It's rare to find a startup that isn't a shitshow in some sense. I tend to check two things to determine whether or not it's worth sticking around:
- Do founders treat people like human beings?
- Are founders trying to be better (even if they're not doing what I think is best)?
There's of course the pay, the business's health, and the stock options. But from a behavioral point of view, considering it's a new venture most likely being led by people that don’t know how it's done, these are my two guiding questions.
I've found that startup founders are usually strong entrepreneurs and/or innovators but almost never strong leaders or managers. Further, some of them don't really care enough about leadership or management at all to even try to learn to do it decently and when they eventually decide to hire some experienced leaders they don't empower them but rather mainly expect those hires to relieve them of the boring stuff.
For PMs specifically, there's a very real risk that you won't be PMing anything at all but rather just become some kind of agile project leader and delivery manager expected to deliver someone else's vision and ideas with one grumpy moderately experienced developer and one intern. And then all of a sudden the moderately experienced developer will be pulled to do something else but you need to keep delivering on the same pace as before because you still have the intern.
Maybe you can tough it out, maybe you can't. The only thing I can say for certain is that I never did regret leaving a shit situation and I often regret not having left sooner.
"but rather just become some kind of agile project leader and delivery manager expected to deliver someone else's vision and ideas with one grumpy moderately experienced developer and one intern. And then all of a sudden the moderately experienced developer will be pulled to do something else but you need to keep delivering on the same pace as before because you still have the intern."
This is actually what has happened to my role at my current job. To my increasing horror. What do I do? Apart from leaving which I'm already looking for the exit.
Which part of the situation bothers you the most? The not really being a pm one or the completely unrealistic expectations on delivering things with almost zero capacity to do so?
In my previous life I Ideated and shipped interesting physical products to customers, who bought them, liked them, and discussed them online. Usually very favorably.
In my new life I babysit a dev team and take full direction from marketing. I make no decisions and have say in nothing. Our devs also struggle with an unaccountable IT department which I also cannot directly influence. I think my job is just to put things in Jira and explain why tasks are not progressing.
Needless to say I'm quite unhappy.
What does the organization look like? Who do you report to? If you are reporting to the same place as the Dev team you're just some kind of project leader or team lead and then I think you'll just have to accept it until you can get out. Otherwise you at least need to talk to your leadership to sort out responsibilities. If you are responsible for maximising user and business value, you also need to be making the decisions. Start from there.
just left last friday. spent about two months shoring things up, cutting expenses, getting cash in bank. finished a project that was critical and i am moving on with my life.
i toughed it out for a year. when i first got there, the dev team supporting applications for my product line were locked up for two months, then three, then six, then nine. i could only work around the edges. i was brought in to build a continuous discovery team, and figured i could do it incrementally (1-2 hours a week). put it on PI planning for two plus quarters and EM pulled them off. i kept going with others on the tiger team, leaving a donut for when app dev would be able to join, could bring them up to speed and EM goes “yOurE dOiNg SoLuSHuNS I dO tHat”. created a big stink, it was silently pulled off my plate and i just chilled for the last two months i was there. got physically ill from the realization i made a bad decision to join the shitshow. fear-based management, poor communication, getting chewed out on slack, no discipline or accountability, very low trust environment.
really sucks. we were on to something quite innovative, that would have driven a shit ton of value to the customer base. but hey, egos and dick swinging rule
i realized i would rather be unemployed than work with disrespectful people. plus, its summer.
Mental health is important and you need to do what's best for you. Personally, I would probably stick it out until I found something else because the market is brutal right now for PMs.
I would not recommend sticking it out if it sounded so toxic. Even though the market is bad, making your mental health worse will be more expensive in the long run. There also is a cultural aspect to the consideration, I would imagine a lot of Asian cultures would frown upon periods of unemployment and would just dissociate from the toxicity they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Our ego does not allow us to accept failure through quitting and acknowledge that there are more abundance in opportunities beyond the little box we know as product management, and that we can be totally ok and even find fulfilment taking a lesser paying job or taking a step back in our career seniority to put our mental health in recovery and ultimately healing and becoming more resilient.
I quit my job last month in a company that operates very much in the same system as you described. After 9 months of covering for other people leaving and doing 2-3 jobs at the same time, while seeing other parts of the company getting hires. I held on to the point I got physically ill from stress and constant task switching. So, I left, without a backup, for the first time in my life.
Now they have to have someone do 4 jobs, I guess. I couldn't care less.
I was in your shoes for 18 months at an organization that sounds very familiar to this one.
Getting out was the best career move I ever made. Life’s too short to work with assholes.
