I work at a very large Silicon Valley corporation as a product manager. Being a PM at a big company is great in many ways (access to resources, serving a developed market, etc.), but at times it can be a frustrating role–mainly because the pace of work is much slower and it’s difficult to innovate.

In the worst case, a product cycle can look like the following: you come up with a product idea, meet with key stakeholders to get initial buy-in on the idea, prepare a presentation to sell the broader upper management on the idea, finally get signed off on implementing your idea, beg your VP of engineering to provide developers to create your idea, wait until next quarter/next year for the business unit to allocate money and people behind your idea, create a product requirements document, spend weeks debating with your engineering manager and developers over the feasibility of your product requirements, convince your team to put together a proof of concept to test in usability, run usability, use usability data to convince your team/other stakeholders about the pressing business need for your product, achieve shared vision on your product idea, spend months building the product, run more usability, beta test, find critical bugs in your product, strip features, iterate–finally you’re ready to launch!

In this worst case, it can take many months–perhaps even years–to get your idea to market. By the time you launch, you may find that your smaller, more nimble competitors had been innovating other cooler things while you were dragging your feet with process and red tape. (And just to reiterate–I’ve presented the worst case scenario, it’s not always like this.)

Working with the HelloMovies team has been a refreshing change from my day job. Some things I absolutely love:

• The pace of the work is lightning fast. There’s no red tape or product requirements docs–we just talk about ideas with the engineers and they go off and code while figuring it out on the fly.
• We are definitely innovating. I’m not really at liberty to describe in detail what we’re building, but our team is definitely in the forefront of creating a new technology that can benefit a lot of people.
• We are young and ambitious. This team is scrappy and truly believes that we have the capability to build anything we want. Plus, the team is full of great personalities!
• I love movies! This is just my personal thing–but I absolutely love movies, and I feel privileged to be on a project to help other people–YOU–improve their movie watching experiences.

Being at a startup is thrilling and absolutely satisfying. That’s why it’s easy for folks like me and Steven to work a full day on our day jobs and then spend another 7 hours at night in a Stanford dorm room building out this website.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Team. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.