Becoming a Product Builder

The Context

Around 180 days ago I wrote “Must Go Faster“. I was grappling with what AI meant for my job. I’d spent the first 15 years of my career building products mostly the same way. Find the idea, prioritize it against the other ideas, work with the designers and engineers to understand the idea, work with everyone to build the product, measure its quality, communicate the outcome, repeat.

I think the reason I felt an inherent resistance to AI was that it felt as though it was fundamentally changing how building products would work. Enough of a change that it felt like my 15 years of hard-earned experience was about to be moot. The kid coming out of college was going to know more about building products than I was. It was a tough pill to swallow.

Reflecting on it, I think moments like this happen to every career, where something changes so drastically that your old experience becomes far less valuable. You’re faced with a choice when moments like this occur.

1. Put your foot down and say “new way bad, my way good”

2. Change.

I love change.

The Problem

The natural next step? Start building products the new way and get the experience. Use my existing experience as a multiplier to radically level up my product building game.

The problem was I was a people manager at a large org, with systems far too complex for me to just play around with. My job was mostly people and strategy; the work of building things was a bit too far outside my realm of responsibility, and my calendar was filled to the brim with the relationship and strategy work that comes with high-level management at a large organization.

The Solution

Around 90 Days ago, I quit that role. I decided to take the leap of faith, to follow the happy path I laid out in “Must Go Faster“, which sounded like this

“If AI is what its proponents believe it to be, AI will allow me to build things I could have never dreamed of building before at a pace previously unfathomable.”

I joined a growing startup, Another Nine, as the VP of Product and Technology. Now, that may sound like a title that would be filled with even more people management and strategy, but at a 10-person company, there can only be so many meetings. And my organization size? 1.

The beauty of this role is that someday I will get back to being a manager. As Another Nine grows, so too will my domain. I’ll get back to a part of the work I love, growing people and their careers. But for now, I am a 1 man organization, and all I do is build.

One of the many reasons I took this role is that it’s like a paid language immersion course in the new AI-driven ways of product building. Every day, all day, I sit with my bots and advance the the company’s technology any way I see fit. I have maybe 4 hours of meetings a week. The CEO trusts me enough that I barely have to convince him my ideas are any good. I have a growing company with a myriad of problems to solve. I have everything I need to learn, and I’m getting paid to do it.

The Result

Someday, this quantity of output might seem normal (and yes, it’s output, not outcomes; leave me alone you data-driven zealots I’m doing my best). But writing it right now feels like bragging, especially given the pace at which things were built in my first 15 years of product.

Here’s what I built in the first quarter at a new organization, from 0 to 100 PR’s.

Did you catch that last one? I built an iOS and Android app. I don’t know how to program. It took me 4 weeks.

This would be the equivalent output of an entire organization of people at previous organizations. Hell, just building Student Discounts in a past life took an entire quarter with multiple teams working on it. At Another Nine, we had the idea on a Monday, and it was live on Tuesday.*

Quick Asterisk

While I am proud of everything I have built, I know that building for small-scale at a small organization is a wildly different thing than building for large-scale at large organizations. While nothing I’ve built is a toy, I don’t know how it will hold up to the pressures of a growing business from a stability or security perspective. These are things I will have to learn along the way.

I also have to give credit to our development agency, Mtn Haus, who have:

• Built an amazing foundation of backend services and architecture before I arrived for me to layer these products on top of.
• Reviewed my PR’s tirelessly and with grace and given me the confidence and adjustments required to productionalize all of this.

Thank you to you all and the engineers who put up with a crazy product guy trying to build fast.

Loving the Bomb

The title of this post is a tribute to the movie “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” It’s an old classic, a satirical take on how a government determines that building a doomsday device capable of destroying humanity will save humanity. It’s all I could think of when thinking about how much I love building with AI.

Part of why I’ve built so much in the past 90 days is because when I said “all I do is build,” I was being somewhat serious. Yes, my workday is filled with building. But once my kids and wife go to bed, I spend another 1-3 hours almost every night building other things. Not because my boss expects it of me, but because it’s fun.

I’ve loved building things since I was a kid. Growing up, I wanted to be an architect, and since college, I’ve always found time to build things in the physical world. But in the digital world, I’ve never been able to build much myself; I’ve always had to build through people. I’ve always had to convince someone to help me bring what I wanted to see in the digital world to life. That’s the fundamental change AI has created. I can build software now, and it’s addictive.

So, is AI going to destroy us all? Probably. But damn if I’m not having a blast riding it down.