A strange thing is happening in product right now: PMs are prototyping. Designers are coding. Engineers are writing prompts.
Everyone’s vibe coding.
And it feels both exciting and a little absurd.
The upside-down industry
I never thought I’d see a world where a PM’s biggest contribution was spinning up prototypes. A year ago, if you told me PMs would be building prototypes in Figma (Make), I would have laughed.
But here we are. At Intercom, designers are shipping fixes directly. At small startups, PMs are stitching together backends with Cursor. Engineers are spending more time prompt-engineering than pushing code.
The lines between roles have never been blurrier.
The wrong kind of progress
Here’s the risk: we confuse momentum for progress.
Prototypes feel good. They’re tangible. They make you feel like you’re moving forward. But the hardest part of product has never been execution. It’s:
Knowing what to build
Creating something people actually love
Figuring out how to make it valuable enough to use or pay for
Execution is cheap now. Judgment is what’s scarce. As Preston Attebery put it, “Once everyone can make an app, we will remember that the hard part about apps isn’t making the app.”
Where PMs actually add value
This is why I get uneasy about PMs being celebrated for prototyping. It’s useful, but it’s not the job.
A PM’s leverage comes from judgment. From understanding tradeoffs, clarifying impact, and pointing the team toward the right problem.
The same is true for designers. Writing code is fine, but our edge is in turning ambiguity into clarity and building experiences people care about.
So while everyone is vibe coding, the real skill is knowing what deserves to exist in the first place.