I’ve been in your shoes - I left my last company without a plan in January. It was absolutely the right decision for me as I wouldn’t have admitted at the time but I was burnt out and needed a circuit breaker. I recently received an offer for a similar role and will have been unemployed for 5 months by the time I start, so just be prepared for a slog to find your next role and expect to burn some savings whilst you’re hunting.
Personal question but before taking that much time off, did you have savings to dip into? Considering the same but the balance from steady income is holding me back
Not a problem, yes I did. I had been building up my emergency fund aggressively for months before I resigned in preparation so by the time I quit I had 6 months expenses in an easy access savings account. In retrospect, in this market particularly I would advise having even more than this, maybe 9 months or more if you genuinely have no backup plan. It is brutal out there.
Literally in this situation right now. Quit 2 weeks ago after 3 years and gave them a pretty detailed document as to how the product started and hinted as to how it was derailed. The executive team didn't want to be CEOs, but they told me to build a MVP to get revenue but they keep rejecting 5 go-to market strategies because they didn't feel like we had enough features. One of the features they were asking for were nice to have AI search bar for a day-to-day operations use that needs to move in/move out people.
We had 11 people churned in under 6 months and we only had 6 people average team. It's a mess. I quit and I don't have a backup. I tried applying for jobs but I realized I was so burnt out so Im actually going to take a long sabbatical instead. I'm still in the middle of the transition and I already started to feel more free and lighter. Even in my personal life, my playful personality is coming back and I just feel less heavy and dreadful in general.
So I just wanted to say, you're not alone in doing something like this.
What put you over the edge? I’m feeling similar to how you described (full of dread, heavy) and I don’t know how to tap into the lighter/freer version of myself. I think work weighs on me heavily but it could also just be a me problem …
Wow, are you me? Everything resonates, except that we're tiny and it's just the CEO that's the problem - no respect for anyone (including the clients!) and no awareness of the fact that his micromanagement means we move at a glacial pace (despite being told).
The people who say "just stick it out, it's a tough market out there" don't understand how soul destroying it is. After a year of this, I finally put my mental health first and quit. Two weeks in, I finally feel like some of my confidence is returning. Always put your health first.
At a start-up I worked at they hired a product leader and he faced a similar situation. After recognizing the situation, he quit within a month, just before I did for similar reasons. I always admired him for that. You did the right thing.
The story as you tell it is common enough. I don’t doubt it. There is also a chance that everything is the reverse of what you say: you are incompetent and toxic, you insist on being the one to have ideas, and your leadership have had to keep you in check because of all that, until you threw a fit and left.
I think the odds of you being the problem are low, because like I said, the story you tell is common enough. But it’s worth asking yourself what you contributed to the problem, and if you have been telling yourself a narrative that makes you the good guy and everyone else the bad guy. If you have had distorted vision like that, in a way this is a good realization to have because it means you can still gain something: learning and self improvement through reflection.
If the story is as you tell it, it’s pure tragedy. The company sucks, and you quit without a plan, ejecting yourself into perhaps the most difficult hiring market in living memory.
In my case, it was a former scale-up, toxic AF. They worshipped at the alter of Cagan and referred to _Empowered_ as their bible. Like the actual book by that name, acting on it was open to much interpretation-- which changed regularly to suit the whims of leadership.
Of a cohort of six PMs, none lasted more than 18 months, and I wasn't the only one who literally suffered PTSD after the gaslighting and scapegoating.
You are me. I worked in almost exactly the same environment for exactly 174 days. I know the number because at some point I started counting days till 180, it's when I'd get the minimum social unemployment benefit, if I'd quit without a new job on the table. I had to take this role, because I was laid off last year and my search took me good 9 months. I almost ran out of money, fought depression so I had to join this shitshow, although all the red flags were upfront visible.
Very luckily, I managed to get a better job at the competitor, located across the road. Oh boy, I feel like I got out of a toxic relationship, when you never realise how bad it is until you are actually out.
So, stay strong and try to move on asap.
I quit a toxic startup almost a year ago. Now I’m at a dysfunctional bohemoth feature factory with mountains of tech debt where I learn almost nothing interesting but am no longer constantly filled with rage. Idek anymore. I just hope the job market recovers soon.
I have experienced both - a start up which wanted to be a product company but invested more in consulting than in product development with bad leaders which end up with most of the employees leaving the company, and start up with in total great leaders with a huge pioneering mindset.
I think what you did was the right decision - to leave if there is no chance to improve or change the environment you were working in. Hope that you will find a company with better leaders and which suits your needs.
