4 Life Lessons from Entrepreneurship Journey of a
Product Manager
Entrepreneurship is a path, a lifestyle and ultimately a journey. You begin, face challenges and, eventually through struggle and hard work, you succeed. Whether you’re about to begin your path, or are perhaps floundering in the dark and stormy woods along the way. Knowing the four stages of Manjunath Talwar’s(an Adaptive Alumni, ex-Yahoo, IIMK) journey just might help you identify where you are on the entrepreneur’s path and help you reach your intended goal.
Departure from the standard path to follow your passion: Entrepreneurship requires departure from the comforts and security of “normal” life. Sometimes, your departure from the standard path is solely your own choice to follow the vision you just have to follow. That’s what Manjunath did when he quit Yahoo, where he was managing the global consumer products like yahoo movies, TV etc and started his own venture myNotiecPeriod.com along with his partner Abhijit Khasnis.
Work hard and play smarter:
Entrepreneurship is difficult and one must put in work long hours, more than many other people do. As an entrepreneur, this is where you can expect frustration and the agony of lots of setbacks, even failures; however, if you have a sound understanding of the end to end business, the success is easy and achievable. Manjunath had enough visibility of product management and also had an urge of giving the industry his own creation so thought of putting his hands into an entrepreneurship role and decided to astonish the industry by giving something unique.
Learn to achieve your goals:
Though Manjunath had a good experience of product management but what was missing was a holistic perspective until he joined the Adaptive workshop in 2012 and decided to enhance his learning. The Adaptive workshop which he took drastically changed his mindset in terms how in different ways he can put together the ideas in a framework, build it, design it and execute it. It also helped him to prepare the right kind of matrix, the importance of data collected during market research, insights of data and consumer behaviour and its significance in creating the right kind of product which is required in the market as well as right execution of a business plan. This workshop also helped him clearing his doubts and basically brought lots of framework which when implemented and can help creating great products.
Finding your own secret ingredient and extract it:
Manjunath launched a portal mynoticeperiod.com keeping in mind those jobseekers who are serving their notice period. When asked how he got this idea of starting mynoticeperiod.com, here is what he had to say; “It’s not all about you and your idea. I thought of taking time to serve and help others with this venture. It is difficult to get people on board when you want to hire a resource as early as possible; you don’t find people quickly as they have to serve a NP for three to four months and is really a long process to get people on board. So I thought of bringing down the inefficiency of hiring and help companies be more efficient, the project I started was in a beta mode for three months and eventually I figured out that it is taking off well and subsequently decided to make it full time. These ideas are basic and without any super innovative technology. They fulfil a basic need as success can come from simple ideas with a twist”. Manjunath concluded by advising the product managers who wish to start their journey as an entrepreneur, “Ecosystem is really strong in India and Bangalore in particular which makes life of the entrepreneurs really easy as funding is readily available. There are lots of VCs who are interested in supporting the start ups and the journey from a product manager to an entrepreneur though could be challenging but not that difficult.” Knowing the four stages of Manunath’s journey just might help others identify where they are on the entrepreneur’s path and help them reach their intended goal. Remember, it’s not just the destination, it’s the journey.
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