Tips on managing Product at early stage startups- HIT ME!

Ido Lavi
1 reply
Hey PH, I recently sold my startup where I was CEO and joined a new company as VP Product. As my previous company was 8 people strong, Product Management was split between myself and the CTO, but did not run in a methodical process. Today, I'm looking to implement a methodology-based product management system. What are your top tips for great product management at early stage startups (aside from the obvious "talk to your users" ones). Thanks!

Replies

Kiran Kanakadandi (yugahq.com)
I'd like to see this conversation going (and hear views from others), so here goes my view: if the company has a VP Product, you might want the full works of product management. Process, tools, team (and even titles!). As for the process, assuming it is all software, the recipe typically is: - build a backlog of features; when you "talk to your users", start adding your responses (not user views) into the backlog - sort backlog by RoI: cost vs value; ideally, a low-cost v1 exists for every feature and so spec every feature to ship increments based on feedback-based iteration; if you've not considered no-code, consider bubble.io; pure RoI gold to ship feeatures (and discard if needed) - plan and execute (spec, design, dev, uat, enablement/outreach) each sprint's payload - do "backlog grooming" periodically, based on priorities This is intentionally generic and I'd love to see others fill in more -- may be the nature of product (SaaS, mobile app, APIs, etc.) and team size can help them. Good luck!