I recently answered this question on Quora: If I want to eventually start my own company, will product management experience help?

Yes!

Let me share a personal experience. Very early in my career, I was initially a marketing assistant at a startup application hosting company. In less than a year, I transitioned to developing applications for the company and for our clients. After that, I was a systems administrator while continuing to develop and support our applications.

The company grew quickly and one of my database applications blossomed in popularity and generated some press attention for the company. The company had grown from four people when I’d started to about 15 by this time.

Then, I was promoted to Product Manager of all of the company’s internet applications, which consisted of a variety of data products, including the one I had designed.

This was the first product management position in the company and my job was to manage the features, functionality and future direction of all of our products.

This involved coordinating with customers to learn what they wanted from an existing or new application, coordinate with app developers to specify and develop the application, and then work with marketing to brand and promote the products, identify buyers and deliver the applications.

As the sole product manager in a rapidly growing company, I was young but I was also a relatively senior employee. I was often called in to provide advanced support for major clients using our products and – most importantly – I was asked to help prepare proposals for larger customer projects built around our applications and network.

Finally, I found an opportunity to start my own company with a group of investors in London and was able to put the skills I had learned as a product manager to immediate good use by designing and building database applications around customer needs. Ultimately, I built a boutique high-security data management company in London that was able to attract a variety of prominent customers including Amnesty International, Kangol Clothing, Hong Kong Shipping and members of parliament.

Being a product manager was a great transition and stepping stone from application and database developer to startup founder because it forced me to quickly develop several of the most crucial skills needed for building a new company:

1. Identifying a customer need.
2. Documenting the customer need through discussions and interviews.
3. Determining that meeting a customer need is concrete, achievable and profitable.
4. Specifying the product design in detail to a development team.
5. Providing ongoing review and feedback on the product design, including detailed feature review, testing and quality control.
6. Managing products through multiple iterations and a full product lifecycle from conception, development, release, support, maintenance, obsolesce, replacement and end-of-life.
7. Dealing with real-world customer support dilemmas, revenue, cost and profitability difficulties and problem-solving.
8. Balancing development effort and investment across a portfolio of ideas, requests and products competing for limited time and resources.
9. Coordinating and managing product development release schedules, project managers, developers, executive demands, budget demands and customer expectations.
10. Coordinating promotion and marketing ideas around the product portfolio and dealing with marketing and sales staff, managing relationships
11. …And, finally, fulfilling the company’s brand promise to customers and exceeding their expectations, which is the most satisfying part of the product management job.

There are several areas where you will not gain significant experience as a product manager, so be sure to seek these other experiences through other positions, classes, books and side-hustles:

1. Direct, hands-on technical work. While you may gain some product design and even systems architecture experience as a product manager, you won’t typically have time to do hands-on technical work. It is useful experience and knowledge for a startup founder – in any industry – so be sure to gain this experience elsewhere.
2. Financial management. While I had some insight into product performance and I did need to prepare some budgets and allocate resources, big-picture company financials were not part of this particular job. Be sure to read up on this and get as much financial management experience as you can in other ways.
3. Direct sales and marketing work. As a product manager, I needed to keep the product on track, but I didn’t have the time or bandwidth to do a lot of the sales work or to implement the marketing plan. I was fortunate to work with very talented sales and marketing staff from whom I learned a great deal, and did some direct sales, proposal writing, sales engineering and bidding work on larger projects. You may or may not get that experience as a product manager, so be sure to seek out that experience elsewhere. Your side-hustle is the perfect method.
4. Also, fundraising: As a product manager you are very unlikely to gain a lot of experience with fundraising, yet it can be a crucial area of knowledge and skill for a startup founder. You can read a lot of good books on this, but you should also seek out experienced mentors and advisors when you get ready to launch your startup. They can help you avoid the biggest fundraising pitfalls.

Product management roles are excellent stepping stone positions for startup founders. Good luck with the new position!

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