What I wish was different
Working at a startup, everyone’s very forward looking and I’ve read about startup culture but didn’t expect the reality to fit the stories to the T. One thing I wished was more present was a sense of mentorship. I don’t have a traditional design background, and product management isn’t exactly something you learn at school, so I had hoped to receive more guidance from my coworkers. Not to say I don’t-there’s a huge learning curve already at Fountain, practicing both quick, aggressive implementation in a heuristic environment. I’ve gained so much in the past three weeks, but because everyone is so busy, I’ve become an integral part of the team as well and I feel like there was a lack of oversight. This lends to things like company bureaucracies, systematic approaches, even whole design processes being lost, in comparison to bigger companies where a lot of these would be found.