Catching and Surfing a Wave
Understand the challenges of entering and progressing on the management track, and learn how startups provide dynamic environments with growth potential, diverse roles, and meaningful influence to build your management career. Assess risks and benefits including startup culture, compensation, and networking strategies to position yourself for management roles in early-stage companies.
We'll cover the following...
We'll cover the following...
Difficulties with management track
The management track presents two difficulties with entry and progression:
- Landing an initial management position: Since very few people have formal training in management (why else would this course exist?), getting the chance to be a manager in the first place can be challenging. When applying to open roles at companies, those with previous management experience often have the upper hand over those with none.
- Always having a route for upward growth: A manager’s progression can be bounded more tightly by the size and structure of an organization. After all, managing more people and teams involves traveling upward in the organization chart. What if there’s nowhere to go?
Favorable properties of startups
Startups can offer an environment that can make these situations a little easier. As we mentioned previously, startups that do well have some favorable properties:
- They grow and change rapidly. Investment or fast organic growth can double or triple the size of the engineering team in a short span of time. This means that a handful of people working in a flat hierarchy may now require more structure in their organization chart, including the introduction of more line management. This creates roles you can step into, especially if you’re already working there. Additionally, continued success can expand the department further, and you’re well placed to continue the journey upward.
- They have less money to spend. Given that startups are unlikely to be poaching highly paid managers at