Prioritization at Startups - ProductFTW #37

Picture this: You're leading a startup's six-person dev team. Your CEO is laser-focused on the new product you're building, but a potential enterprise customer is dangling a massive contract if you'll just add one feature to your existing product. Your runway clock is ticking.

Welcome to prioritization at a startup.

The Startup Reality

Every product management book will tell you to use frameworks like RICE or MoSCoW to bring order to your backlog through careful scoring and evaluation. They promise to make prioritization objective and scientific.

The reality? At Perigon, we're building an entirely new product while maintaining our news API platform. Recently, we faced the decision of whether to pause development on our new app to build a feature for a potential enterprise customer. A traditional framework would have said to stay focused on the core roadmap. Instead, we saw an opportunity to land a major contract with a feature we could eventually use across our product line.

This situation demonstrates why traditional prioritization frameworks miss the mark in startup land: Everything changes too fast. No framework could have predicted or properly weighted that enterprise opportunity – we had to react based on business instincts and quick analysis. When the contract was on the table, we needed to make a call quickly or risk losing the deal entirely.

You're optimizing for survival. At my previous role as a product lead at Red Ventures, we had established products and could plan quarters ahead. At a startup? We have six developers and limited runway. We need to focus on what moves the needle now, whether that's landing customers or learning what doesn't work.

At a startup, your team is too small for heavy processes. Our entire company fits in one Zoom screen. We don't need complex scoring systems when we can just turn around and talk to each other. The overhead of maintaining detailed frameworks would actually slow us down. At Perigon, we can have a priority discussion, make a decision, and start executing in the time it would take just to update a prioritization spreadsheet at a larger company.

I can hear the objections: "But without frameworks, how do you make objective decisions? Won't everything become chaos?"

Here's the truth: startup prioritization isn't about finding the perfect framework. It's about making calculated bets while keeping your options open. Sometimes, that means pausing your primary initiative to seize an opportunity. Your priorities will change. Your assumptions will be wrong. The key is building a system that embraces this reality instead of fighting it.

A Different Approach

After trying various methods at Perigon, we've landed on something deceptively simple: maintain a clear, prioritized list of the 5 most important projects that move us toward our vision. No elaborate scoring systems. No complex roadmaps. Just brutal clarity about what matters most right now.

Here's what our priority list might look like:

1. New product development: Core feature X
2. Enterprise client feature for current product
3. Infrastructure upgrade for scale
4. Analytics dashboard improvements
5. Search performance optimization

"Such a short list?" you might ask. "What about everything else that needs to get done?"

This is where the reality of startup execution comes in. Having a short priority list doesn't mean only working on one thing at a time. Even with six developers, forcing everyone to work on the same project actually slows you down. Different features require different expertise, and developers end up blocking each other or working on things they're not best suited for.

Instead, we use our priority list to guide how we deploy our team's capabilities. We typically have 3-4 developers on our highest priority, while others push forward on the next most important projects that match their expertise. About 20% of our capacity goes to maintenance work - bugs, production support, technical debt, and smaller improvements.

Here's where being small is actually an advantage: we can reassess and reprioritize at any time. When that enterprise opportunity came up, we didn't need a two-week roadmap review with multiple stakeholders. We had a quick discussion about trade-offs, made the call, and shifted two developers to the new feature while maintaining momentum on our main product development. The entire decision process took one 15-minute meeting, not a month of planning.

This isn't about juggling multiple priorities—it's about being realistic about how work actually gets done in a startup. Your priority list keeps everyone aligned on what matters most, while your small team size lets you adapt quickly as circumstances change. There is no bureaucracy, no complex change management processes—just quick, informed decisions and rapid execution.

At a startup, your biggest risk isn't making the wrong choice—it's taking too long to make any choice at all.

When This Breaks

Like everything in startups, this approach isn't perfect. Product veterans like Marty Cagan would likely argue it's too tactical—where's the deep product discovery? What about quarterly OKR planning and detailed outcome metrics? They're not wrong, but they're solving different problems than early-stage startups face.

Still, you need to recognize when this lightweight approach starts breaking down. Here are the warning signs we've hit at Perigon:

Dependencies become blockers. We recently faced this when our new product development started requiring changes to our core API. Suddenly, our "parallel tracks" started crashing into each other. Two developers who were working on the new product needed API changes that would impact three other projects. Our usual quick priority discussions turned into technical debt debates.

The solution wasn't to add more processes—it was to temporarily compress our priority list. We moved the API work to the top spot and paused features that would require API changes. Not elegant, but effective.

Another red flag is when your "20% maintenance capacity" starts routinely stretching to 40% or 50%. This happened to us when we landed several enterprise customers in quick succession. Each had its own small requirements and bug reports. Valid needs, but they started eating into our core development time. We had to make a hard choice: either expand the maintenance team or risk slowing down key projects. We chose the former, knowing it would impact our velocity on the new product.

You'll also notice strain when your team grows. Our approach worked smoothly with six developers. At ten or twelve? You'll start needing more coordination. More importantly, you'll have team members who haven't been around since the beginning and don't have the context for quick decision-making. That's when you might need to start incorporating some of those traditional product management practices—just enough to maintain alignment without losing agility.

The key isn't to avoid these breaking points—they're inevitable. Your job is to recognize them early and adapt before they create real problems. Sometimes, that means temporarily constraining your priorities even further. Other times, it means adding just enough process to keep things running smoothly. But always err on the side of doing too little rather than too much. You can always add process later; it's much harder to remove it.

Closing

Most of us at startups have read the same product management books and studied the well-known frameworks. We've been told we need rigorous processes, dedicated product teams, and months of discovery. And while that advice isn't wrong, it's solving different problems than most early-stage startups face.

The reality of startup prioritization is messier—and simpler—than all that. Keep your priority list short and clear. Let your team work in parallel when it makes sense. Move fast when opportunities arise. Be ready to adapt when the system starts showing strain. Sure, you might occasionally wish you had made a different call, but that's better than being the startup that had a perfect prioritization framework and perfectly organized backlogs... and ran out of runway before finding product-market fit.

Remember: At a startup, your biggest risk isn't making the wrong choice—it's taking too long to make any choice at all.

About ProductFTW

ProductFTW is a biweekly newsletter about product management, with a focus on real-life experiences in startups. We want to help product leaders be successful by giving realistic approaches that aren’t for giant tech companies. We know you don’t have a full-time product designer on each team. We know your software probably hasn’t been used by millions of people worldwide–yet. We’re here to bridge the content gap from building your product and team to scaling it.