Super curious to understand how startups without PMs or UXR conduct research or know what to build next.
As an engineer and now a founder, I’m fascinated by Linear’s approach of “product teams over product managers” where the broader team collectively thinks about the product and how features are delivered, not just the PMs.
I’ve never worked in such a setup, so I wanted to hear from those who have.
How do you collect/synthesize user feedback and decide what to act on? What are some of the challenges you faced because of not having PMs?
Hold brainstorming sessions. Hopefully engineering, design and UX are all occasionally using the product, so they probably have some idea of missing features. Just building gets the juices flowing, even if they’re not the most profitable features, Pareto principle says you’ll spend 80% of time building less valuable things anyway.
If there’s a subreddit or other online community dedicated to your market, sometimes you can mine that for ideas.
And put a dang suggestion box on your product. It doesn’t need to be intrusive, just ask your customers how things are going.
Feels like you need a specific structure in place to avoid constant context switching. Also I'm guessing it depends on the level of interaction you already have with your user base, e.g. dev tools know their customers already well, but other industries less so.