The pre-PMF guide to product management

June's CEO on how to move faster and stop throwing away your roadmaps

👋 Hi, it’s Kyle. Welcome to Growth Unhinged, my newsletter that explores the playbooks and hidden tactics behind today’s best startups.

If you've seen

Lenny Rachitsky

’s viral post about finding product-market fit (PMF), you know that it took Airtable, Slack, Miro, and Figma at least four years from idea to PMF. But this doesn’t have to be the case.

Enzo Avigo, former product manager at Intercom and CEO of product analytics startup June, joins the newsletter to unpack how to accelerate your path to PMF. (This post may be too long for email; read the full version here.)

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Last year, I made a painful realization that could have cost my startup dearly – I had thrown away 10 meticulously crafted roadmaps, and with them, an entire month of my precious time. 

For someone who had spent seven years as a Product Manager (PM), confidently stepping into the world of entrepreneurship, this turn of events was nothing short of a rude awakening. I had assumed that my extensive background in product management at companies like Intercom would seamlessly translate into success for my startup. 

I was wrong. 

In my first three months building June, I discarded not one, not two, but 10 roadmaps. The same happened with user stories. Features were being developed at a good speed, often before I could even finish drafting user stories.

It was during this time that I began to question the applicability of traditional product management principles in the volatile and unpredictable early-stage startup environment. The notion that I had nurtured for seven years seemed to crumble in the face of these new challenges. So I embarked on a mission to understand what truly works in the world of early-stage product management. 

In this article, I'm sharing with you the six commandments of product management in the pre-Product-Market-Fit (pre-PMF) phase. Looking back, I can say with confidence this adapting product management to pre-PMF is what helped us reach our PMF. 

First, it helped us develop a muscle to ship fast and increase our output. We started to ship insanely fast and never missed publishing a weekly changelog since then. We also understood how to prioritize better and build what people wanted. A few rewards acknowledged that: we won the Golden Kitty Award in Data and became the fastest growing app on Twilio Segment in 2022. All of that with a team of 8. A year and a half later we reached our PMF (we wrote more here). 

Throughout this journey, pre-PMF product management was our secret. It's what accelerated us, but it would not have been without these six principles:

1. Unlearn traditional practices 

2. Start with the right MVP

3. Prioritize insanely well

4. Move insanely fast

5. Set the right milestones

6. Collect learnings

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Step 1. Unlearn traditional practices 

Traditional product management doesn't fit early-stage startups. These methods are designed for late-stage corporations, ensuring user-centricity as they expand. Yet, for startups, these approaches introduce unnecessary friction, slowing delivery and reducing impact. 

When you're starting your product and not yet hitting big success, concentrate on getting things done. Don't spend too much time on complicated ideas. Concentrate on finding answers to problems. This is fundamentally different from the post-PMF phase, where the biggest risk is losing sight of your customers and misalignment between teams.

Let me be even more specific with some DOs and DON'Ts for effective product management in the pre-PMF:

❌ DON’Ts

• Build a roadmap: Especially > 3 months. Your product changes too fast.

• Write user stories & epics: Abstraction will slow you down

• Do too much user research: Chances are you’ll get lost. Instead, get real.

• “Influence” people: If you have an opinion, say it loud and act on it.

• Set & forget: Building and releasing something is only the beginning.

• Listen to everyone. Find out who loves you and pick a niche.

• Don’t get stuck on strategy docs. Have a clear positioning and execute.

✅ DOs

• Write problem statements. Make a prioritized list and only work on key customer problems.

• Get real and prototype live: Do everything you can to increase the delivery pace.

• Ship it: Just ship it, you’ll learn faster 😉

• Pick big swings: “What’s the highest impact work we can do this week”?

• Empower people: Centralized decisions slow you down.

• Get feedback on releases: Most things require an iteration.

• Start a community: Before your product is ready, you can start a community.

• Talk to users every day: Keep sharing these learnings with your team.

Step 2. Start with the right MVP

Now that you know which tasks to do or not, let’s talk about your first product: your Minimum Viable Product (MVP). 

The common idea about the MVP is that you create a small solution, give it to people, and see if they find it useful. But in most cases, this first version doesn't quite match what people need. So, you start to wonder:

• Are you solving a real problem? 

• Is your solution the right one?

• Are you aiming at the right group of people?

If you're in this situation, you're in a tough spot, and it's hard to get out of it. Each of these questions has 10 different possible answers. That’s 10 x 10 x 10 = 1000 combinations you need to test to find PMF. This would take a lifetime!

To get a chance to succeed you need to ship an MVP that helps you collect some learnings. And for that, you need to be accurate. You need to ship an MVP as close as possible to what your product will eventually look like. 

Successful startups often get it right from the beginning:

Notion and Uber MVPs look very familiar no?

Here are a couple of tips to launch the right MVP from the get-go:

• Be organized when you launch your first version.

• Trust your gut feeling.

• Solve a problem that you've personally experienced.

• Keep learning from your launches and be ready to change if necessary.

You've probably heard that you should launch fast and improve quickly. That's good advice, but don't rush through your first version. It's really important.

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Step 3. Prioritize insanely well