i'm a little late to this discussion but i think it's an interesting topic worthy of chiming in.

this laundry list of tasks gives a good overview of all the things that _could_ be done.

another way to think about it is to ask, what are the most important things i need to do right now to move the business forward?

new business propositions are all based on a set of assumptions that each need to be verified in order for the venture to succeed. as the business guy on the team, my tasks at a given point in time are a function of what the team is doing currently to validate a particular assumption or hypothesis.

for example, in order for us to move forward, we need to validate whether users will buy into our value proposition. we've already done a fair amount of ethnographic studies, user interviews, and paper prototyping to inform product decisions pre-development. the only way to validate our hypothesis now is to actually develop and release our product to a small set of users.

my tasks, then, are to tackle all problems in the path of achieving the goal of developing and releasing our product to a small set of users.

so, my personal laundry list (in order of priority & 'bang for buck') is:

1) research XYZ APIs and terms of service //our product users a bunch of different APIs so i need to make sure what we're doing is legal and technically feasible before i incorporate it into the spec—otherwise, my team is going to have to waste time figuring it out themselves

2) complete functional spec and designs of features ABC //i try to remove as much ambiguity from the spec as possible so my team doesn't spend time disambiguating feature requests

3) get an office space //although we've been working remotely, we all agree we'd be much more productive if we had a shared work space we can commit to day in and day out. we estimated that we'd get an extra hour of productivity per day by working together, which justifies putting this high on the priority list

i hope that helps.