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
- One hour of planning.
- A visible sprint board.
- No mid-sprint additions unless the world’s on fire.
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.