The first 30 days of a shared project

Most projects that stay on paper die in the same month: the first one. Not because the idea was bad, but because nobody defined what "progress" meant for those four weeks. Here's the structure we recommend.

Week 1 — Honest alignment

• Write the problem in one sentence. If team members can't write it the same way separately, they're not yet on the same project.
• Define success for the month. Not product success: success for this month. Example: "10 user interviews and a clickable prototype".
• Time agreement. Real hours per week each person can put in. Not aspirational — real.

Week 2 — Get out of the document

• Evidence outside the group. Talk to real users, not to each other. Even just 3 people.
• First visible version. A Figma, a static landing, a notebook — anything that pulls the idea out of text into something another person can react to.
• First real disagreement. If none has shown up, either everyone's too aligned (suspicious) or someone's staying quiet (worse).

Week 3 — Adjusting on real friction

• Revisit the problem in light of what you learned. The week-1 definition almost always changes once users are involved. Rewrite it.
• Decide what NOT to do this month. More important than deciding what to do. Young projects die of too many features, not too few.
• Assign owners. Not "we all do it". Each piece has a name attached.

Week 4 — Decision to continue

The month ends with an explicit conversation: are we continuing next month? Same people, same scope, same hours. If the answer is "yes but..." the "but" is month 2's real work.

If it's no, shut it down clean. A project that ends without drama leaves people available for the next one; one that drags on half-alive burns them out for everything.

Signs it's going well

• Someone outside the team heard about the project and wants to know more.
• At least one decision got made quickly with the three members agreeing without fighting.
• The original document no longer accurately describes what you're actually doing — it evolved.

Signs it's going badly

• Meetings repeat the same conversation.
• Nobody has talked to a real user in 14 days.
• Someone on the team "has been busy" three weeks in a row.

These 30 days are, statistically, the most fragile moment of a project. Knowing it and structuring them helps you cross into month 2, where things actually get interesting.