And does that fit with kind of what I want? Because some companies are gonna say, we're more or less engineering driven, so that's where the decisions come from. Your job is to get this done, but engineering's ultimately gonna decide how this gets what we're building. And that's okay for that company. If that's where you wanna be, then it's okay for you. If you wanna be in a company where you wanna be more in that driver's seat, and then you go to a company where the focus isn't from the PM, it might not be a good fit. Like when you're going into a company, you're signing up for at least a few years of your life somewhere, right? You wanna make sure that you're gonna get something out of it and that they're gonna get something out of it. Both people need to kind of work together on that. Both you and the company, not both people, sorry. Being more autonomous versus being a little bit more of a drone, again, bigger companies mean less control. It doesn't mean you're only gonna be a drone and just kind of like, okay, I got this, okay, I talked to this person, okay, we got that done. But just think about what drives you, what motivates you. Do you wanna just have a control over everything? Do you wanna just, you know, you're red marking this and you're writing that and you're helping out engineering here and you're QE testing that, or do you kind of wanna focus on more of just, especially earlier in your career, just figuring out the execution. How do I know how to do this? How do I just get that, you know, okay, here's the framework we're using. It's agile, it's cam in, it's scrum. This is how we're gonna do it. And then strategy versus execution. Ultimately, as you get further and further in your career, you should be doing more and more strategy. Earlier in your career, learn how to execute my advice. Later in your career, worry about the strategy. That doesn't mean you can't have input into strategy. There's nothing wrong with saying to your manager, hey, I was thinking about this thing that we're doing and, you know, this would be cool. I do that all the time. I actually sat down with my manager like four months ago and I said, hey, I'm literally gonna pitch you 10 ideas right now, 10 areas that I think we should be investing in. He loved all of them and then we did none of them. Now I'm just kidding, actually a couple of them we are trying to move forward with. So you can have some influence there, but especially earlier on, you're really more about driving. This again, this is kind of from my experience previously. So final thoughts, random. Doing your other thing doesn't mean founding a startup. There's nothing wrong with founding a startup. It's awesome. That doesn't mean that you have to. And I think this is kind of, this is why it's labeled random. One thing I think, especially around Silicon Valley that you hear all this news about startups, you hear all these, you know, the hot new company, but I've definitely seen a lot of people that just do something on the side that they enjoy doing. It brings some income or whatever, but that fulfills them. They don't need to start something new. They don't need to quit their job. They don't need to, you know, make a huge lifestyle change in order to start something new. They can do that while they're continuing to keep their job, their current job, and still have some other, some meaning as well that's not part of their job. That doesn't mean their current job is meaningless. Just they have now two kind of places that they can devote their resource. If you are working for a company, make sure that you run it by legal usually. Oftentimes you'll see when you sign, when you sign your offer letter and whatnot, there's like a section for like, you know, inventions that you already have and like anything you do is property, the company and stuff like that. So just be careful. Determine what's important to you now and later. So this is more about, you know, everybody's life changes over time. So you might say, hey, I know that I wanna have a kid in three years. So I need to be three years, you know, I wanna make sure that I'll be at a company that has an awesome policy for this down the other, right? So what are the skill sets that I need? I don't need that right now, but what are the things that I need now so that I can get to that company later, right? This is your life. You're working at a company, you're doing great things for them, but this is also, you gotta live day to day too. So make sure that what you're doing fits where you are now, it fits your skill sets now and you're able to deliver value to your company, but also that, you know, it sets you up to be able to be successful and happy somewhere else. Because ultimately, if you're not happy your job, that's not good for you or the company, right? So make sure that you're setting yourself up to be successful and happy as you move through. This is big. Be aware of your industry, read the news, know the current events. I do this all the time. I have Google alerts for like five different, I have Google alerts on eBay, StubHub, tickets, event tickets, everything. And I get a ton of alerts that don't matter. And that's fine because like the three week that I do, immediately send it to my team and that's worked out like now the whole team knows, hey, for example, CKEY just launched an enterprise platform, right? That's really important for us on product to know. No one else is doing that. And one of the person's kind of doing it now. But like a lot of people don't. So knowing the industry definitely helps you understand things. Another point on that is when I first started at StubHub, I read a book about how the whole ticketing industry started. It's actually very fascinating. But it helped me kind of coming in, understanding the competition, understanding why we do things the way we do, why they do things the way they do, understanding where the evolution came from. And actually it was really interesting and it helped me later because we went into some different regions and I saw a lot of these similarities to how ticketing in the US started. So if we decide to continue to invest in those regions, you can kind of see the path that might work there because it's worked here. It was, I think it was like the rise of, it was the rise of Ticketmaster and how the public got scalped. I think, yeah. Not the greatest name, but yeah. Yeah, it was real, it's a little bit thicker book, but it was really informative to see how that business started. And it actually helped me to understand the problems that a lot of people face today in terms of purchasing their tickets and why the industry has evolved the way it has. We can definitely talk about that after, I don't want to let everybody hostage to that. So evaluating options, find a good manager, make sure that there's a good supporting team. Like I said, one thing that was really, really awesome for me that I really loved about StubHub is that there's a QE team there. So a lot of those pieces can be supported. They support the devs, they support the PMs. We all support each other, but it's not just, hey, you do this, you do this and that's it, right? This is important. Make sure that the product and the area that you're on has company support. I've definitely been in companies where when I started, there was investment into what I was, the area that I was working on. And by the time I left, one of the reasons was that there was less investment, right? So they had shifted a lot of the resources to other areas, which meant we weren't getting to do as much, which ultimately wasn't really as thrilling for me. So I would find out, make sure that if you're looking at a company, you're evaluating a company, you're evaluating the area that you're gonna be in that company. That this is something the company wants to, like, a company wants everything to succeed, right? But they're really focused on what you're doing as well, your area. Technical versus non-technical, I think we've probably hit this one enough. But think about it in terms of what does the company want from this PM? Cause I've definitely been in places where they expected a more senior person or a more junior person, and I was either over qualified and wasn't learning as much as I had hoped, or I wasn't delivering exactly what they were looking for. Sometimes smaller companies don't always know. Sometimes they do. So sometimes larger companies know and sometimes they don't. And then like I said earlier, kind of the background leadership team, just to kind of do a gut check, make sure that you're going into a company that you feel that the management, the people that are leading this company kind of know what they're doing. Cause you don't want to walk into a company where people are kind of confused all the time and not really sure. So general guidelines, there's nothing in here that's like this company specifically or that company specifically, when you're looking at your options, start to think about all these different facets. Most people, and especially when they're starting and I did it too when I was starting, this offer looks great. This company's awesome. I'm going to do it. And I didn't think about a lot of these things. And over time, I've kind of amassed this list of things that I've checklist almost. And these are some of the biggest things on it. It's like, when I look at a company, does it hit these things? Do I know enough about these things to make a smart decision about where I'm entrusting my career? They're entrusting a lot to you. You're also entrusting a lot to them.