The Minimum Viable Team
Jan 17, 2026 • 2 min read
I'm not coming up with anything new here but the trifecta below is the minimum team you should hire if you are at all serious about building something great.
Over the many years building, I’ve noticed a consistent pattern in most early stage startups led by first-time founders:
Hire a developer. We’ll figure out the details as we go.
Not a product manager.
Not a designer.
Just someone to build it.
On paper, that sounds lean. And maybe some manage to pull it off. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about developers. They are amazing. In my experience the developer-only approach has failed every time.
I’m not coming up with anything new here but the trifecta below is the minimum team you should hire if you are at all serious about building something great.
The Team
Product Manager
They own:
- Problem definition
- User research
- Prioritization
- Scope control
- Success metrics
- Turning ideas into clear user stories
They answer:
- Who is this for?
- What pain are we solving?
- What does “done” look like?
- What do we not build right now?
Product Designer
They own:
- User flows
- Interaction models
- Information hierarchy
- Edge cases
- Accessibility
- Usability validation
Developer
They own:
- Architecture
- Code quality
- Performance
- Infrastructure
- Security
- Deployment
- Maintainability
Anything less, and someone ends up doing a job they weren’t hired (or wired) to do. In fact, what actually happens is a collapse of everything onto the software developer, they become the product manager, UX designer, technical architect, QA department, and release manager. The outcome is almost always a frustrated founder, stressed developer, and a failed product.