Ex-Entrepreneurs make the best Product Leaders!

I recently met an entrepreneur, who after shutting his startup, was considering joining a gaming company to “learn product management”… I was appalled because if anyone had asked me to recommend a strong product leader, his name would have topped my list. I strongly believe that being a product manager is not something you learn, it’s simply who you become as you try to scale and sell your product — it’s the art that most founders are already incredibly skilled at! An entrepreneur’s mind is highly trained to excel at the three E’s of Product Management:

Evaluate: Evaluate deeply what your customer needs and what your business needs. Evaluate the competitive landscape and understand what it takes to differentiate. Use this deep understanding to come up with a hypothesis for what will work…

Experiment: Put out small experiments to test your hypothesis. Keep tweaking your experiments to get to the right answer and to perfect your product…

Explain: Explain your hypothesis and what you have learned to key stakeholders within the firm. Align them so you can achieve the best possible outcome…

Pretty much every strong entrepreneur I know spends all his time doing the above three. They are constantly talking to customers, constantly testing their beliefs/hypothesis and constantly rallying their team and their investors behind their ideas… I can’t imagine a better training ground..!