{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"We Not Me","title":"Big decisions, small budget. The team is the answer - with Steve McLeod","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2445,"description":"Steve McLeod has spent years building Feature Upvote, a small bootstrapped software company, and along the way became fixated on a question most product literature ignores: how do founders with no product manager, no big budget and no army of researchers actually decide what to build next? He set out to write a book about prioritization frameworks — and discovered almost nobody uses one. This episode is the story of what he found instead, drawn from interviews with ten small, self-funded software companies (including Squadify's own Dan Hammond and Pia Lee) about how they really make product calls under pressure.The conversation lands on the \"Hippo\" — Highest Paid Person's Opinion — and the reassuring discovery that it's rarer than founders fear: the companies that lasted were the ones who brought their whole team into the decision, even when the founder ultimately had to call it. Steve walks through the recurring traps (chasing every early customer request until the product buckles under its own clutter), the founders who held their nerve on vision anyway, and the practical habit — ruthlessly deleting your backlog — that keeps decision-making sane as you scale.Key Themes & TakeawaysMost software is built by small, bootstrapped teams, yet almost all published advice on feature prioritization assumes you have VC funding and a dedicated product management function.In companies under roughly 30 people, a dedicated product manager rarely exists — the founder is the de facto product manager whether or not they were ever trained for the role.The feared \"Hippo\" (highest paid person's opinion) showed up far less than expected: the founders who survived were the ones who genuinely brought their team into the decision before calling it.Early customer flattery is dangerous — saying yes to every request in the early days can quietly bury a product in clutter, technical debt and UX debt until the simplicity customers loved disappears.Some founders held firm to a narrow product...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/cTxm0uMo1AuvRTsg1GhIjdn998MJJQ_xMMLaqK_LTcA/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8zOTk3/MThmYWIxNDllNjc2/YzEwZjVhOWNmZjVm/ODNmNi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}