If I can offer any advice at all to product people struggling to figure out the current moment, it’s to just start building stuff.

Anything you feel like building, just go try and build it.

It’s less about whether the idea is good or will succeed, and more about throwing out the old assumptions about what your job was – opportunity sizing, prioritization, managing a backlog, etc etc. – and getting into the mindset of just building stuff based on what your sense is telling you to build.

Start with a personal thing. For me, that was Unstream – an app idea I had that came into being 2 days later and now has a few hundred users every month.

Then, look into what it would take to start building something in your day job. It could just be a process improvement or automation. It could even be a change to the product you manage! But don’t be afraid to push against the boundaries of what’s possible.

It’s wild to think about, but a lot of things we used to do as PMs – things we used to consider essential parts of our daily work – are basically irrelevant now. Who needs to carefully assess the tradeoffs of prioritizing one feature over another, if Claude can plan and build both for you in a few hours? Who needs to do a ton of user research before building anything, when you can build your own prototype – perhaps even in your product itself – and share that with users?

These are all things we’re starting to do at @Buffer. I built 2 entire features for which I’m collecting feedback internally right now, plus a few other small enhancements that are just awaiting a final code review. We’re soon at a point where I can start sharing these with groups of real users, thereby shortcutting the “old way” of doing user research entirely.

To be clear, I didn’t actually code anything – but I don’t think that’s the point. Instead, I’m using my own product/UX sense, feedback from users, our internal hive mind of functional expertise, and a deep understanding of our product strategy to simply act.

I’m not stealing my engineers’ jobs either. They are doing invaluable work standing up & maintaining structures to undergird the product and uphold our technical strategy. Their work makes my new work possible, but it’s also never done.

I also still don’t know how I feel about AI existentially – but I recognize that it’s causing me to move faster and in more exciting ways than I’ve been able to before, and it will help me do things I couldn’t before in my daily work.