Let’s get one thing out of the way:
Your startup probably doesn’t need a full PMO.You don’t need Gantt charts tattooed across your whiteboards or a portfolio governance committee. Not yet.
But that doesn’t mean you get to fly blind forever.
Startups delay real project management for understandable reasons:
- “We’re not there yet.” Translation: "We haven't felt enough pain to admit it."
- “We don’t want bureaucracy.” Fair. But chaos isn’t agility — it’s just chaos.
- “The founders still run ops.” Cool. But founders shouldn’t also be traffic cops.
At some point, the wheels will start wobbling.
The 3 Signs You’re at the Tipping Point
- You’ve got more than 2–3 cross-functional initiatives happening at once.
That’s the magic number where things stop syncing naturally and start stepping on each other. You're losing clarity on what is happening, when it's happening, and how it impacts the next initiative. - Stuff keeps getting delayed, and nobody knows why.
“We thought Dev had it.”
“No, it was waiting on Design.”
A Slack thread is not a project plan. A random shared powerpoint or excel sheet with edit access for all isn't either. Get a project management information software (PMIS). If your team is small and budgets are tight, there are many reasonable options that are either free or low cost. Please stop using poorly crafted excel workbooks. If you don't ride a horse to work, or send mail by pigeon, you shouldn't be using excel to manage projects. - Someone (maybe you) asks: “Wait… who’s owning this?”
If that’s not instantly obvious, you’re overdue. If this is you, don't feel bad, many large organizations fall short here. Just document key pieces for ownership.
So What Does “Getting Serious” Actually Mean?
This isn’t about hiring a Program Manager to sit in meetings all day. In fact, thats typically never the right move.
It’s about creating clarity without creating overhead.
Here’s what that looks like:
- Define ownership. One person owns outcomes. Everyone else supports. Don't assign multiple stakeholders. You might as well put everyone on the team as responsible and then stand around pointing at each other claiming you thought the next person "had it".
- Add light accountability loops. Weekly check-ins. Real timelines. Less hand-waving. If you choose daily standups, make them actual standups. don't create daily status calls. It eats into actually working.
- Use reusable templates. (Mini charters, kickoff decks, status updates — you don’t need to invent them every time. There are endless templates online, find one, modify it to fit your needs.
- And please, for the sake of all of your team memebers, establish an Information Radiator with your PMIS of choice (Atlassian, MS Project, Airtable, etc. ).
- Don't overburden people with endless meetings to talk about more meetings. Leave the Zoom calls for necessary, productive collaboration. You shouldn't have to dig through someone's email thread, Slacks or endless PowerPoints for a real-time snapshot of key project status (RAID items, past due tasks, milestone trends, key PSR items (Project Status Report).
Fractional PMs: The Startup-Friendly Middle Ground
Hiring a full-time PM might not be in the cards.
(Or in the budget. Or approved by the Head of “Do We Really Need This?”)
That’s where fractional project leaders make sense:
- Build foundational structure.
- Run real projects.
- Test-drive what scaled project ops could look like — before you overcommit.
No PMO. No bloat. Just enough structure to stop burning time, budget, and talent.
