I came to product to keep building

I started in design. From 2011 to 2019 I ran a small studio, mostly helping startups go from zero to one: the first MVP, the first design hire, the scramble toward product-market fit. The thread running through all of it was being hands-on, close to the thing being made. At Livingly I started pushing code next to the engineers, mostly prototypes, sometimes just CSS, which I had a slightly unreasonable obsession with.

I moved into product in 2019/2020, and the honest reason is narrower than the usual story. After stepping back from being a founder to join Livingly full-time as UX lead, I wanted more control over the narrative: to push for the things I thought mattered. Product looked like the seat with the most leverage for that. It was the place where a gut feeling could become something real, where I’d have the time to dig into the data, validate the hunch, and push it with the right narrative behind it instead of throwing ideas at the wall. I still don’t have a clean definition of the job, and AI is blurring the lines further by the month. But looking back, what I wanted was simple enough: to keep building new things, with a little more say in which ones.

A few years in, I came across “technical product manager” and thought it fit better. The label was never really the point. The point was temperament. I would always rather go deep on how something actually works, and how to bend it into something better or something else entirely, than project-manage the building of it. The PMs I trust most are the ones who could open the hood if they had to.

That is the whole of my opinion: a product manager should be a builder. Not a full-time engineer, but someone who can make the thing, or a rough version of it, with their own hands. It was always useful. AI has made it close to essential. A PM who can build, working with a designer and a developer, is a terrific trio, and the old ratio of one PM to many engineers stops being the bottleneck it was. Even alone, the meaning of “prototyping” has changed for good: you can carry an idea much further by yourself before it ever needs a team, which means you reach the only question that matters, whether the thing actually works, far sooner and far cheaper.

It is also part of why I have stayed in monetization. Monetization is a flood of small items, each serving some larger assumption, and the craft is finding the smallest change that moves the most, which rewards exactly the hands-on, go-deep instinct that pulled me here in the first place. The flip side is newly true: a big bet that used to cost a quarter can now fit in a sprint, at a fraction of the investment, so you can afford more big swings, not fewer. Either way, the job keeps coming back to building.

The role keeps shifting under all of us, and I have made my peace with not having the final word on what a product manager is. The through-line, for me, was never the title. It was the itch to make the thing, from a seat close to engineering and design but planted at the intersection of everyone else. Building the right thing takes that too: understanding how the business actually works, deeply enough to know which knobs to pull. In monetization that is not optional; it is the job.