When clients begin their product journey, they naturally focus on the core team: a sharp product designer, strong developers, and a savvy product manager.
These are the visionaries and builders who bring the idea to life. But anyone who’s attempted a complex build knows, whether software, a house, or anything else, having the right team is only half the solution.
Without delivery leadership, an intentional focus on process, people and progress, even the best‑coded features will arrive late, cost more or miss the mark.
Studies of project management show that coordinated leadership helps ensure that projects are completed on time, within budget and to the expected quality.
At Altar.io, we’ve seen first-hand how product teams consistently outperform when they’re supported by structured delivery leadership; namely, a disciplined Project Manager and a nimble Scrum Master.
These roles might look like overhead, but in reality, they are lubricants that keep the engine running smoothly. Quietly but powerfully, they remove friction, keep everyone pointed in the right direction and ensure the work flows toward success.
In this article, I’ll dive into what these roles do and how they can benefit your startup.
Contents
Clarifying Roles: Delivery Leadership vs. Product Vision
A typical product‑focused team includes a product manager, developers and a designer. The product manager leads the product vision and prioritises features, while developers turn that vision into code.
Without dedicated delivery roles, however, there is no one to steward the process itself. A project manager defines goals, creates an actionable plan, allocates resources and makes sure the work is finished on time, within budget and to the satisfaction of stakeholders.
A Scrum master fosters an environment where Scrum principles can flourish, coaching the team in self‑management, facilitating agile ceremonies and removing impediments that slow progress.
The table below summarises these roles. Notice how each focuses on a different dimension of success:
| Role | Primary Focus | Key Responsibilities |
|---|---|---|
| Product Manager | Product value | Understands the market and customer; prioritises the backlog; defines product goals |
| Project Manager | Delivery constraints | Plans scope, schedule and budget; manages stakeholder communication; monitors risks and adjusts as necessary |
| Scrum Master | Team process | Coaches the team in agile practices; facilitates stand‑ups, sprint planning and retrospectives; removes impediments and ensures events are positive and productive |
When these roles work together, developers and designers can focus on building, rather than firefighting.
Managing Constraints and Protecting the Build
Agile development offers the flexibility to adapt to change.
Yet even agile projects operate within real constraints: time, cost and scope.
The project management triangle illustrates the need to balance these variables. Failing to do so can lead to delays and budget overruns.
A skilled project manager monitors burn rate, negotiates scope and communicates constraints to investors and stakeholders. Effective project management helps identify and mitigate risks, manage resources and ensure that projects are completed within budget.
For founders, this discipline translates into practical actions:
- Define and freeze the scope early. A clear scope prevents endless feature creep and keeps teams focused.
- Plan around real deadlines. Time is finite, and missing a market window can be costly.
- Track costs proactively. Project managers keep expenses aligned with the budget by monitoring both direct and indirect costs.
- Communicate trade‑offs transparently. When a deadline or budget shifts, stakeholders hear about it immediately, not at the end of a sprint.
By protecting the build from scope creep and surprises, a project manager enables the team to deliver working software in predictable increments.
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Maintaining Momentum Through Agile Rituals
Momentum is easy to lose and hard to regain. Small blockers: an unanswered question, an unavailable API, a forgotten design asset, can cascade into stalled sprints. The Scrum master’s purpose is to prevent that cascade.
As the Scrum Guide lays out, the Scrum master coaches the team in self‑management, helps them focus on high‑value increments, removes impediments and ensures that all Scrum events are positive, productive and kept within the timebox.
At its core, the Scrum master acts as a “servant leader” who facilitates daily stand‑ups, sprint planning and retrospectives and addresses issues that hinder a team member’s capacity to work.
In practice, this means:
- Running concise daily stand‑ups that surface blockers quickly.
- Facilitating sprint planning to align the team around a realistic goal and workload.
- Guiding retrospectives that focus on continuous improvement rather than blame.
- Ensuring impediments are either removed or escalated to the project manager or stakeholder.
At Altar.io, we’ve seen firsthand how startups can regain momentum simply by investing in agile rituals. Here’s one anonymised example from our work (details adjusted to protect client confidentiality).
A FinTech company came to us after building its MVP with only developers and a product manager.
By that point, backlog items had piled up, unanswered questions lingered in Slack, and the team felt exhausted.
