Companies mistakenly bundle management with authority, forcing top performers onto a management track to gain influence. Separate them. Define management's role as coordination and context-sharing, allowing senior individual contributors to drive decisions without managing people.

In a corporate setting, a PM might build a feature because an executive wants it. As a solopreneur, you personally absorb all financial and time costs. This forces a raw, unfiltered evaluation of business viability and opportunity cost for every decision, a muscle often atrophied in large organizations.

Despite the valuable experience gained, many hiring managers are wary of candidates who've built their own products. They fear these individuals may be uncooperative, have a high flight risk, or struggle to adapt to a structured corporate environment, viewing them as potential "problem starters."

Mentoring is not just altruistic; it's a powerful tool for self-improvement. When mentees apply a senior PM's frameworks and encounter challenges, it forces the mentor to refine their models, plug gaps, and confirm which patterns are truly repeatable. It's a feedback loop for your own expertise.

Building your own product forces you to confront technical realities like database migrations and architectural trade-offs. This firsthand experience provides deep empathy for engineering challenges, which in turn builds crucial credibility and improves collaboration with development teams.

When you're the only resource, you must be ruthless. You only build what is absolutely necessary to solve your own immediate problems. This eliminates stakeholder noise and "nice-to-have" features, teaching the purest form of MVP-driven prioritization where every feature must be critical.

The designer initially felt her career stagnated from being the only designer at companies like Descript. In retrospect, this "lone wolf" experience was critical training. It forced her to develop frameworks and decision-making confidence without peer feedback, enabling her to single-handedly own the massive Comet browser project from day one.

To avoid developing bad habits, solo builders should simulate a corporate environment. Set artificial budgets, conduct real demos, talk to external users, and establish deadlines. This forces the discipline that traditional product management constraints provide and makes the experience transferable.

Unlike a corporate setting where failure has high stakes, solo projects allow you to take big swings and fail without career repercussions. The key is to treat these failures professionally by conducting post-mortems or root cause analyses to internalize learnings that are directly transferable.