In this part Elliot and I discuss the role of founders as product managers.
Because the skills of Product Managers are not well understood, it doesn’t exist as a job role in the start of a company. So the founders take on the role – at the same time founders are often great, charismatic sales people – here are two common results:
1. The founder starts out a meeting with the plan to get feedback about an idea or product. Somewhere they start to flip from questions to statements and start telling the interviewee how awesome this product will be/is. Naturally the interviewee doesn’t want to argue too much and so the founder walks away with a rock-solid validation 🙂
2. One of the founding teams goes out to a meeting and returns with a new feature never previously discussed or even a major pivot! Of course this may be valid, but a data-point of 1 needs some extra research.
Here Elliot proposes some ways to get space between your skill to sell (your ability to transmit a Steve-Jobs-Like-Reality-Distortion-Field) and being receptive enough to not get deluded about your product vision.
In Part 3 we’ll look at unconscious biases that may underlie common Product Market Fit misses. Also how this maps into Product Roadmap prioritization.
