Translating Engineering wisdom to Entrepreneurship

Some of us make great engineers or engineering leaders. Yet, that doesn’t necessarily translate into conventional entrepreneurial success. This note reflects on the critical tasks for the entrepreneurs in these early stages, ie Product / Market discovery/validation, that the Engineering leaders often get wrong.

Engineering leadership to Entrepreneurship

I have found significant challenges & learnings for myself in steps (0–3). Steps (4–5) are relatively more straightforward if the earlier stages are done right.

The above must be contextualized within the entrepreneur’s specific goals — eg to make an impact or work in a particular sector to improve it. These decisions must be explicit and may override the industry or market selection.

Summarising the challenges

Summarising the challenges that come in the early stage product fit:

1. Entrepreneur’s echo chamber:

• Entrepreneurs wrongly believe that inspiration >> process
• Fear of the uncomfortable or awkward discussion of being proved wrong
• Entrepreneurial fear of exposing weakness in the initial conjectures on which they hired, raised money

2. Lack of process or team:

• Market sizing or sentiment is hard
• Product validation is complex & needs structure. Not many organizations & teams have that process
• No one to discuss with as a single founder

Differentiating between an ideal solution & what customers may be willing to pay for can take time and effort. It’s essential to:

1. Validate the problem, i.e. the customers are aware of & call this the problem, have been frustrated by or tried to solve it & can see the implications of translating it to pay for it. This is not inspiration & must be validated with the customers, however good.
2. Validate the solution, ie is better than the status quo to overcome the inertia (i.e. Kunal Shah’s Delta-4 framework). Sometimes, a high delta product then up-prioritizes a problem.

Hence, Team >> Sector/Market >> Problem >> Solution (Product):

1. (Founding) Team: Needed for a successful learning process of customer discussions/ideation. If none, get advisors/investors early.
2. Sector: Some sectors have inefficiencies, significant & growing, and/or have VC money chasing them — some secondary research & primary research with some close VCs may be good enough.
3. Problem: The process above is to be validated in customer or expert discussions.
4. Solution: The specific product or solution to the problem to be proposed by the founders/startup.

A good, cohesive team in a happening sector can find an important enough problem & the right solution, even over multiple iterations.

We have been too good a founder to take a less market-friendly idea further than most would have managed, to prevent us from giving up on them & see that they may not have been worth the time anyway.