Embed engineers directly with customers to hear feedback and ship solutions, often on the same day. This radical structure eliminates layers of communication (Product Managers, Customer Success) and scales the 'founder energy' of talking to users and immediately building what they need.

MongoDB's CEO attributes his business acumen as a product person to constant customer interaction. This goes beyond feature requests to understanding their broader problems, buying processes, and deployment challenges. This intimacy allows product leaders to anticipate market needs and build solutions that have a clear path to market, moving beyond the "if you build it, they will come" fallacy.

True product intuition isn't just from standard discovery calls. It's forged by directly engaging with customers' most urgent problems on escalation calls. This unfiltered feedback provides conviction and data-backed confidence for decision-making.

In the pre-product-market fit stage (the first ~20 deals), the sales leader's primary role is not just closing revenue, but acting as a product manager. They must be in every meeting to gather objections, find pockets of value, and translate raw market feedback into actionable insights for the engineering team.

To remain agile and responsive, CEOs should avoid fully delegating all operational roles. BrandShield's CEO leads product and manages key accounts himself. This direct pipeline to customer feedback and market threats allows for rapid translation of insights into the company's product roadmap.

The traditional PM function, which builds sequential, multi-month roadmaps based on customer feedback, is ill-suited for AI. With core capabilities evolving weekly, AI companies must embed research teams directly with customer-facing teams to stay agile, rendering the classic PM role ineffective.

To build trust and deliver value, product managers cannot be 'tourists' who drop in on other departments transactionally. They must become 'locals'—deeply integrated, trusted partners who are regulars in cross-functional conversations and are seen as being 'in the battle' together with sales, marketing, and other teams.

Harvey's CEO found his product decisions were worse when he isolated himself to work on strategy. He realized his best product insights come from being deeply involved in sales calls 24/7. The direct feedback loop from talking to customers is more valuable for roadmap planning than any internal brainstorming session.

Even with a productive sales team, founders should periodically run sales conversations. Jack Altman continued doing sales calls to stay connected to the market. It's the most direct way to understand what resonates with customers, what feels hard, and what lights them up, providing an unfiltered view of product-market fit.