The Minimum Viable Team
Jan 17, 2026 • 2 min read
The minimum team you need if you're serious about building something great: PM, designer, developer.
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 product 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—death by scope creep, or a product nobody uses, or both.
The trifecta below is the minimum team I’d hire if I were serious about building something great. One of each. Not two people wearing three hats.
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
They answer:
- Can someone actually use this?
- Where do people get stuck?
- Does the flow make sense before we build?
- Can users find what they need?
Developer
They own:
- Architecture
- Code quality
- Performance
- Infrastructure
- Security
- Deployment
- Maintainability
They answer:
- Will it hold up?
- Can we ship it and maintain it?
- What do we build vs. buy?
- Is it secure?
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.
Get the trifecta right first. Then scale.