In the early stages of a B2B company, you work almost full-time for your first clients. This means you end up having lots of meetings with stakeholders, you hear all of their problems, and then you go back to the office to figure out how your software could help them so you can present a proposal at the next meeting and move on.
This worked great for us at the beginning because we could learn about the business we were trying to help, and it also allowed us to build empathy with those first stakeholders, but it was not scalable. We ended up with a considerable backlog, impossible to finish, and we were receiving feature requests from every customer and every area of the company, something needed to change.
As you start to grow, you can't handle all the client's requirements, you need to prioritize, and you have to learn to prioritize. So, in early 2019 I convinced my company that I would like to work full-time as a product manager to solve these issues.
Product origins
Infinite backlog
2017 — 2019