“In the rush to create and innovate, the product manager who can establish order within chaos, not by eliminating it but by harnessing its creative potential, will thrive. The first 100 days aren’t about perfection—they’re about building the frameworks that allow both structure and serendipity to coexist.” — Marty Cagan
Building the Foundation: A Framework for Early-Stage Product Management
When you’re standing at the beginning of building a new product or platform, it can feel like you’re staring into a vast expanse of ambiguity. There’s vision, energy, maybe a few sketches or prototypes—but the machinery of product development isn’t in motion yet. This is where the work begins for product management.
In early-stage teams, product management isn’t just a role. It’s the glue, the translator, the strategist, the doer. Your job is to bring clarity, create alignment, and build just enough structure to start delivering value—without over-engineering process or getting in the way of speed. Here’s a framework to guide you through this critical first phase.
Phase 1: Before the First Line of Code
Before engineering sprints begin, product must:
1. Align on Vision and Problem Space
Clarify: What problem are we solving? For whom? Why now?
Do user interviews, market research, or leverage founder insights to articulate the problem clearly. This becomes your north star.
2. Define the MVP
An MVP isn’t a prototype, and it’s not a lite version of the full product. It’s the smallest thing you can build that delivers value and starts the feedback loop. Use story mapping or job-to-be-done frameworks to find this nucleus.
3. Prioritize Ruthlessly
Use a simple prioritization matrix or MoSCoW method. Rank features by impact vs. effort. Focus on what validates core hypotheses.
4. Create a Lightweight Product Backlog
Write just enough user stories to support the first sprint. Keep it lean, leave room for learning.
5. Set Up Feedback Loops Early
Figure out how you’re going to learn. This could be a feedback form, a Slack group of early users, or regular usability tests.
6. Introduce Just-Enough Process
Early product management should resist the urge to create heavy frameworks. Instead, focus on:
- A shared understanding of goals
- A groomed and prioritized backlog
- Defined sprint cadence (1 or 2 weeks)
- Lightweight standups, planning, demos, and retros
The goal is to establish consistency and reliability, not bureaucracy.
Phase 2: Supporting Engineering Execution
Once sprinting begins, your role shifts to enabling momentum and minimizing friction:
1. Be Available, Not Overbearing
Sit with engineers. Answer questions quickly. Clarify requirements in real time. Keep stories groomed and updated.
2. Maintain a Just-in-Time Roadmap
Your roadmap is not a promise. It’s a rolling forecast. Keep it updated based on what you’re learning.
3. Validate Early and Often
Ship internally. Ship to beta users. Watch users interact. Iterate. Validate assumptions and adjust priorities.
4. Keep Context Alive
Never assume everyone remembers the “why.” Reinforce the user problem and outcome you’re targeting in sprint planning, demos, and retros.
5. Play an Active Role in Ceremonies
- Sprint Planning: Bring prioritized stories, clarify user problems, define acceptance criteria.
- Daily Standups: Listen for blockers, realign if priorities shift, and observe morale.
- Demos: Highlight what was learned, not just what was built.
- Retros: Share learnings from user feedback and product metrics to enrich team understanding.
6. Define Sign-Offs and Hand-Offs
To keep quality high and everyone accountable:
- Ready for Dev: Stories must have a clear problem statement, acceptance criteria, and dependencies resolved.
- Ready for Test/UAT: Product validates functionality against acceptance criteria.
- Done: Includes functional completeness, stakeholder approval, analytics instrumentation, and documentation (if applicable).
These gates aren’t red tape—they’re clarity mechanisms.
7. Scrum Roles in Early-Stage Teams
Scrum can work well in early-stage environments with adaptations:
- Product Owner (PO): Often the PM or founder. Owns the vision, prioritization, and backlog clarity.
- Scrum Master: In early stages, this may be shared or informal. Someone should champion continuous improvement and ceremony discipline.
- Development Team: Cross-functional builders who collaborate tightly with product to ship and iterate quickly.
While Scrum provides helpful structure, early teams may blend roles or simplify ceremonies. What matters most is:
- Clear accountability
- A steady delivery rhythm
- Fast feedback loops
Alternative Frameworks to Consider
Scrum isn’t the only option. Early teams might explore:
1. Kanban
A visual workflow approach. Great for continuous delivery, flexible priorities, and reducing WIP (Work in Progress).
- Use when work is highly reactive or priorities change often.
2. Shape Up (Basecamp)
- Emphasizes appetite over estimates.
- Focuses on six-week cycles and small, empowered teams.
- Ideal for teams with strong product-engineer collaboration.
3. Lean Startup
Focuses on validated learning through build-measure-learn loops. Pairs well with any delivery methodology.
- Ideal mindset for MVP and product-market fit exploration.
Each framework offers tools to match your context. Don’t be dogmatic—mix what works.
Phase 3: Preparing for First Customers
The platform is forming. You have your MVP, maybe even a beta. Now comes the shift from building to learning and scaling.
1. Instrument Everything
Set up behavioral analytics (e.g., Mixpanel, Amplitude). Track events tied to your core flows. Ensure you can answer: What are users doing? Where are they getting stuck?
2. Define KPIs and Success Metrics
Create clear metrics tied to your product’s purpose. Examples:
- Activation rate (did they reach first value?)
- Retention (do they come back?)
- Task success rate
- Time to value
- Churn and stickiness
3. Develop Theories and Validate Them
Use data to propose hypotheses: “Users drop off at onboarding step 2 due to friction.” Test with experiments: Improve the flow, run A/B tests, collect qual and quant feedback.
4. Build a Voice-of-the-Customer Pipeline
Build a process for capturing insights: Sales calls, support tickets, NPS, surveys, user interviews. Distill them into patterns and drive roadmap updates.
5. Balance Quality with Iteration Speed
You want to move fast, but you can’t break trust. Introduce a definition of done, and ensure someone is always thinking about UX, security, and edge cases.
Wrapping up…
In early-stage product development, the process is the product. Your role as a PM is not to control every outcome, but to create an environment where discovery, learning, and iteration can happen safely and quickly. The team needs a north star, a way to measure progress, and fast feedback cycles.
Be the one who asks: “What are we trying to learn next?” And then make sure the team has everything it needs to learn it.
Build trust, keep things light, and stay close to the problem. That’s how great products begin.
