Execution & Velocity

When you're building fast, the temptation is to do everything but do it sloppily. The better move is to do almost nothing but do it perfectly. Keep cutting features until the last cut would make it worthless, then ship that. If people use it despite its limitations, you've found something real — and now you have a list of complaints that tells you exactly what to build next.

Your job as a PM is to make it easy for your team to get things out the door fast. That means being crystal clear on who you are building for and why, so engineers can make decisions without waiting on you. The less your team has to stop and ask for approval, the faster everyone moves.

Before your next meeting, email every participant separately and ask for their opinion or ranking — don't let them see each other's answers first. Then use the meeting only to discuss where people disagree, not to re-confirm where they agree. This alone eliminates the loudest-person-wins problem and cuts meeting time dramatically.

When a company is tiny, everyone knows what to do because the founders are in the room. As you hire people, that shared understanding breaks down and you need lightweight structure — simple spreadsheets, weekly check-ins, a written product strategy — so people can make good decisions without asking permission for everything. The goal is never process for its own sake; it's restoring the speed and clarity the founders had on day one.

As a PM, your job is not just to decide what to build — it's to make sure it actually gets out the door. That means writing clear goals so engineers aren't stuck waiting for your input, creating repeatable processes so launching feels easy, and pushing conversations into public channels so decisions don't get trapped in your inbox.