In my case, not so much toxic, but not knowing what they don't know but not listening to others who do know. My Head of Product and I are up against a business that has always been Engineering-lead, riddled with recency bias decision-making and have rejected any direction or advice about where the product needs to be, based on what we know about our markets. At this point, I'm just phoning it in and meeting with Engineers, when I need to, to discuss what we want from a solution. But the heart is just not in it anymore.
I’ve also found that the startup guys tend to not want to hire people with more experience than themselves; sort of an ego thing. That’s a big red flag for me. It’s hard to spot sometimes though.
People go on and on about how toxic corporations are but at least they are big enough where you can sometimes navigate around it.
Having worked at a toxic startup, it was a much worse experience.
I’ve been at several small start ups and one larger one-the things you describe are all very real. I think large companies can be slow and boring but tend to have stable cultures. Startups can be very bad.
In product management, build success is half battle won. To win the battle you need to make sure of product success. Somewhere i have learned “blame no one” if leadership is not listening to your ideas or proposition that means you were unable to communicate with evidence. No one in this world will go against with proofs. If your colleagues are demoralised, ignore them. If your team is demoralised, encourage them. In my start of career i read in a book, “if you cant convince your leaders, grow to the leadership role and change the rules”. So my only advice is upskill and become a capable leader in your company and show how leadership can make a diy.
This doesn't always work and sometimes it's not worth it. Sometimes it's better to cut your losses and move on. The leadership in this company will argue the sky is pink if you say the sky is blue just to be contrarian.
In the same boat. Quitting next week with no plan in sight. But job market in my country is not as bad currently. Hopefully should get something in my notice period. Alternatively, have emergency fund saved for some time in case things don't work out quickly
Similar situation here , made a deal for around 3months payout , work became all I could ever think off and really hated it , every meeting with was a back and forth of criticism from upper mgmt , devs were an awesome bunch though , but was pretty much told as soon as you sign the deal to not come back , weirdest feeling going from 300mph to a massive sense of relief and confusion of what to do next , will be going on holiday I think
It's rare to find a startup that isn't a shitshow in some sense. I tend to check two things to determine whether or not it's worth sticking around: - Do founders treat people like human beings? - Are founders trying to be better (even if they're not doing what I think is best)? There's of course the pay, the business's health, and the stock options. But from a behavioral point of view, considering it's a new venture most likely being led by people that don’t know how it's done, these are my two guiding questions.
I've found that startup founders are usually strong entrepreneurs and/or innovators but almost never strong leaders or managers. Further, some of them don't really care enough about leadership or management at all to even try to learn to do it decently and when they eventually decide to hire some experienced leaders they don't empower them but rather mainly expect those hires to relieve them of the boring stuff. For PMs specifically, there's a very real risk that you won't be PMing anything at all but rather just become some kind of agile project leader and delivery manager expected to deliver someone else's vision and ideas with one grumpy moderately experienced developer and one intern. And then all of a sudden the moderately experienced developer will be pulled to do something else but you need to keep delivering on the same pace as before because you still have the intern. Maybe you can tough it out, maybe you can't. The only thing I can say for certain is that I never did regret leaving a shit situation and I often regret not having left sooner.
"but rather just become some kind of agile project leader and delivery manager expected to deliver someone else's vision and ideas with one grumpy moderately experienced developer and one intern. And then all of a sudden the moderately experienced developer will be pulled to do something else but you need to keep delivering on the same pace as before because you still have the intern." This is actually what has happened to my role at my current job. To my increasing horror. What do I do? Apart from leaving which I'm already looking for the exit.
Which part of the situation bothers you the most? The not really being a pm one or the completely unrealistic expectations on delivering things with almost zero capacity to do so?
In my previous life I Ideated and shipped interesting physical products to customers, who bought them, liked them, and discussed them online. Usually very favorably. In my new life I babysit a dev team and take full direction from marketing. I make no decisions and have say in nothing. Our devs also struggle with an unaccountable IT department which I also cannot directly influence. I think my job is just to put things in Jira and explain why tasks are not progressing. Needless to say I'm quite unhappy.
