SUNDAY REWIND: Building a product without any full-time product managers

This week’s Sunday Rewind takes us back to a 2022 post from Francesco Wiedemann on how small teams can achieve growth without the need for full-time product managers.

Francesco says  you can build an effective operating team of up to 30 people without a full-time product manager. He explains how at his startup Kyte all three co-founders focused on initial product discovery and finding product-market fit to de-risk the company.

They used a model of shared product responsibilities. This meant they installed three building blocks, namely extreme ownership, decentralised product processes and strong north star.

Extreme ownership

Francesco says that a high sense of ownership of every teammate was the key foundation for a successful shared product responsibility culture, and he explains how they fuelled this sense of ownership at Kyte.

Decentralised product processes

They also strived to create processes that made it very easy for everyone in the company to contribute to product work, and Francesco also explains some of the core processes they used.

Strong north star

A strong north star was also fundamental, because, as Francesco says, it means “all efforts are aligned to pay into the overall company objective, the total outcome will be bigger than the sum of all the single initiatives”.

At the time of writing, Kyte had reached the point where it made sense to hire full-time product managers.

Read the original article: A case study: Building a product without any full-time product managers