Project Management can be as simple or as complex as needed. If your project is you and a few highly-aligned folks in the same room then you might be able to make due with a whiteboard and some sticky-notes, but this doesn't scale. There's a lot of expertise involved in taking a project from sticky-notes to a scaled agile enterprise operating model, but the foundations of planning don't change. IE: If you want to dig for treasure, then you should plan to get a shovel to enable your success.
Before you jump into executing your vision, start by discovering a your minimum viable operating posture (see also the concept of minimum virtuous products), as this dictates a large portion of your overall organizational structure and talent strategy. Getting this wrong is similar to getting software architecture wrong -- it's all dysfunction and debt that will have to be corrected at some point, but at much greater risk and cost down the line.
- Thoroughly describe your vision, its unique value, use case, functionality, target markets, customers, etc.
- Measure your vision against external mandates, and understand that they take prescidence.
- Data Protection Regulations - GDPR, HIPPA, CCPA,etc.
- Accessibility Regulations - ADA
- Customer Demands (SOC2, ISO27001, WCAG, etc. Hint: Many vendor evaluations stipulate such req.)
- Other Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), such as performance, reliability, availability, recoverability, data residency, localization, etc.
- Bonus: If you're doing profiling on people, be aware of incoming regulations in this area.
Yes, this is a lot of material, and it represents a large investment. This is a big part of why the age of the startup is over. While there are still startups --if they're going to handle protected data of any kind-- the smart ones run in shadow mode until they've achieved SOC2 Type2, ISO27001, WCAG2.0, etc., as needed to mitigate their exposure from day one.
Having discovered your MVOP, you're well on your way.
No, this stuff isn't easy, and getting it wrong can be disasterous. The good news is that roadmap to success in project management is well refiend at this point. The fact that it's been largely the same material for over 10,000 years is encouraging, so take advantage of discipline knowledge that's older than Göbekli Tepe (9000 BCE).
