Build Your First PM Framework, Fast

A guide for startup CEOs and CTOs building Product teams

Need a PM framework for your startup that won’t slow you down? Here’s one you can implement in 15 minutes.

This is for the early-stage startup CEO or CTO who has 1-3 PMs: You need something to create shared understanding of expectations, but you don’t have a deep PM background, and you’re trying to move fast.

At the early stages — think seed stage or series A with a startup of 10-50 people — execution and speed matter more than process perfection or even long-term career clarity. Your energy is better spent removing obstacles and leading the company than crafting complex frameworks.

Honestly, we've overcomplicated what makes a great product manager anyway.

I know because I've written and rewritten PM competency frameworks for years. With each iteration, I suspect that I added more than I deleted in the name of "clarity." Looking back, that extra content didn't always help the product team — and it certainly took up my time.

After getting back into early-stage startups last year with some advising work and then joining LaunchNotes, I laid out each of the PM competency matrices I've developed over the years and boiled them down into what matters, specifically at an early-stage startup.

What follows is a lightweight system with examples you can customize to guide your growing product team at this stage. No bells, no whistles.

👉 Simple by design: Three measures (Scope, Influence, Consistency) across four practice areas (Execution & Agency, Communication, Insights & Empathy, Strategic Thinking).

How to use this framework

Think of this is a conversation starter for your PM(s), not a checklist. What to do:

1. Start (15 minutes)

   1. Copy the practice areas into your wiki as “PM Excellence” or “PM Expectations”

   2. Adapt the content based on your stage and situation

   3. Highlight the practice areas that are most critical for your company and stage

2. Align (30 minutes)

   1. Walk through the practice areas together (If only one PM, in a 1-1; if more than one PM, in a group then additionally in 1-1s)

   2. Discuss what “good” looks like; get their feedback and thoughts

   3. Agree on a focus area for the next quarter

3. Ship

   1. Use this new shared language to structure 1-1s

   2. Reference specific examples when giving feedback

   3. Revisit every quarter to check on progress and adjust

Measuring Impact

Progress for the PM is measured through impact:

• Scope: Are they handling increasingly complex problems and larger surface areas? Hungry for more? A junior PM might own a feature; a principal PM shapes entire product categories.

• Influence: How effectively are they driving outcomes without direct authority and resolving conflicts before they reach you? Influence is the essence of product management.

• Consistency: Are they reliably delivering value, sprint after sprint, quarter after quarter? Handling increasing pressure, and providing early warning when things might slip? Spikes and sprints fade; consistency is what sets the best apart.

Practice Areas

The product craft is about value creation: Balancing art and science to attack the right problem, at the right time, for the right customer. Everything flows from there.

🏃1) Execution & Agency

At early-stage startups, execution is everything — survival and growth is all that matters. Great PMs build and ship just enough to validate assumptions and unlock the next stage, making swift decisions with incomplete data while keeping the team focused and aligned.

Measuring impact:

• Scope: Moving from owning single-feature delivery to orchestrating multi-quarter initiatives

• Influence: Evolving from following established processes to setting ambitious milestones that teams rally behind

• Consistency: Delivering predictable results while maintaining speed and quality

Signs they're ready for more:

• Ships ahead of schedule while maintaining quality and team morale

• Proactively identifies and tackles adjacent problems outside their scope

• Creates reusable processes that other PMs can follow

• Manages multiple complex initiatives simultaneously without dropping balls

• Makes and defends difficult trade-off decisions with minimal guidance

  <!--An example to build on-->
  
  **EXECUTION & AGENCY**
  
  **Getting it done looks like:**
  
  • Finding a way, especially with constrained resources
  • Making rapid scope tradeoffs that keep velocity high while managing technical debt
  • Converting uncertain market opportunities into small shippable bets that validate direction
  • Setting ambitious milestones and goals
  
  **Anti-Patterns**
  
  • Perfect over progress: Perfecting specs instead of shipping to learn
  • Analysis paralysis: Waiting for complete data in an early-stage environment
  • Scope creep: Adding "nice-to-haves" that delay critical learning

🎙️ 2) Communication

There are enough risks in a fast-moving startup, but miscommunication kills momentum faster than anything — and it’s a risk you can actually control. Your PM needs to cut through chaos with clear priorities, unite the team around critical decisions, and ensure everyone knows exactly what to build and why.

