Product Managers as developers?

This is just a fancy title to get your attention in relation to the recent Shopify announcement that they will include a coding portion in all Product Manager interviews.
Because they really didn’t say that a PM should do maintainable, production ready code.

But the gist of this really resonates with me, especially now when it seems that we all agree that AI is good enough for prototyping.

To be able to not only produce roadmaps, PowerPoints, help with user stories, and so on, but to create some artifacts that probably would have to be created by more specialized members — either designers if we were talking about UI, or engineers if we were talking about more technical stuff — is really amazing.

Everything that helps visualize an idea is very important because it helps with communication with all the members of the project, regardless of them being part of the development team (that will ultimately have to build it) or the managerial team that will have to assess if they will finance the idea.
And of course, if you’re closer to your external clients or customers, to be able to show them things that they can relate to, and that usually means UI not code, is a really important tool, either for sales or for project status communication.

And even if we’re talking about more backend or infrastructure stuff, to be able to try ideas (like in a spike) that would take a week, and do that in one or two days allows for other things to happen, one of them being the sense that we can do more experiments before committing to the final plan.

In my experience, firing up VS Code with Github Copilot, or Cline or Claude Code, and feed it with some ideas and ask it to generate a UI for this, has been a very productive way of helping me to get a better understanding of the challenges that i’m trying to tackle in a new feature or requirement.


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