Build, Sell, Understand

A framework for navigating your startup career

In my first startup job, I was trying to figure out whether I should work in product or marketing.

The CEO asked me a question which has rattled around in my head ever since: do you want to build, or do you want to sell?

My experience since then has added some nuance to that framework. Some jobs are a mix of more than one - for example the role I landed on after that conversation was in growth, which is a mix of building and selling.

And today I find myself in a job which is neither of those two: I lead the Strategy & Analytics teams at Faire, whose primary job is to understand.

Add this up, and you get a simple framework that can be clarifying for anyone trying to figure out what path to go down. There are only three fundamental jobs at any company:

1. Building - creating the product or the company itself

2. Selling - getting more customers to use the product

3. Understanding - learning more about what to build or sell

They form three interlocking circles, and every function can be mapped somewhere within them:

Some functions are closely aligned to one job. Most of engineering and operations is about building the product or the company. Most of marketing and sales is about driving growth. And most of analytics and research is about better understanding what to do.

Some functions are hybrids. Growth emerged as a way to combine the jobs of building and selling. Designers are tasked with not just designing the product but deeply understanding the customer. PMMs play a similar role between selling and understanding. The job of founders and general managers is often to do all three.

If you’re currently thinking about what path to take, I’d offer three meditations on this framework:

Ask yourself where you derive joy (and what you can put up with).

I began my startup journey in growth, but found myself constantly pulled toward roles in analysis, strategy, and investing. I realized it is because I love the “understand” part of the job - the process of going from hypothesis to conclusion. I find joy in ideas, learning, the hunt for the right answer. And I can put up with the most common criticism of this kind of role, which is that is one step removed from the execution. You often have to be OK with someone else acting on your ideas.

Some people like building beautiful products or designing efficient operations. Builders find joy in the act of creation - bringing something new or better into the world. But these roles usually come with a heavy logistics burden. There is just a lot of project management and complicated coordination between many stakeholders. When people first become PMs they often love the strategic side of the role but are surprised by how much blocking and tackling there is. To be great, you have to at a minimum put up with this, and better yet enjoy it.

Other people like figuring out how to craft the perfect message or close the customer. Sellers find joy in the deal, in winning hearts and minds, in making the numbers go up. But it often means you play a role that is downstream from the people building the product. You have to be comfortable evangelizing someone else’s vision.

There are other pros and cons to these kinds of roles, of course. The point is to reflect on what those are, and make sure you love the upsides and can tolerate the downside.

The job of selling comes for most of us eventually.

Recruiting, managing, and working cross-functionally are all mostly about selling. You’re trying to convince people to take a job, stay in a job, or do something they might not otherwise.

That means that if you stay in almost any function long enough, you’re probably going to end up doing a lot of selling.

In fact, one of the most common sources of mid-career frustration is when builders or understanders realize that they are being asked to get into sales. “Why am I in so many meetings? Why do I spend so much time interviewing?”

As a result, everyone needs to either (1) embrace the job of selling and get good at it or (2) intentionally steer themselves toward a role that doesn’t require much of it.

The main way to do #2 is to pursue a senior IC track, such as becoming a staff engineer or designer. Many functions don’t have an equivalent role today, but as AI tools magnify the output of the best ICs, we’ll see “staff” functions emerge in many other fields like marketing and operations as well.

Consider where the puck is going.

At most tech companies today, the split of building, selling, and understanding is probably about 50%, 30%, 20%. The engineering team is usually the largest, and the sales and marketing team is the second largest.

But AI is improving the efficiency of building and selling at a much faster rate than it is impacting the “understand” part of the job. We’re already seeing PM to engineering ratios fall. AI tools are beginning to do a lot of front-line CX and marketing work, and it will move up the stack from there.

What it hasn’t done a good job replacing yet is the generation of novel insights or answers to hard problems. The shift over time will be toward greater and greater share of time spent on the understand task. That means that whatever role you are in, it’s likely to become a bigger part of your job, and it is worth investing in.