Measuring impact:

• Scope: Progressing from clear product briefs to compelling product vision documents

• Influence: Growing from status updates to strategic narratives that drive organizational alignment

• Consistency: Maintaining a steady drumbeat of clear, purposeful communication across all the company

Signs they’re ready for more:

• Other teams proactively seek their input on communications and processes

• Successfully drives alignment across functions during challenging pivots

• Creates frameworks for communication that others adopt

• Resolves cross-functional conflicts before they escalate

• Effectively tailors complex messages for different audiences without guidance

  <!--An example to build on-->
  
  **COMMUNICATION**
  
  **Creating shared understanding looks like:**
  
  • Keeping the company aligned during rapid pivots and direction changes
  • Developing lightweight processes without slowing things down
  • Translating complex, muddy customer problems into clear, actionable MVPs and specs
  • Employing different techniques based on the audience to build trust and drive clarity
  
  *Anti-Patterns**
  
  • Over-process: Creating heavyweight processes that slow down the team
  • Meeting overload: Substituting meetings for clear written communication
  • Vertical only: Communicating up to leadership but not across to peers
  

📊 3) Insights & Empathy

Early-stage success hinges on finding product-market fit. Strong PMs rapidly collect customer signals, translate them into testable hypotheses, and help the team learn just enough to make the next meaningful decision.

Measuring impact:

• Scope: Advancing from feature-level user research to market-level opportunity synthesis

• Influence: Developing from data reporting to insight-driven decision making that shapes strategy

• Consistency: Building repeatable processes for customer feedback and data-driven validation

Signs they’re ready for more:

• Identifies market patterns before they become obvious to others

• Builds and validates hypotheses with creative, scrappy research methods

• Creates scalable systems for gathering and synthesizing customer insights

• Influences product strategy through strong, data-backed narratives

• Consistently predicts customer needs before they're explicitly stated

<!--An example to build on-->

**INSIGHTS & EMPATHY**

**Digging for signal and synthesizing looks like:**

• Finding creative ways to get customer feedback when you don’t have many customers yet
• Building conviction and anchoring decisions with very limited information and data
• Shipping with metrics of success, and looping back to measure if it was the right call
• Shepherding the customer problem — deep empathy with the user to nail the core use case(s)

**Anti-Patterns**

• Surface level: Collecting but not synthesizing customer feedback
• Data worship: Waiting for statistical significance with small sample sizes (AKA “sandblasting the soup cracker”)
• Solution jumping: Falling in love with solutions before validating problems

🧭 4) Strategic Thinking

Strategy at early stages is about focus and speed — making choices. The best startup PMs work with you as the leader to identify the few critical bets that matter now, translate them into concrete next steps, and keep the team laser-focused on what will unlock the next stage of growth.

Measuring impact:

• Scope: Expanding from sprint plans to quarterly roadmaps to multi-year product vision

• Influence: Moving from executing strategy to shaping it through strong opinions and clear rationale

• Consistency: Regularly connecting business objectives to customer problems in ways that galvanize teams

Signs they’re ready for more:

• Consistently connects daily decisions to longer-term founder vision

• Proactively identifies strategic risks and opportunities

• Influences company strategy beyond their immediate product area

• Successfully advocates for and leads strategic pivots when needed

• Builds compelling business cases that give you, the leader, options

<!--An example to build on-->

**STRATEGIC THINKING**

**Making specific choices that connect business goals to customer problems looks like:**

• Turning founder vision into concrete experiments that validate direction
• Balancing quick wins and strategic bets that could transform the business
• Making hard trade-off decisions that concentrate resources on next-stage growth
• Prioritizing customer segments and ICPs based on data and gut

**Anti-Patterns**

• Short-term only: Focusing solely on immediate wins without connecting to larger vision
• All vision: Big ideas, big talk, no concrete next steps
• Narrow view: Optimizing for one metric at the expense of company growth

Scaling Up

When This Framework Needs to Evolve

How will you know if you need more than this simple framework? When you notice:

• PMs struggling to understand growth opportunities

• Inconsistent expectations across managers

• Difficulty in compensation or promotion decisions

• Need for specialized PM roles or tracks

This framework works best for teams of 1-3 PMs. As you scale beyond that with company growth, you'll likely need to add:

1. Structured Career Paths: Defining clear differences between Senior, Lead, and Principal roles and ideally support dual-track career tracks (People Leadership track)

2. Specialized Tracks: Separating platform, growth, or core product competencies

3. Formal Reviews: More structured performance evaluation processes

4. Documentation: Written expectations and examples for each level

But don't rush to add complexity. This simple framework can scale surprisingly well if you trust your PM(s) to own their development within the framework, and keep a few conversations per quarter at an altitude that focuses on impact rather than just output and driving work.

A few resources:

• Petra Willie’s PM Wheel

• GitLab Product Management

• Ravi Mehta’s What’s Your Shape

• Intercom’s PM Expectations by Level

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Bottom line: If you're a CEO or CTO at an early-stage startup drowning in frameworks while trying to guide your small PM team, keep it simple. At the early stages, execution and speed matter more than process perfection. Use this, customize it, and keep shipping!

Remember why you hired PMs in the first place: To help you move faster and create impact. Don't let the tools get in the way of the work.