Introducing a dedicated Scrum Master improved the cadence: blockers were addressed daily, sprint goals became achievable, and the team regained energy. Within a month, the product shipped with a stable core and the investors were satisfied.
That’s the power of a disciplined process.
Engineering Alignment Inside and Out
Alignment does not happen automatically; it must be engineered.
Good communication is at the heart of project management. The project manager ensures that stakeholders understand the project goals, status and trade‑offs, while the Scrum master keeps the internal team cohesive.
Together, they drive alignment in two directions:
- External alignment: The project manager meets regularly with founders, investors and other stakeholders, translating technical progress into business outcomes. This communication prevents unpleasant surprises and builds trust.
- Internal alignment: The Scrum master fosters a psychologically safe environment where developers, designers and product managers can speak openly. They coach the team to remain focused on the Sprint Goal.
This engineered alignment reduces friction. Instead of “Why are we building this?” moments, you get a shared understanding and a sense of collective ownership.
Delivery Leadership Is an Investment, Not Overhead
Founders often ask whether adding both a project manager and a Scrum master will inflate costs. Evidence suggests the opposite.
Project managers and Scrum masters reduce rework, keep budgets under control and help the team stay focused.
With project managers defining scope, maintaining consistent communication and managing risk, and Scrum masters focus on enabling the team to follow Scrum practices and resolve issues, neither is stretched thin by conflicting responsibilities, leading to better outcomes.
Case Study: Atrium – When a Large Team & Heavy Funding Weren’t Enough
To see why talented engineers and generous funding do not guarantee success, consider Atrium, a legal‑tech SaaS startup founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Justin Kan.
Atrium aimed to revolutionise legal services by combining an in‑house law firm with proprietary software. Within three years, it raised over $75 million and employed more than 200 people.
Despite this star‑studded team and war chest, the company shut down in March 2020. Its story highlights the dangers of building before validating.
From the start, Atrium attempted to build an entire vertical stack itself, a law firm plus bespoke practice‑management software, instead of using existing tools.
Justin Kan later admitted that the team “hired way too fast in the beginning” and should have kept a small product team focused on “one slice of the problem”. He observed that as headcount grows, “the harder it is to bubble up feedback or turn the ship”.
The analysis of his post‑mortem emphasises that there is no shortcut past research and development: skipping the R&D phase means missing the discovery needed to build something truly differentiated.
In Atrium’s case, investing millions in proprietary software ignored the fact that many legal practice‑management products already existed.
The full‑stack approach also introduced complexity and cost. Atrium’s product never achieved a clear product‑market fit, and adding more money rarely fixes a misaligned product. Employing too many people too early proved costly and removed the flexibility a young startup needs.
Attempting to build everything in‑house created a “premature scaling” problem: complexity ballooned, feedback loops slowed, and the company could not iterate its business model quickly enough.
After laying off its legal team in January 2020 and pivoting to focus solely on software, Atrium still lacked market traction and returned money to investors two months later.
Atrium’s demise offers practical lessons for founders:
- Validate the market before hiring and building. Kan later reflected that adding more money to a situation without product‑market fit rarely works. Start with a lean team, research customer needs and build only what solves a specific problem.
- Don’t skip the R&D phase. A disciplined discovery phase uncovers existing solutions, helps differentiate your product and prevents wasted development.
- Avoid premature scaling. Keeping the team small and focusing on a narrow problem makes it easier to adjust course and reduces burn rate.
- Iterate business models quickly. Atrium failed to pivot its pricing and full‑stack model in time; incremental delivery and frequent feedback loops would have surfaced issues sooner.
By examining Atrium’s collapse, we see that even world‑class engineers and generous investment cannot save a product built without a clear mission, market validation and disciplined delivery.
A strong delivery leader would have insisted on research, scope control and incremental development before scaling, ensuring that talent and capital were deployed towards a validated opportunity.
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Taking the Next Step
Strong product delivery is an intentional practice, not a happy accident. It requires a balanced team of builders and delivery leaders, clear constraints, disciplined agile rituals and proactive alignment.
For founders and investors who want to maximise the return on their product investment, hiring or partnering with experienced project managers and Scrum masters is one of the smartest moves you can make.
Thanks for reading.
