This SIP is an abridged version of Startup Bootcamp and is for students who want to develop the skills they need to understand their customer pain points, jobs to be done and a cursory exploration of the core elements of getting a startup off the ground.
Julia B. Austin
Senior Lecturer of Business Administration
Senior Lecturer of Business Administration
Julia Austin is a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School’s Rock Center for Entrepreneurship where she currently teaches Startup Operations. Julia is also a certified Executive Coach, board member, startup advisor and angel investor as well as the founder of Good For Her, a non-profit community for women founders that fosters their growth as they navigate their entrepreneurial journeys.
Prior to her current endeavors, Julia was the CTO at DigitalOcean, VP of Innovation for VMware, Inc., the VP of Engineering at Akamai Technologies and has held technical management and consulting positions at several other startups and mature companies. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Massachusetts and a Master of Science in Management Information Systems from Boston University.
Entrepreneurial Management
Startup Operations is designed to provide hands-on guidance through the early stages of building your business. Students will test assumptions and hypotheses to evolve their product, build their strategic and operating roadmaps, create organizational plans and develop skills necessary to manage the many complexities of operating a startup. Sessions will feature skill-building exercises led by the instructor and outside experts, weekly peer-to-peer critiques on work-in-progress and some case discussions with guest protagonists.
The Startup Bootcamp is an immersion program for first-year HBS MBA candidates that uses a learning-by-doing approach to build skills required as an early stage entrepreneur.
Julia previously taught Product Management 101 & 102 (PM 101/102). This is a two-semester project-based course that uses a learning-by-doing approach to build basic product management skills. Students evaluate user needs and specify functional requirements for a new web or mobile application. Students attend weekly sessions featuring skill-building exercises led by outside experts and peer-to-peer feedback on project work-in-progress. At the completion of PM102, most students have launched a minimum viable product and many continue their venture post-HBS.
Julia Austin is a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School’s Rock Center for Entrepreneurship where she currently teaches Startup Operations. Julia is also a certified Executive Coach, board member, startup advisor and angel investor as well as the founder of Good For Her, a non-profit community for women founders that fosters their growth as they navigate their entrepreneurial journeys.
Prior to her current endeavors, Julia was the CTO at DigitalOcean, VP of Innovation for VMware, Inc., the VP of Engineering at Akamai Technologies and has held technical management and consulting positions at several other startups and mature companies. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Massachusetts and a Master of Science in Management Information Systems from Boston University.
- Featured Work
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For many CEOs, particularly those running startups, hiring the right people is the single biggest determinant of whether a new business survives. And so it makes sense that the chief executive should be heavily involved in selecting key hires throughout the organization.
But when it comes to hiring technical help, the decision-making can be a little more daunting for CEOs, especially if they are not technicaly inclined themselves. Luckily, there are many books and articles about building engineering teams. The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks, should be on every software engineer and tech startup leader’s reading list. CEOs might also find it helpful to check out the many blog posts explaining why, for example, full stack engineers are unicorns.
To get basic engineering work done as a company grows, it’s fine to look for a generalist or augmenting your technical team with an outsourced development shop. But being strategic about hiring could be the difference between a great product already earning its way in the market versus one that goes virtually unnoticed.
Here are six tips based on personal experience for how to be more strategic about technical hiring.
I've experienced first-hand the excitement and pain that come as companies with a few founders scale to hundreds or thousands of employees. At somewhere around 75 to 100 employees, running a business becomes more complicated, demanding more of leadership, teams, and individuals. It's important to recognize and try to stay ahead of these changes brought by scale.
Here is advice for the CEO/founders of early-stage companies, but it also applies to leaders of any scaling organization, even inside a large corporate entity.
An entrepreneur recently said to me “When it gets really hard, I feel like I’m doing it wrong.” She went on to say that sometimes she’s not sure how her investors could be helpful — even if it’s just validating what’s hard vs. advising on how to work through certain challenges. I’ve heard other entrepreneurs say they’d like to get help from their investors but worry that purely by asking for help it will signal a weakness. Conversely, I’ve heard investors say they wish the leaders of their portfolio companies would be more transparent about challenges they are facing and ask for help. As one investor said to me recently, “They already sold me on the business and have our money. It’s now our firm’s job to help them succeed.”What are the tradeoffs between going to a startup versus joining a mature company? Having done both, several times, I get this question all the time. There are many things to consider and lots of “it depends” when it comes to where you are in your career, where you live, and many other factors. Here’s my perspective on the tradeoffs.No matter how much we hate going to meetings, there’s a generally accepted best practice that teams should meet with their managers on a regular cadence. More often than not, unfortunately, I hear leaders and their staffs dreading these get-togethers. Shouldn't these meetings be looked forward to? That we felt they were time well spent with our colleagues and added value to our roles in some meaningful way?
