All questions
How should startups approach prompt engineering from day one?
Focus on one painful workflow and make it 2× better. Use simple tooling (git, spreadsheets, scripts) and a tiny eval set. Document prompts and metrics, ship fast, and iterate weekly. Don’t over-engineer; reliability beats fancy patterns. When usage grows, add governance and monitoring.
In practice
Appoint a prompt owner—even small teams need a single throat to choke.
Where to start
- 1Pick one workflow with clear ROI.
- 2Create baseline metrics and a small eval.
- 3Ship v1 in a week and iterate.
- 4Layer governance only as complexity increases.
startup promptingLLM early stagefounder prompts