Intrapreneurship: A pre-cursor to Product Management and Entrepreneurship
Intrapreneurship is the best and often overlooked opportunity for Product Managers and Entrepreneurs to learn the required skills within corporate guard rails
Whether you are looking for ways to learn product management or entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship is one of the safest ways to learn the skills you need to become great PMs or entrepreneurs.
In this post, I write about intrapreneurs and how you can be one too.
Traits of Intrapreneurs that help you be great Product Managers
Most intrapreneurs are motivated by the spirit of innovation to solve a problem. They have some common traits. These are the same traits that are in really good Product Managers. Being an intrapreneur helps you learn the art and science of Product Management. Said differently, if you learn product management and apply it to intrapreneurship, you will be much more successful.
🎯 Problem Solvers: Intrapreneurs focus on a problem. They identify a problem and go after solving it through innovation. And those who are good at really understanding the customer and identifying the right problem do much better.
🔥 Purpose: Intrapreneurs are driven by a purpose. They are motivated to drive impact whether it is social impact, impact to their customers or to their company.
👏 Leadership: They are great at bringing people together toward a common mission. They get teams excited about the problem at hand and drive people to passionately solve it.
🚀Future Thinking: They skate to where the puck is going, not where it is. Intrapreneurs like entrepreneurs are always a few steps ahead of the rest. They are constantly assessing the market, company, the pulse of people to understand directing markets accordingly.
💪 Grit: They are relentless. They work until they find a solution to the challenge at hand. They are not easy to give up.
💫 Adaptable: Good intrapreneurs set the vision yet remain flexible to the solutions. But at the same time, they don’t fall in love with their ideas. They work until they find the right solution to the problem at hand. But they are also great at pivoting because their goal is to solve the problem. They are courageous in shifting strategy and direction because they are focused on the outcomes.
👉 Hands-on: You won't see intrapreneurs setting direction. You will see them in the arena working alongside the team. If they see a problem, they are typically the ones solving them. They lead but also do a lot of the upfront groundwork. They inspire but also do most of the grunt work.
🤝 Collaboration: Intrapreneurs thrive by working with others, and by partnering with others to create programs. They leave space for everybody who joins hands to contribute to the idea and learn from the experience in their own way. They create space and opportunities for others. Opportunity to solve an interesting problem, to lead, to work on a side hustle, to shine, etc., When they do so, their programs succeed because it is rarely about themselves
How can you become an intrapreneur?
📌 Understand your customers: No matter what you want to build, it is important to understand your customers. Always start with the customer. Learn more about them, their context, the jobs they are trying to get done, their problems. This will inspire you with opportunities and help you gain deep customer empathy. It will show you the path for unmet customer needs that you can solve for.
📌 Understand your company: As an entrepreneur or Product Manager building on your own, this won’t matter but if you want to innovate for your company, it is important to understand how your company works, what the priorities and opportunities are. It is also important to understand your company strategy. This will help you identify opportunities that the company might not be looking at yet but might be open to supporting your intrapreneurial journey as a way to test the market.
📌 Get support: Check in with the right leaders and teams to ensure you are working on ideas that get support as you progress. If you don’t see support, you are at least aware of what you might need to make the idea real once you have built it.
📌 Experiment: Instead of rushing to build a whole idea out, experiment your way through ideas to ensure you are unlocking the right innovation for your customers and the company.
📌 Build the right team: Find people who care about the problem, the innovation challenge or simply the opportunity to work on something in addition to their day job. Finding the right folks for your team is significant or you might be stuck with doing most of the work if nobody is able to find the time to work on this.
Resources
📚 You will find tools for target market research, problem statement definition, lean canvas and many more here
📚 Adobe created an innovation kit they share with the world. It is a simple book that will help you on your validation journey. You can download the KickBook here
📚 Download a free copy of The Inrapreeur’s Toolkit here
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