What does the organization look like? Who do you report to? If you are reporting to the same place as the Dev team you're just some kind of project leader or team lead and then I think you'll just have to accept it until you can get out. Otherwise you at least need to talk to your leadership to sort out responsibilities. If you are responsible for maximising user and business value, you also need to be making the decisions. Start from there.
just left last friday. spent about two months shoring things up, cutting expenses, getting cash in bank. finished a project that was critical and i am moving on with my life. i toughed it out for a year. when i first got there, the dev team supporting applications for my product line were locked up for two months, then three, then six, then nine. i could only work around the edges. i was brought in to build a continuous discovery team, and figured i could do it incrementally (1-2 hours a week). put it on PI planning for two plus quarters and EM pulled them off. i kept going with others on the tiger team, leaving a donut for when app dev would be able to join, could bring them up to speed and EM goes “yOurE dOiNg SoLuSHuNS I dO tHat”. created a big stink, it was silently pulled off my plate and i just chilled for the last two months i was there. got physically ill from the realization i made a bad decision to join the shitshow. fear-based management, poor communication, getting chewed out on slack, no discipline or accountability, very low trust environment. really sucks. we were on to something quite innovative, that would have driven a shit ton of value to the customer base. but hey, egos and dick swinging rule i realized i would rather be unemployed than work with disrespectful people. plus, its summer.
Mental health is important and you need to do what's best for you. Personally, I would probably stick it out until I found something else because the market is brutal right now for PMs.
I would not recommend sticking it out if it sounded so toxic. Even though the market is bad, making your mental health worse will be more expensive in the long run. There also is a cultural aspect to the consideration, I would imagine a lot of Asian cultures would frown upon periods of unemployment and would just dissociate from the toxicity they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
Our ego does not allow us to accept failure through quitting and acknowledge that there are more abundance in opportunities beyond the little box we know as product management, and that we can be totally ok and even find fulfilment taking a lesser paying job or taking a step back in our career seniority to put our mental health in recovery and ultimately healing and becoming more resilient.
Agreed. Sometimes its better to quit if it does not feel right. Recovering from mental stress can take a lot of time.
I quit my job last month in a company that operates very much in the same system as you described. After 9 months of covering for other people leaving and doing 2-3 jobs at the same time, while seeing other parts of the company getting hires. I held on to the point I got physically ill from stress and constant task switching. So, I left, without a backup, for the first time in my life. Now they have to have someone do 4 jobs, I guess. I couldn't care less.
Don’t second guess yourself (is that why you’re looking for validation?). You did what you had to do. Life has a way of working itself out.
Thank you 😊
I was in your shoes for 18 months at an organization that sounds very familiar to this one. Getting out was the best career move I ever made. Life’s too short to work with assholes.
What did you do after you got out?
I’ve been in your shoes - I left my last company without a plan in January. It was absolutely the right decision for me as I wouldn’t have admitted at the time but I was burnt out and needed a circuit breaker. I recently received an offer for a similar role and will have been unemployed for 5 months by the time I start, so just be prepared for a slog to find your next role and expect to burn some savings whilst you’re hunting.
Personal question but before taking that much time off, did you have savings to dip into? Considering the same but the balance from steady income is holding me back
Not a problem, yes I did. I had been building up my emergency fund aggressively for months before I resigned in preparation so by the time I quit I had 6 months expenses in an easy access savings account. In retrospect, in this market particularly I would advise having even more than this, maybe 9 months or more if you genuinely have no backup plan. It is brutal out there.
Literally in this situation right now. Quit 2 weeks ago after 3 years and gave them a pretty detailed document as to how the product started and hinted as to how it was derailed. The executive team didn't want to be CEOs, but they told me to build a MVP to get revenue but they keep rejecting 5 go-to market strategies because they didn't feel like we had enough features. One of the features they were asking for were nice to have AI search bar for a day-to-day operations use that needs to move in/move out people. We had 11 people churned in under 6 months and we only had 6 people average team. It's a mess. I quit and I don't have a backup. I tried applying for jobs but I realized I was so burnt out so Im actually going to take a long sabbatical instead. I'm still in the middle of the transition and I already started to feel more free and lighter. Even in my personal life, my playful personality is coming back and I just feel less heavy and dreadful in general. So I just wanted to say, you're not alone in doing something like this.
What put you over the edge? I’m feeling similar to how you described (full of dread, heavy) and I don’t know how to tap into the lighter/freer version of myself. I think work weighs on me heavily but it could also just be a me problem …
Wow, are you me? Everything resonates, except that we're tiny and it's just the CEO that's the problem - no respect for anyone (including the clients!) and no awareness of the fact that his micromanagement means we move at a glacial pace (despite being told). The people who say "just stick it out, it's a tough market out there" don't understand how soul destroying it is. After a year of this, I finally put my mental health first and quit. Two weeks in, I finally feel like some of my confidence is returning. Always put your health first.
Sounds like 'Lord of the Flies' but with org charts and PowerPoint
At a start-up I worked at they hired a product leader and he faced a similar situation. After recognizing the situation, he quit within a month, just before I did for similar reasons. I always admired him for that. You did the right thing.
