Coding is no longer the hard part

For years the explanation for why operations teams don't build their own software was simple: they can't code. Engineers are scarce, ops requests go to the bottom of the backlog, and everyone lives with the spreadsheet.

Then AI made coding close to free. So this year we started a builder program at an apparel company. Ten people from across the company, marketing to supply chain to finance, spend half their time for a quarter building AI workflows for their own departments. While some have a more technical background, others had never used the tools before day one.

People are no longer blocked on their ability to code, but they may be more quietly blocked.

They've been blocked on the subtle, quiet lessons that I’ve learned from my experiences as a Product Manager. As Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina “"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". Applied to Product Management, one can say "Successful projects are all alike; every unsuccessful project fails in its own way"

Mis-steps typical of new Malleable builders include:

• Automating a process for a teammate before fully understanding the workflow, leading to rework.
• Building multiple steps of the workflow before running any of it, and finding weeks later that step one won't work as imagined.
• Creating a second copy of a workflow, leading to one always being left behind as the other is improved.

None of those are AI problems. The AI did exactly what it was asked. They're the problems Product Managers spend a career learning to avoid: know who the user is, ship a thin slice before the whole thing, build for the person who maintains it. Nobody taught this to the rest of the company because the rest of the company never had to build anything. There was always an engineering team in between.

Now there isn't. The ops person describes the workflow and the software appears. Which means the ops person is the Product Manager, whether they signed up for it or not.

Coding removed the barrier to building. It didn't remove the barrier to building the right thing. What a builder program actually teaches is Product Management. The tool is the easy part.