I posted this answer today on Quora, in response to the question “Are Product Manager Future Entrepreneurs?”
As a former Product Manager, recently turned Entrepreneur, I’ll say that several skills necessary to be successful in Product overlap, but certainly not all.
Skills in Common:
- Cross-company collaboration – PMs must be able to work across business functional areas, including marketing, service, and engineering, in order to get great products built. This flexibility and breadth of exposure is helpful as an entrepreneur
- Focus on users – PMs tend to be highly customer-centric – thinking about the best user experience that a product or service can deliver. This is even more important for an entrepreneur, who must even more actively seek out customer opinions to assess the merits of a specific product idea
- Effort and priority assessment – PMs are required to constantly manage a backlog of priorities and keep tabs on the productivity of a finite number of resources. These same skills are necessary to maniacally manage scope for startup projects where resources (namely your own time and that of your co-founders) is extremely limited
- Market evaluation – PMs often find themselves in the role of assessing the viability of a particular market or product, and developing a business case. This is obviously similar and even more exaggerated for an entrepreneur.
New Skills I’ve Found Necessary as an Entrepreneur
- Sales – As a PM, I did not find myself having to sell, and certainly not to external audiences. As an entrepreneur, I have had to learn how to sell others on my vision, on how our progress actually represents tremendous momentum, and how our barely-existent product is a solution for their needs.
- Networking – As a PM, only rarely did I have to develop relationships outside of my business – much more important were my internal connections and clout. As an entrepreneur, I am constantly looking to develop new relationships and connections with potential employees, advisors, and investors.
- “Growth hacking” – As a PM, I certainly had to worry about user adoption, but mostly only the abstract – there was a marketing team that was responsible for delivering new users to “knock on the front door.” As an entrepreneur, I have had to get very creative in finding ways to deliver users to my product with little or no budget to spend.
I’m answering this in the context of an online product manager transitioning to the role of the founder of an online-product-centric startup – other scenarios are obviously possible.
Looking forward to hearing the opinions of others.
