Can you really do both? If not, which is the cart and which is the horse? I think products guy is in a very long drain pipe that gets thinner the farther he goes, not to talk of carrying debris on the way down, while startup guy is on a very big playground with lots of toys but no one in sight.
The dilemma is now verus later. If you go too far down that pipe, you won’t be able to come out of it, and if no one comes around the playground, you might as well jump down the pipe! I recently read a post by Seesmic developer about building in someone else’s yard. What is even worse than this is building someone else’s structure in their yard. Eventually you will be shown the door. You may be fortunate to get a thank you, come again.
Build you own structure in your own yard. This isn’t against collaboration or leveraging 3rd party services, but always shore up your end, if X goes south, have Y & Z in place primed to go. Recently developers have griped @twitter for placing restrictions on the use of their previously unhampered API. Google is gradually and systematically migrating their “free” APIs to paid ones or making them end of life. Typically if I can’t read the fine print then it is better seeking alternatives because the loop holes ahead will certainly have gotchas embedded.
It is good to know from the very beginning what you really want, and how you want to get there. There is no harm being a product guy, as far as it is the path you chose, if you find yourself there incidentally, don’t get distracted from the grand scheme of things.
It is really hard to be both; one is effectively killing the other, so how do you follow your passion? I saw a weird TED Talk on “Why you will fail to have a great career”, and it boils down to making the hard choices. One of the reasons for startup failure is not doing it full time. This isn’t to say you should run and go quit your job, be smart about it and hopefully in the end, you achieve that great career.
