In the fast-paced world of early-stage startups, traditional product management frameworks often feel like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. While these frameworks provide valuable guidance, they don’t always align with the unique challenges and opportunities faced by young companies. As Product people, we’ve all experienced this firsthand. What about we embark on a journey to develop a customized product management approach that aligns with our primary goals: focusing on the business, iterating and testing rapidly, and keeping everyone in the company informed and aligned. Let’s see how we can integrate various frameworks to achieve these objectives.

Focusing on Business

In the early stages of a startup, focusing on the business’s growth and sustainability is paramount. We’ve found that the following frameworks are particularly effective in helping us achieve this goal:

1. North Star Framework: At the heart of our strategy lies the North Star Metric, a single, pivotal metric that encapsulates the core value our product delivers to customers. This metric keeps our team aligned with the business’s growth objectives. It serves as our guiding light, ensuring that every product decision we make contributes to our overall business success.
2. RICE Prioritization: While we don’t follow RICE by the book, we leverage its principles to evaluate product ideas. We assess initiatives based on Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort, ensuring that we prioritize projects that align with our North Star Metric. This approach helps us focus on high-impact initiatives that drive our business forward.
3. Weighted Impact Scoring: To further refine our prioritization process, we use the Weighted Impact Scoring model. By assigning weights to key criteria, we objectively score initiatives and rank them based on their business impact. This data-driven approach ensures that our resources are allocated to projects that directly contribute to our business goals.

Each team creates its own mission sheet, with ideas that should get us closer to our North star. Each idea is scored using our light RICE approach. The weighted impact scoring is used mostly to enable us to make hard decisions when we cannot deliver everything because, as we all know, in startups we always have more to do than we have people.

Iterating and Testing Rapidly

In the ever-evolving startup landscape, the ability to iterate and test rapidly is crucial. To achieve this goal, we incorporate the following frameworks:

1. Job To Be Done (JTBD): Instead of focusing solely on personas, we emphasize understanding the specific jobs our customers need our product to do. This approach allows us to target precise pain points and iterate our product to better address these needs.
2. GIST Planning: We’ve adopted the GIST Planning framework, which emphasizes Goals, Ideas, Steps, and Tasks. This approach streamlines our planning and execution processes, enabling us to iterate quickly and respond to customer feedback effectively. It reduces management overhead and empowers our team to move swiftly.
3. Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Inspired by the Lean Startup methodology, we develop minimal viable products that address specific problems. This approach allows us to gather user feedback early in the product development process, facilitating rapid iterations and improvements.

Clearly defining personas early on can be challenging, and it sometimes leads to designing products for people we imagine rather than real users, especially when time for proper research is limited. While we advocate for more research, scaling it and obtaining deep insights can often be difficult, if not impossible. This is why combining JTBD with a lean approach enables us to deliver product versions driven by business goals. If the product does the job the market expects, we are likely to address the correct persona, even if we can’t yet describe them. It’s still crucial to mix GIST and MVP frameworks not to lose sight of the company goals. An MVP can end up being useless otherwise. Failing to make a good MVP is okay, but not learning anything from it is worse.

Keeping Everyone Aligned and Informed

Maintaining alignment and ensuring that everyone in the company is informed about our product strategy and progress are essential to succeed as a product team in a startup environment. We achieve this through the following frameworks:

1. North Star Framework (Again): Our North Star Metric not only guides our product development but also serves as a unifying force within the company. It ensures that everyone understands the core value we deliver to customers and aligns their efforts accordingly.
2. Working Backwards: This framework, inspired by Amazon’s approach, helps us create a shared vision within the company. We start by writing a memo about a supposed finished product, which forces us to think about the end result. This exercise ensures that our entire team is on the same page regarding our product’s direction.
3. Opportunity Solution Tree: To provide a visual representation of our product strategy, we use the Opportunity Solution Tree. It simplifies the discovery process, enabling us to prioritize opportunities effectively. This tool helps everyone in the company see the big picture and make informed decisions.

All these frameworks are geared towards bringing us closer to our North Star Metric and making our strategy understandable to anyone in the company, regardless of their skills or job roles. Projecting the end result of our actions achieves three critical objectives:

• It eliminates the jargon used by specific teams, which often creates disconnection between teams.
• It makes our goals and thought processes visual so that anyone can grasp them.
• It transparently displays our reasoning, encouraging people to challenge and question it. This openness is vital for avoiding bad decisions and fostering trust within the organization.

Work on your own frame

In the world of early-stage startups, creating a tailored product management approach that aligns with your specific goals is crucial. By integrating elements of these frameworks, we can craft a strategy that focuses on business growth but also enables us to iterate rapidly and maintain alignment across an organization. As you navigate the exciting journey of entrepreneurship, remember that the right blend of frameworks can empower your team to innovate, iterate, stay together and succeed.