AI Turned Me Into a Better Product Manager Than a Better Developer

A few weeks ago, I decided to build a personal website.

Nothing particularly ambitious. Just a place to write about AI, products, leadership, and whatever else I happen to be learning.

A few years ago, this project probably wouldn't have happened. Not because it was technically difficult, but because it sat in that awkward category of things that require just enough time and effort to keep getting postponed.

This time was different.

With the help of AI tools, I went from idea to a live website on my own domain in a matter of hours.

But that's not the interesting part.

The interesting part is that I barely felt like a developer during the process.

I felt like a product manager.

The AI generated code, suggested designs, created content structures, and helped troubleshoot deployment issues. The bottleneck wasn't implementation. The bottleneck was deciding what I actually wanted.

Should the website be a consulting site or a personal blog?

What kind of audience was I trying to build?

What should the design communicate?

What should the first article be about?

The quality of the output was directly related to the clarity of my thinking.

When I gave vague instructions, I got vague results. When I had a clear vision, the AI moved surprisingly fast.

That felt familiar.

When experienced engineers work on a project, they don't need someone hovering over every line of code. What they need is context, direction, constraints, and good feedback.

Working with AI felt remarkably similar.

The better I could explain the outcome I wanted, the better the result became.

This has made me wonder if we're focusing on the wrong skills when we talk about the impact of AI on software development.

A lot of the conversation revolves around whether AI will replace developers.

I suspect a more interesting question is whether AI increases the value of product thinking.

If implementation becomes easier, then framing the problem becomes more important.

The ability to answer questions like:

• What are we trying to build?
• Who is it for?
• What does good look like?
• What tradeoffs are acceptable?

may become more valuable than ever.

I'm not suggesting technical skills stop mattering. Architecture, security, performance, and engineering judgment remain critical.

But for the first time in my career, I finished a software project feeling that coding wasn't the scarce resource.

Clear thinking was.

AI didn't make me feel like a 10x developer.

It made me appreciate the value of product management more than ever.