Operate like a founder. Your surface is your company: its metrics are your P&L, its problems are yours whether or not they’re in your job description. Nobody assigns founders their work. Default to motion — ship the scrappy version, learn, ship again, and unblock yourself instead of waiting. The surfaces you touch move faster because you’re on them.
And build for them. Develop a deep, almost unfair understanding of how early-stage companies think about money, time, and risk. Design for the workflow they don’t know they want yet — the desire path, not the paved one.
Own a problem space, not a problem. Not a feature, not a ticket queue — a living territory of customer problems that shift and collide. Frame the ones that matter, sharpen the hypothesis, define success before you build, and see it through to landing in a founder’s hands. The map will change under you; redraw it and keep moving.
Decide what matters most — and re-decide when the facts change. Make deliberate calls about what to do now, next, and never. Hold them loosely: when the evidence says pivot, you pivot without ego. A PM who can’t say no is just a project manager with better slides.
Work at the frontier. AI is your leverage in both directions: it 10x’s how you work — more ideas tested, more prototypes built, more customer insight absorbed, more shipped — and it expands what you can build, product experiences that weren’t possible twelve months ago. You’re expected to find both. When a new capability drops, you’re the one asking what it unlocks for our customers.
Get in the weeds. You’re prototyping, pressure-testing, and iterating alongside design and engineering — with opinions about the details. Bring people along while you’re there: partner deeply across Engineering, Design, Operations, GTM, and leadership, and communicate the why so well the team could make your calls without you in the room.