Because I teach a course on product management at Harvard Business School, I am routinely asked “What is the role of a product manager?” The role of product manager (PM) is often referred to as the “CEO of the product.” I disagree because, as Martin Eriksson points out, “Product managers simply don’t have any direct authority over most of the things needed to make their products successful — from user and data research through design and development to marketing, sales, and support.” PMs are not the CEO of product, and their roles vary widely depending on a number of factors. So, what should you consider if you’re thinking of pursuing a PM role?There comes a time in every scaling tech start-up’s life when an engineering team begins to show signs of needing help. The symptoms can include lost velocity in releasing new products/features, attrition or morale issues, fragile code or lack of innovation. I frequently hear CEOs and founders say “we need a new CTO” or “should we hire a VP of Engineering?”. But what does that really mean? A title is one thing, but the skills necessary to cure the symptoms is a whole other challenge.Whether you’re a CEO or a line manager, your team is just as important as a group as its members are as individuals. Today’s tech companies offer many perks to attract and retain the best employees. We offer competitive salaries, training and the promise of success – professionally and financially. But how we treat them as individuals can determine the way their DNA will impact the fabric of your organization. What are you doing, as their manager, to make sure they are satisfied and making the best contribution to your organization?One of the most popular conversations I have with entrepreneurs I work with is how to improve their recruiting and hiring strategy. I love when they dive into this topic early on because it’s one of the hardest parts of running any company, no matter how small or big, and super easy to screw up. It’s also extra hard these days for tech companies when talent is sparse and you’re trying to create a culture of diversity. The blog post below is definitely not comprehensive and also not a replacement for a company-specific conversation tailored to your business, products and team, but in most cases these tips should be useful.Tech startups are often associated with Silicon Valley and men. To contrast that perception, we went on a quest to find some of the women interning at Boston startups this summer; to talk to some of the people hiring them; and explore how these companies are creating a positive environment for women interested in tech.
Innovation is really another word for creativity. So when a company launches an innovation program, or even goes so far as to appoint or hire someone to lead their innovation efforts, what they’re attempting to say is, “We are a creative organization that wants to foster and support creative stuff.” But the big question is, are they set up to succeed in making that statement a reality?
I’ve worked at startup companies and I’ve run development teams inside large public companies. In both environments, executives spend far more time forecasting how successful they’ll be than planning what they will do if something breaks down.
- Journal Articles
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- Austin, Julia. "What It Takes to Become a Great Product Manager." Harvard Business Review (website) (December 13, 2017). View Details
- Cases and Teaching Materials
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- Austin, Julia, Sarah Mehta, and Tom Quinn. "Wymsee." Harvard Business School Case 822-002, August 2021. View Details
- Ghosh, Shikhar, Julia Austin, and Christopher Payton. "Help Scout." Harvard Business School Case 817-049, September 2016. (Revised May 2017.) View Details
- Teaching
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This SIP is an abridged version of Startup Bootcamp and is for students who want to develop the skills they need to understand their customer pain points, jobs to be done and a cursory exploration of the core elements of getting a startup off the ground.Startup Operations is designed to provide hands-on guidance through the early stages of building your business. Students will test assumptions and hypotheses to evolve their product, build their strategic and operating roadmaps, create organizational plans and develop skills necessary to manage the many complexities of operating a startup. Sessions will feature skill-building exercises led by the instructor and outside experts, weekly peer-to-peer critiques on work-in-progress and some case discussions with guest protagonists.The Startup Bootcamp is an immersion program for first-year HBS MBA candidates that uses a learning-by-doing approach to build skills required as an early stage entrepreneur.Julia previously taught Product Management 101 & 102 (PM 101/102). This is a two-semester project-based course that uses a learning-by-doing approach to build basic product management skills. Students evaluate user needs and specify functional requirements for a new web or mobile application. Students attend weekly sessions featuring skill-building exercises led by outside experts and peer-to-peer feedback on project work-in-progress. At the completion of PM102, most students have launched a minimum viable product and many continue their venture post-HBS.
- Additional Information
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