Protops
Cursor for the product-minded
The Itch
Every product leader I know has the same setup: OKRs in Notion, a roadmap in a slide deck, priorities debated in Slack, and strategy in a doc nobody reads after Q1 planning. The tools don’t talk to each other. The strategy doesn’t talk to the roadmap. And six months in, nobody can remember why the team is building what it’s building.
I’ve been that PM. I’ve watched teams drift. I started Protops because I wanted a tool that could hold the whole strategic stack in one place — and make the connection between direction and execution visible.
What It Is
Protops is a lightweight ops tool for product-minded people — PMs, founders, strategy operators — who need to move fast without losing the thread of why.
The core idea: your strategy, OKRs, roadmap, and decisions should live in the same place and reinforce each other. Not as a top-down mandate, but as a shared context layer that the whole team can see and interrogate.
The name
“Protops” = Product + Operations. It’s a bad portmanteau and I’m keeping it.
The Approach
Rather than building another task tracker or another docs tool, Protops is built around structured decision-making. You define your winning aspiration and strategic choices first — then your roadmap and OKRs flow from them, not the other way around.
Under the hood:
- React + TypeScript frontend with a visual canvas for strategy mapping
- Node.js backend, PostgreSQL for persistence
- Deployed on Railway; marketing site on Vercel
Where It Stands
Protops is in active development. Early validation has been encouraging:
- 47 waitlist signups from a single LinkedIn post
- 3 design partners running the framework manually while the product catches up
- First paying customer onboarded in early 2024
The hardest part of building B2B solo isn’t the code. It’s knowing who your first 10 users are and why they’d pay — before you’ve built anything. I’m still figuring that out, and writing about it.
What I’m Learning
Building in public is both terrifying and clarifying. Every time I share a screenshot or a concept on LinkedIn, I learn more about what resonates. The visual strategy canvas? People get it immediately. The framework jargon? Kills the demo every time.
The first big insight: lead with outcomes, not frameworks. Nobody wants to learn Roger Martin’s strategy cascade. They want to stop wondering why their team is shipping things that don’t seem connected to anything.