It seems natural that a startup with a small team forego traditional project management in favor of delivering the product. However, at a certain scale, project management components start to become critical. For example, I expect that when well executed, following practices would save months of time:

  * Domain experts sign off on a plan to ensure success
  * Stakeholders agree that their needs will be met
  * Just enough design and estimation is done to plan around dependencies

My question is, who out there is getting project management right? What does it look like inside the organization - what responsibilities do engineers, managers and product managers have in order for this to work? Has anyone seen a firm successfully adopt a culture of project management?