Problem

I’ve been an employee for most of my career, but many of the skills required for professional development as an employee seem entrepreneurial in nature; is there a more direct way to identify and gain experience with these skills?

The phrase "entrepreneur school" keeps coming to mind, eg a group employees could use to share information and support each other.

Solution

Customer focus

This seems to be the overarching principle. We’re in business if we’re delivering value to a paying customer.

A customer can be myself when hacking, a teacher in the classroom, a product manager in a team, or the more traditional definition of someone paying for a service.

This opens a couple questions: what do customer’s want? how to get customers? What I learned building Page.REST — from idea to paying customers in 7 days by Perera provides good tips, and Product Hunt is developing tooling around this called Ship.

Minimize cost & diversify

This is basic life advice, but in terms of product development we can bias toward the agile and lean development models: deliver the minimum to attract customers and get feedback. I don’t have experience with Ship, but I see it’s built with lean principles in mind.

Trusted feedback

In the workplace, I have experience inviting partner companies for lunch to hear their feedback.

Perera mentions use of slack channels with narrow membership for this purpose.

In terms of professional development, Write/Speak/Code recommends publishing written content to trusted reviewers first before the general public.

I wonder if this is an aspect of the traditional editor role in literature.