PMs are becoming builders.

I shipped a Mac app this year. Two years ago that would have been an engineering hire — at minimum two senior contractors, a quarter of runway, weeks of coordination overhead. This year I built it solo while running product at Loyco.

I'm not a Swift developer. I'm a product manager who taught himself enough Swift to make Imprint by collaborating with an AI tool that's now, basically, part of my hand.

That's the shift I want to talk about.

The handoff was the friction

Most discussions of "PMs and AI" focus on the wrong layer. Yes, you can use AI to write specs and summarise call transcripts. Sure. But the real change is that PMs can now ship — not just describe.

This breaks the implicit contract of the job. The PM was always the person who decided the shape of the thing, then handed it to engineering to build. That handoff was the friction. The cost of translating intent into code, and code into product, was high enough that most ideas died there — not because they were bad ideas, but because they weren't worth the activation energy.

When a PM can prototype the idea themselves, the handoff happens later or disappears entirely. The PM walks into the engineering meeting with a working version of the thing, not a Figma frame. The conversation shifts from "should we build this?" to "should we keep building this in production?" — a fundamentally better question to be debating.

Building yourself makes you better at the rest

There's something I didn't anticipate when I started: building yourself makes you a much better PM. You stop writing specs that hand-wave around hard parts. You start noticing the ten implementation details that a Figma frame couldn't have shown you. You earn a kind of credibility with engineers that I don't think there's another way to get. They know you've been in the weeds — because they read your code.

The PM-as-builder isn't going to replace engineers. (I'm a worse engineer than the ones I work with, and I know it.) What it's going to do is delete an entire category of low-leverage product work. The "specify, defend, hand off, iterate" cycle gets compressed into "build, show, iterate." Roles get muddier.

Worth saying: if you're a PM today and you're not building, you're going to be competing — for jobs, for roles, for influence — with PMs who do. That's the new floor.