Your Startup Will Die If Your PMs Don't Master These 5 Skills

We hired product managers in 2025 to help Blaze grow revenue faster. Externally, that means increasing the value of our product by shipping the features our customers wanted most—on time, with high quality, and with clear documentation. Internally, it means providing leverage to the team—helping engineers, designers, and leadership move faster, do more, and execute better.

But being a PM at an early-stage, fast-growing, high-performance company like Blaze is not the same as being a PM at Google or Amazon. In Big Tech, PMs have layers of process, stability, and support. Here, they don’t. At a startup, PMs are directly responsible for whether the company keeps momentum or collapses under its own chaos. That’s why we say your startup will live or die by whether your PMs master key early stage superpowers.

Many founders struggle with figuring out what to optimize for when they recruit their first PMs, so I thought I'd give our secret formula for how to hire a product team that accelerates revenue at your startup.

Superpower #1: Extreme Ownership

At Blaze, a PM doesn’t just own features—they own outcomes. Product area adoption, retention, engagement, quality, and pace of improvement are all on you. It’s your call if a feature is “good enough” or “done,” and you’ll be held accountable if it isn’t. You can’t wait for others to flag issues. You must surface and solve them yourself.

To do that well, you have to be an expert on customer expectations and represent them relentlessly throughout the development process. If something is incomplete or subpar, you say so and fix it. Without this level of ownership, we risk shipping work that’s late, sloppy, or incomplete. That erodes trust, hurts retention, and drags morale down across the team.

Superpower #2: Excellent Project Management

At Blaze, there’s no separate ops function for product, design, or GTM. As a PM, you are the operations team for your feature areas. That means staying one step ahead by:

• Knowing exactly where a feature is in development.

• Proactively communicating progress and risks across docs, Linear, Slack, and meetings.

• Arriving prepared to standups, 1:1s, MMS, and All Hands with updates and a focused set of incomplete tasks or open questions.

• Anticipating and mitigating inevitable delays, scope shifts, or directional changes to keep projects on track.

The best PMs keep the team aligned, unblocked, and moving. Without that discipline, work feels chaotic, mistakes multiply, and both customers and teammates suffer.

Superpower #3: Fast, Decisive Prioritization

The ultimate job of a PM is to decide what to build, in what order, and why. At Blaze, where we’ll always have more to do than we have resources, that task is critical. Our PMs make quick, daily calls on what to do—and just as importantly, what not to do—so their teams can move forward with clarity and confidence.

Great decision-making requires deep domain expertise, the ability to estimate high-level technical effort, and a clear sense of the customer’s north star for quality. It also requires the courage to say “no” gracefully but firmly to protect the team’s focus. Without fast prioritization, teams work on the wrong things—or too many things—leading to wasted productivity and frustrated customers.

Superpower #4: Simplicity as a Multiplier

Because we need to build a lot, quickly, and at high quality, complexity is the enemy. It clouds what’s important, slows teams down, and creates mistakes. Simplicity, by contrast, compounds impact—it accelerates progress and multiplies outcomes.

That’s why our PMs keep it simple in everything: writing PRDs and tickets, communicating goals and requirements, and organizing updates across Linear, docs, and Slack. When they succeed, the whole team moves faster. When they fail, they become the source of problems rather than the driver of solutions.

Superpower #5: Lane Discipline

We hire great people, and the best way for PMs to create leverage is to focus on their own areas of ownership and let others fully own theirs. Strong lane discipline means knowing clearly where your responsibility begins and ends, trusting others to do their jobs, and keeping your energy focused on your swim lane while supporting the team’s broader goals.

Of course, when the company needs it, everyone pitches in. But by default, crossing lanes creates thrash, slows progress, and increases tension. Good lane discipline builds trust. And trust creates speed.

The Ultimate Survival Test

These five superpowers aren’t “nice-to-haves.” They are existential for PMs to succeed at startup and produce more value for the team and business than the resources they take. If your PMs own outcomes, keep projects on track, make fast calls, simplify relentlessly, and stay in their lanes, momentum compounds. Engineering moves faster. Customers are happier. Leadership gets to focus on strategy instead of firefighting.

If they don’t? You get chaos disguised as growth—until growth stops entirely.

Audit your PM function against these five traits. Can your PMs deliver them? If not, you don’t just have a skills gap. You have a survival problem.