(Lean) Startup Consulting: learn faster what will carry your product
A startup rarely lacks ideas. What it lacks is clarity about which of them will carry the company – and the time to find that out the long way round. As a startup consultant, I support founding teams and young product organizations in learning faster what works: with the Lean Startup method as the foundation, and with the perspective of someone who has founded a company himself and guided a product team from pre-seed to Series A.
What I see in startups again and again:
Growth changes product work.
Three examples:
The search for product-market fit
The round is closed, the first customers are paying, and the problem you solve really exists.
Since then, every conversation brings a new feature request, and the roadmap points in a different direction every week.
You’re building a lot – but you no longer know which assumption you’re actually testing right now.
Sales and product drift apart
On paper, everyone wants the same thing: sales sells, the product team builds.
In day-to-day work, sales promises features that aren’t on any roadmap, and the product team hears about them in the customer meeting.
Both sides work hard – unfortunately, against each other.
The lead is shrinking
For a long time, there was no good alternative for the problem you solve. That was your lead.
Then a small team with a language model underneath rebuilds your core feature in a few weeks.
What sets you apart in the long run, nobody has written down yet.
Sound familiar?
Completely normal. Almost every startup goes through these phases – the only question is how much time they cost.
I help you learn faster, in every phase, what will carry you.
“Jan helped me keep a clear view and focus on what mattered during the critical phase of our search for PMF. With targeted questions, he made the key dependencies of our product approach visible and showed what our strategy had to aim for to improve our chances of success. His coaching is fun and enables rather than dictates: you come away with questions that help you truly internalize frameworks.”
Build, measure, learn – applied to your questions
For me, The Lean Startup is the first principle of digital product work. Every new idea has a limited runway, and in that time it has to learn enough of the right things to sustain itself. That’s why my consulting doesn’t end in a slide deck. We work on your real questions: Which assumption has to be true for your business model to work? What is the smallest experiment that tests it? And how do you know whether to keep going or change course?
Typical topics:
- MVP development and the entire product delivery, together with Philipp Kaiser of Build Better – from the first experiment to a product that runs
- working out the hypotheses behind your idea and ranking them by risk
- MVPs that teach you something – often a landing page, a concierge test, or ten conversations instead of a finished feature
- metrics that show you what you’re learning, not just how you’re growing, and the decision to pivot or persevere
- product strategy and a roadmap built from hypotheses instead of feature requests
- discovery with real customer contact – and with engineering and sales at the table
- building the product organization: roles, rituals, and the first product hires
A principle, not a ritual
I don’t introduce a method at your company; I work with a principle. Build, measure, learn fits two founders with three months of runway just as well as a team after its Series A – only the experiments look different. Together, we’ll figure out which ones fit you.
With AI, this becomes more important, not less. When a feature can be built in a week, learning becomes the bottleneck: you need to know all the more precisely whether it’s the right one – and what makes you hard to copy when others build just as fast.
Where the experience comes from: At Evernest, I built the product team from zero to three teams in Hamburg and Berlin and guided the company on the product side from pre-seed to Series A. Today I’m founding a company of my own, ganzheit, and run through the loop myself every week, at a time when AI is making building cheap. So I don’t ask the question of defensibility only on your behalf.
You can also read how I look at strategy in my take on Playing to Win.
Need more than consulting?We also do end-to-end development.
Together with Philipp Kaiser of Build Better, I also implement what we decide in consulting. Philipp comes from engineering, I come from product – and at ganzheit, our own startup, we build everything ourselves, from marketing to DevOps. That’s why you don’t just get the plan from us, but the implementation as well. And afterward, your team carries on by itself.
- MVP development
- Product discovery and product delivery
- Pull requests from the whole company
- DevOps
- SEA & Google Ads without an agency
- SEO and GEO / AEO
- Tracking as code
- Building a data warehouse
- Numbers with provenance
- AWS as code
- Zero-downtime deploys
- Brand alignment
- Website built with Claude Code
Philipp Kaiser, Build Betterbuild-better.de →LinkedIn →
Contact
Want to work together?
Is your startup at one of these points right now? Then let’s use a no-obligation intro call to figure out which experiment would tell you the most next.
Feel free to book a call right away, email me at jan@produktkraft.com, or reach out on LinkedIn.
