Before working at UK fintech scaleups Starling Bank, OakNorth and Paysend, I spent a decade inside the American Big Tech beast solving problems for Amazon and eBay.
Leading product and technology teams for these behemoths was an imperfect education in senior management, from learning to make decisions at scale to seeing how easily big companies can mistake process for progress.
I don’t regret my time at either company, not only because I learned how to run a successful business, but also because I came away knowing what not to do as a first-time CEO when I got the job at Paysend.
Here are some of the valuable lessons I took with me, alongside some habits I don’t think translate to startup life.
Talk to customers yourself
Developing a “customer obsession” mindset is well-worn advice that has lost its meaning in recent years, as technology has created ways for people to avoid actually talking to the people who pay for their product.
But you will never understand what your customers truly want by outsourcing user feedback to surveys, UX researchers, dashboards or AI summaries.
At eBay, my best ideas came from spending weekends on seller message boards, listening to blunt feedback from people who understood how they sold their products best, whether it was mattresses, wooden toys, bathroom sinks or TV-wall-brackets.
They weren’t always forgiving, but they were certainly useful.
Start with the press release
Before building any Amazon product, we wrote the press release first to force clarity. If we couldn’t explain why people should care about the product on a single page, we wouldn’t build it.
It follows Kidlin’s law, which states that if you write a problem down clearly and specifically, you’re halfway to solving it. Describing a problem deepens your understanding of its components and makes solutions easier to find.
But there’s an important distinction between launching a product and a feature. A product drives value for a customer and revenue for a company. A feature is a widget that makes a product a little better.
A feature won’t make headlines, but a product that addresses a real customer or enterprise need could.
Trust your gut
At the same time, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Once you’ve clarified the essentials and can defend a product’s right to exist, ship it. Don’t get bogged down by the tiny details.
“Launching teaches you what you should have been building,” Y Combinator’s Paul Graham says in a famous essay.
Big Tech can often get stuck in the quagmire of A/B testing, using it as an excuse to stop thinking and outsource decision-making. Should this button be red or blue? Should this box be at the top or bottom? Such trivial decisions don’t warrant lengthy consideration.
Schedule weekly meetings
“Meetings are the broccoli of work [...] widely disliked, but probably good for us anyways,” quips a recent paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The study suggests that high-paying and high-revenue firms — of which we can include Big Tech — devote more resources to meetings, which leads to greater worker wage growth and on-the-job learning.
Startup founders love to use meetings as the stick to beat large corporations with, suggesting that they’re too busy building to take part in what they see as a glorified, time-wasting activity.
But a founder who focuses only on building, without consistently reviewing product-market fit, isn’t building the right thing.
This isn’t a call for “death by meeting” but for adding structure and discipline, creating space to plan, coordinate, strategise and share information.