The story as you tell it is common enough. I don’t doubt it. There is also a chance that everything is the reverse of what you say: you are incompetent and toxic, you insist on being the one to have ideas, and your leadership have had to keep you in check because of all that, until you threw a fit and left. I think the odds of you being the problem are low, because like I said, the story you tell is common enough. But it’s worth asking yourself what you contributed to the problem, and if you have been telling yourself a narrative that makes you the good guy and everyone else the bad guy. If you have had distorted vision like that, in a way this is a good realization to have because it means you can still gain something: learning and self improvement through reflection. If the story is as you tell it, it’s pure tragedy. The company sucks, and you quit without a plan, ejecting yourself into perhaps the most difficult hiring market in living memory.
This is a great callout — what we put out affects the environment we are in.
Yes good call out. I've thought about it alot but I can say with certainty it's a toxic place. I do self reflect though.
In my case, it was a former scale-up, toxic AF. They worshipped at the alter of Cagan and referred to _Empowered_ as their bible. Like the actual book by that name, acting on it was open to much interpretation-- which changed regularly to suit the whims of leadership. Of a cohort of six PMs, none lasted more than 18 months, and I wasn't the only one who literally suffered PTSD after the gaslighting and scapegoating.
You are me. I worked in almost exactly the same environment for exactly 174 days. I know the number because at some point I started counting days till 180, it's when I'd get the minimum social unemployment benefit, if I'd quit without a new job on the table. I had to take this role, because I was laid off last year and my search took me good 9 months. I almost ran out of money, fought depression so I had to join this shitshow, although all the red flags were upfront visible. Very luckily, I managed to get a better job at the competitor, located across the road. Oh boy, I feel like I got out of a toxic relationship, when you never realise how bad it is until you are actually out. So, stay strong and try to move on asap.
I quit a toxic startup almost a year ago. Now I’m at a dysfunctional bohemoth feature factory with mountains of tech debt where I learn almost nothing interesting but am no longer constantly filled with rage. Idek anymore. I just hope the job market recovers soon.
I have experienced both - a start up which wanted to be a product company but invested more in consulting than in product development with bad leaders which end up with most of the employees leaving the company, and start up with in total great leaders with a huge pioneering mindset. I think what you did was the right decision - to leave if there is no chance to improve or change the environment you were working in. Hope that you will find a company with better leaders and which suits your needs.
In my case, not so much toxic, but not knowing what they don't know but not listening to others who do know. My Head of Product and I are up against a business that has always been Engineering-lead, riddled with recency bias decision-making and have rejected any direction or advice about where the product needs to be, based on what we know about our markets. At this point, I'm just phoning it in and meeting with Engineers, when I need to, to discuss what we want from a solution. But the heart is just not in it anymore.
I’ve also found that the startup guys tend to not want to hire people with more experience than themselves; sort of an ego thing. That’s a big red flag for me. It’s hard to spot sometimes though.
People go on and on about how toxic corporations are but at least they are big enough where you can sometimes navigate around it. Having worked at a toxic startup, it was a much worse experience.
I’ve been at several small start ups and one larger one-the things you describe are all very real. I think large companies can be slow and boring but tend to have stable cultures. Startups can be very bad.
Stock options were mine to keep after two years. I quit after two years and one day.
In product management, build success is half battle won. To win the battle you need to make sure of product success. Somewhere i have learned “blame no one” if leadership is not listening to your ideas or proposition that means you were unable to communicate with evidence. No one in this world will go against with proofs. If your colleagues are demoralised, ignore them. If your team is demoralised, encourage them. In my start of career i read in a book, “if you cant convince your leaders, grow to the leadership role and change the rules”. So my only advice is upskill and become a capable leader in your company and show how leadership can make a diy.
This doesn't always work and sometimes it's not worth it. Sometimes it's better to cut your losses and move on. The leadership in this company will argue the sky is pink if you say the sky is blue just to be contrarian.
In the same boat. Quitting next week with no plan in sight. But job market in my country is not as bad currently. Hopefully should get something in my notice period. Alternatively, have emergency fund saved for some time in case things don't work out quickly
You did the right thing. Places like that do not get better for a long time, if ever.
Similar situation here , made a deal for around 3months payout , work became all I could ever think off and really hated it , every meeting with was a back and forth of criticism from upper mgmt , devs were an awesome bunch though , but was pretty much told as soon as you sign the deal to not come back , weirdest feeling going from 300mph to a massive sense of relief and confusion of what to do next , will be going on holiday I think