Many have already written that being a product founder is a difficult job. It requires a broad understanding of many concepts which are necessary to combine to deliver digital products people value.
Skills are required in the following disciplines (and more):
- UX
- Marketing
- Technical
- People skills
- Analytical
- Creative
- Etc etc..
The real skill lies in being able to know just enough about each area to understand how to get each working in unison to constitute a valuable experience of using your digital product or service.
It’s what Mary Popendeck calls perceived integrity and conceptual integrity. Put simply – achieving a balance between different aspects to deliver a total product experience that delights users.
But through my own startup experiences and seeing those of clients, I’ve grown to understand that the biggest challenge is not related to skills.
I see wasting time is the biggest challenge. In lean, one of the key principles is the elimination of waste. Many product founders and leaders waste enormous amounts of time and energy doing some or all of the following:
- Trying to develop a business [rather than testing if there is a viable product which could sustain a future business
- Building products to try and sell to people who don’t need or want them [rather than prototyping products to learn which product to build and sell successfully]
- Trying to develop multiple products at once [rather than focusing on one product]
- Trying to syndicate / whitelabel immature products [rather than achieving product market fit and scaling first]
- Persevering with products that have not achieved product market fit [rather than adapting, pivoting or stopping]
- Taking on too many other life commitments including studying
- Trying to do everything yourself because no one can do as well as you [rather than delegating repeatable processes] (as one client said “I thought one day, get over yourself.”)
- Not believing that a vision can be achieved aka losing belief
- Believing that all products can be developed in months [when some may take years to even achieve basic product market fit
Many of us yoyo between thinking we are Jeff Bezos and having imposter syndrome. Many of us are also so driven that when we drive towards the wrong thing we go far and deep. This wastes enormous amounts of our most precious resource, time.
So ask yourself the question, is wasting time preventing the success of your product?