Enhancing Startup Success Rates: Towards a Pragmatic Framework for Product Managers (PFPM)

Abstract

This study addresses the underrepresentation of the Product Manager (PM) role in determining the success of startups, particularly in the Requirements Engineering (RE) domain. Despite the high failure rate (63%) among software industry startups, the PM role is often completely unknown to founders, and academic research on this issue is lacking. Through a preliminary literature study, 662 unique tasks, condensed to 122 activities, were identified, associated with the PM role, with cash flow management was only mentioned once in the literature, despite being a critical reason (82%) for startup failures. Only a small percentage (11%) of the papers focused specifically on the startup context. To address these issues, our aim is to develop a novel, startup-specific framework that reduces the number of PM tasks to those that are valuable in its context and suggests improvements for each task accordingly. This framework could enhance early-stage product decision-making for founders, including cash flow management related tasks, and increase their probability of success. Not only contribution have practical implications for startups, but it could also stimulate further collaborative academic research in the field of RE.