How AI Prototyping Changed the Way I Build Products?

In my previous post, I covered the pros and cons of vibe coding, but now I want to reflect on the lessons learned while I built Link Spaghetti without writing a single line of code. To give you a bit of context, I stopped writing code over five years ago when frameworks like React became popular. I struggled to grasp the concepts of state management and components as a whole. But with vibe coding, I was able to not only build an entire app end-to-end, but I even shipped it to the real world with actual users. Here are the top three lessons I learned while building this product 

Strong need to articulate your business needs 

While building Link Spaghetti using Claude Sonnet 4, I regularly encountered loops while debugging bugs or adding new features. The issue wasn't the AI, but it was my prompt. When I provided clear prompts with detailed breakdowns of user flows and user stories, Claude was able to give me exactly what I wanted to see on my screen. Building the app helped me improve my stakeholder management skills (considering Claude a stakeholder here), communication skills and articulating requirements in the simplest way possible. The lessons are invaluable, and I can see myself writing better requirements now. 

Empathy with the development team 

As a product owner, it is easy to lose sight of all the hard work your development team does. Without the current knowledge of the tech stack, we can estimate tasks as either lower or higher priority. While building Link Spaghetti, I gained insight into the minor issues that arise during deployment and encountered merge conflicts on Git. While Copilot handled most issues, deploying my app on AWS or working with MongoDB clusters proved to be quite challenging. I just had to pull out a notebook and write down my user flows and data flows to ensure everything is working as expected. The entire process of building an app end-to-end helped me realize the hard work people put into building, debugging and maintaining a product. 

Technical Feasibility and Trade-offs 

As a product manager, it's easy to assign a new ticket and hope things improve quickly. However, hope is not a strategy; as a product manager, you must make trade-offs and assess the feasibility of any feature you consider adding. While vibe coding, it was very easy to come up with new features. However, introducing these features midway through the product development, I saw how Copilot had to refactor a lot of the code and sometimes even start from scratch. The entire process helped me realize the value of building a strong roadmap and clearly stating it to the dev team so they can know how to structure the code better by understanding what is coming down the pipe. 

Communicate better with stakeholders

While vibe coding, I considered Claude as one of my stakeholders and noticed that whenever my prompts were vague or lacked information, the process would get stuck in loops trying to improve the product. However, with clear prompts, detailed user flows, and well-documented user stories, adding new features became easy. Vibe coding helped me communicate more effectively and to the point, without creating any confusion. The formula is simple, providing a clear context on why a feature is essential, followed by how you envision the user flows and stating the happy path for this feature. 

Test and validate your assumptions

Vibe coding is a perfect way for you, as a product manager, to test our products by building working prototypes. Vibe Coding enables you to test new features independently, without overloading your dev team. Additionally, if you understand technology, debugging and validating your assumptions can be much easier. With the help of quick prototypes, you can get feedback from upper management or your dev team and socialize the idea of adding new features to your product. The realm of product management is changing, allowing you to bring much-needed features into your customers' hands without spending your dev team's time or energy.

Conclusion 

Whether you are developing a new product or envisioning a new feature for your existing one, vibe coding can help you save time, validate ideas, and enhance communication and roadmapping skills as a product manager. All it takes is one good prompt to save your company a lot of time and resources by trying vibe coding. What have you built recently with Vibe coding? Do you think it is getting out of control, or will it stay here for a long time? Leave your thoughts in the comment section.

If you enjoyed this post, here are a few ways to go deeper:

• Check out my Prompt Engineering Guide: Prompt Engineering Playbook
• Connect with me on LinkedIn
• Read more on my blog
• Try what I built: LinkSpaghetti

Let me know what you're building, happy to discuss ideas!