Enterprise (big 4 bank in their financial tech team): 6+ months to release minor features. TONS of business case work, clear ROI outlined with many many many assumptions, P&L impacts to other complementary products to ensure no/minimal cannibalization, revenue by sales segment, engineering hours estimation (yes before even ticketing, designing, or gathering requirements, which was basically useless but execs wanted to see this), etc. you get the point. By the time the feature launched it was no longer impactful, customers found their own workaround or left to another more nimble fintech and kept the DDAs as the primary product at the bank.

Series B startup: minimal red tape, business cases still track ROI but are centered around customer experience and improving it with as few resources as possible. Delivery cycles can be as small as a sprint, up to something like 6 sprints. Most massive projects get broken up to be more agile and only target the P0 work and refine the later pieces so that we’re not wasting resources.

My take: you ship more and learn more at an emerging company. Large companies are for coasting in my experience. Also all of the ICs were in like their 40s and 50s and had 0 promotion potential because the management team was super legacy and weren’t planning on leaving and nobody was fired for missing deadlines.

Thank you, @Prodanon, for you comments.

Very interesting perspective. How did you make the most of your time at a startup?