Virtuous feedback: Why being a PM made me a better founder (and being a founder made me a better PM)
A few years back, there was a brief spell where it was in-vogue to refer to product managers as “mini-CEOs.”
While I’m generally glad that era has passed, as someone who has been both a product manager and a founder I do think there was a kernel of truth to that analogy: While product managers shouldn’t consider themselves mini-CEOs, being a product manager and being a founder do require a similar approach to looking at and addressing problems.
As someone who has started my own company and served as a product manager in much larger organizations, something I often consider is the entangled relationship between founding and managing products: What’s common across both, and what are the important distinctions that we can learn from?
These are questions I ask myself subconsciously after doing both for years, and as I’ve led teams over the years, I keep coming back to these three takeaways:
- Product managers and founders need to be accountable
At its best, being a product manager is like being a founder on steroids. Why? Because you get to do everything yourself. In the right organization, this allows you to move fast and continue to accelerate because you’re closer to the ground truth.
That obviously changes when you’re a founder. Here, you’re accountable to the business as a whole, but your job is as much about communication and telling stories as it is about product. Suddenly, you’re not just the product person, but you’re the finance person and the marketing person as well.
There are some downsides to storytelling, however. As a founder, I learned that, while storytelling is a powerful way to get your team on board, if you’re too good at it, you risk deceiving yourself and everyone around you. With my company, I got good at what I wanted to hear rather than what I needed to know to take the right next steps for my business (even and especially when those required difficult choices).
That story-telling experience helped shape my approach to accountability as a product leader, too. Now, when I tell stories, I’m always thinking about how what I’m building is going to shape and drive the broader business. After years as a founder, I literally can’t help thinking that way, and so I’ve found my story-telling muscle that I built as a founder has served me well in product, and enabled me to be clear with my leaders about what I’m delivering and why on a consistent basis.
2. Product managers and founders need to be fearless (but not too fearless)
Starting a new product can give you that feeling like you’re in an elevator that’s rapidly flying 30 floors into the air. Founding is even scarier because, here, your reputation is on the line.
I compare it to watching a train bearing down on you while you’re tied to the tracks or listening to the sound of wind through the propellor blades after the engine on your plane quits 500 miles from nowhere.
The difference is one of degree: as a product person, you’re typically surrounded by people (including your superiors) that will let you know if your ideas are crazy. That gives you trepidation, sure, but there is a sense in product that someone has checked your work and you’re probably not crazy.
That’s not always true when you’re a founder, where, even if you do have a team of capable people, your company culture may dissuade people from challenging your ideas.
Because of this, founders need to be the most adult people in the room. I’ve written about how my last company, Kaffelogue, ended up failing. I want to zero in from the macro-level (why the company failed) to the micro (why my first product failed), because I think it shows the real downsides to being too “fearless.”
Before I launched the S Filter for Aeropress (which was a success), I launched a forgotten stainless steel cleaner called the Coffee Catcher. It was a stainless steel filter/cleaner for French Press coffee makers, and it was dead on arrival.
Looking back, the problem was that, at the time, no one around me was willing to tell me the hard truth that I was solving a problem no one cared that much about (“Why not dump the grounds in the trash?”), and once I got started solving that problem, I tunnel-visioned and I didn’t want to admit to myself that I was making a mistake.
In other words, I was betrayed by the very fearlessness I needed to get started as a founder. Before machining stainless steel blanks and spending hours staring at CAD drawings on screen, I should have learned to ask questions about whether I was solving the right problem. I jumped fearlessly into solving the problem (yay!) but I didn’t ask if there was a better one to solve. That’s a lesson I can apply every day in the product space, too.
I often refer to Kaffeologie as my “MBA of the streets,” because starting the company was a masterclass in learning and failure acceleration, and lessons like “pick the right problem” just stick with you after a stinging failure like the Coffee Catcher. I learned lots of ways to screw things up (and a few really great ways to succeed) in a relatively short amount of time for less money than most people spend on an MBA (I roughly broke even on the company, all told).
3. Product managers and founders need to have a good sense of timing
If timing is important for product development, it’s indispensable for founders, who need to see the world in terms of trends, movements, and moments.
At Kaffeologie, the big trend I got right was the dawn of fourth-wave coffee in the early 2010s. People were spending more on home coffee gear than they ever had before, creating a sizable pool for us to play in. While that pool turned out to be too shallow to really make a splash, it was still 10X deeper at the time than it was just a few years before. In that sense, I got the timing right.
But on a larger scale, I learned ultimately that timing is not enough by itself, and the nuances and trade-offs generated by asking myself questions such as, “Is this the right trend?” are those that are still relevant to me in the product space every day.
Every PM wants to launch a big new product with a big splash. Doing that right takes timing, and it takes knowing which trend to time. For me, founding a company was a really fast way to learn the difference between timing trends and picking trends at the right time. Get the latter right, and you have a company that scales. Do the former (like I did my first time around as a founder) and you have…a great learning experience.
Summing it all up
How do I put these pieces together? Ultimately, founding a company was a big sandbox where I could work and fail on a full business canvas. I did my best to serve customers, succeeded in spots, and had a good ten-year run.
Looking across at other product leaders who are thriving in their roles, I see a common trait is not necessarily founding a business, but the ability to intentionally learn from a wide-ranging prior experience.
For me, that’s founding a business and taking lessons like these into my product workshop daily. For some product colleagues of mine, it’s their prior experience writing code that shapes how they deliver the product. Either way, it’s the learning that counts, and I think it’s my personal pace of learning that shapes my career arc over time.
TL;DR: Always Be Learning.
