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Before you hire a PM, try adding structure

Posted on:May 2025

You probably don’t need a product manager.

Not if decisions happen in real time.
Not if the builders are the product thinkers.
Not if the chaos still ships.

A product manager adds structure.
Structure adds friction.
Friction kills velocity.

Most early teams mistake motion for progress, chaos for flexibility, and no planning for agility:

A few weeks into working with a startup, the engineering process was mostly noise.
Everything was dumped into a single document: Vague titles, no descriptions, and priorities ranging from 1 to 5. Before we could ship anything, we had to translate these into real tickets.

Double the work. Zero clarity.
There was no plan.

Tickets would appear mid-week with no context. Some tasks jumped the queue because someone yelled louder. Bugs, features, ideas, everything lived in the same inbox.

It wasn’t Agile; not even reactive; it was passive.

And it was killing us.

I proposed a new rule:
Pick what matters at the start of the week. Stick to it

Within a week, we had focus:
No backtracking, no chaos: Just shipping.

Within a month, everyone was amazed by the results!

It didn’t require a PM. Just scaffolding and discipline.
Enough to turn chaos into execution.

Don’t hire a PM to fix chaos.
Fix the chaos so you won’t need one.