Are Product Managers the PERFECT Vibe Coders?...

I don't know if all product managers understand what they are building. I don't know whether you follow my LinkedIn shenanigans, but I I watched a really interesting podcast about the fact that product managers are really well placed to become vibe coders because they're so used to gathering requirements, the right requirements, and explaining them to someone or handing those requirements off to someone and just not really caring about the implementation. That's a hot take. I would say it's a semi-h hot take. I I say it's a hot hot take because I don't Okay, I don't Now what I'm gonna say is probably offensive to some people. I don't know if all product managers understand what they are building. The ones that I've seen a lot of them have been good at managing people. They've been more like people managers than product managers. I I think that's like a better name that would fit them because the best product manager would be an engineer or a designer who had to become a product manager just because they had to run a team and you know manage other people but I certainly know product managers who do not understand the technical part and they don't even understand the design at all. So that's the typical product managers that comes to my mind. I've read some stuff about like Apple level product managers where the good ones are not you know just product managers they are like engineers and designers and design engineers turning product managers because they have to but the thing is that mentality that idea is is not alien and I think that exists across the board I know plenty of designers who don't think about UX as an example they just think about the little function they're building in isolation and that's all they care about. This mentality of like you go deep into one whatever your discipline is is not crazy. Uh but at the same time, isn't this the perfect candidate for vibe coding? I think I understand like yeah product managers who even if they have just a sheet of features and whatever even if they don't understand it they could still wipe code. So, sure. It was a a podcast that I watched that gave me this idea and it was basically a couple of project managers or product owners. It's the uh how how I AI and it's this guy. He's the CEO of a company. I looked on his on his LinkedIn. He's got three tasks. Create PRD uh generate tasks and task list. And these are basically he set up what it takes to create a PRD. What is a PRD? product requirements document. Okay. And this is a conversation piece. Then it's basically saying, look, here's what I think makes a good product requirements doc. Ask me these questions back. And then the AI does that. And out of the back of that, generates tasks, follows the generate tasks markdown file inside of cursor to generate a task list, and then actually implement that task list. So, it's a three-step solution to building out a product or a feature or something like that. And it's it's through a conversation. That was the thing that got my cogs turning. The role of sort of mid senior developers are going to be more in the world of really taking their time and thinking about their their prompt, however they come up with that prompt. It could be a process like this, like generating markdown files and all the rest of it. Oh, and actually you've got a he's got a tasks folder here which it dumps in every single task that it has to do. So really organized in that way. But regardless, these are product owners. These are product people. They're not developers. He's got a really sick process for writing code. It's checking things off as well. You can see here when it's doing these tasks, it's checking them off. This is very interesting what I've been doing with my cursor because I have a developer who's like writing a lot of code and whenever I want to also post about it, I use cursor to explain things to me. So it's not just to write code but explain things to me and I was thinking if I should store everything in one file and I had no idea about this but now it gave me the idea that this actually exists and I can store things in a just text doc. I never thought about it like this because I'm not coming from this developer mindset. I never used a code editor as basically a folder and put all the data and documents they want in it. Yeah. And again, this is coming from product people. But the thing is, you know, no one really knows what they're doing with this stuff. AI's got a mind of it. You're grappling with a with a wild horse and you're hoping that you can tame it a little bit. But it's nice to see these sort of workflows coming out of the woodwork and interesting ways to try and better your coding skills. But I do think we are generally going in the direction of your time will be spent as a developer will be spent crafting the prompt and making sure the requirements are there which is very much a product manager's job. The other conversation I had on on the weekend was about like we're in this weird middle ground right now where people coming out of university are still in this void of what junior developers are currently defined as but that the learning is now expedited. They need to know that AI is there to help them learn and learn in a complete different way that's bespoke to their needs. Whether they've got learning difficulties, whether they're visual, whether they're auditory, you know, whatever the thing that we call junior developer is just now miles above what was previously junior developer. They're going to be actually writing code and creating pull requests on day one. And then it's the senior devs who are then able to maybe talk to them about what their prompt was and shephering that code through to to production. And that's where I think Mid and Senior are. But what do I know? I'm just a guy with a hat.