Beyond the PRD: Vibe Coding and the Future of PM Prototyping
How AI is reshaping the role of PMs, collapsing the product stack, and changing how we validate ideas
When I first heard the term “vibe coding”, the first thing I imagined was a bunch of surfers waiting for the perfect wave. Vibes has permeated the internet and GenZ now are “vibes only”. It’s gone into the corporate culture and it’s infused our code base. For software, vibe coding is being used to define the moment when individuals build software without actually changing a line of code themselves. They describe what they want to build and voila, it’s built. And it’s impacting how the product development process is being defined.
In 2025, PMs no longer write PRDs. They’re expected to demo a product in Slack by EOW to the team.
The new era of product development
We’re entering a new era of product development — one where prototyping isn’t reserved for designers or engineers, but expected from product managers too. I can’t say I am technical, unless you count my countless beginner classes in Python, but with tools like GPT, Replit, and Vercel, the barrier to creating interactive demos has dropped dramatically. I can just open up Claude and type in: “Build a responsive front-end for a dashboard that tracks team OKRs with a form to submit updates and a timeline view” — and in seconds, I’ll have the React scaffolding.
I could copy-paste that into Cursor to preview it on local host, tweak it live, then connect a basic backend using Supabase or Firebase, and then deploy it in under 30 minutes. It’s no longer about writing perfect PRDs or waiting on mockups.
Today’s PMs can skip words in a product requirement document or the static 2D world of Figma and share real, working prototypes — often before a sprint even begins. This flips the traditional product process on its head: instead of telling your team what to build with ambiguous inaccurate words, you can show them what it might look like. That subtle shift changes everything about how we validate ideas, collaborate across functions, and build momentum around the products we believe in.
Beware of risks with prototyping
However, prototyping is disruptive — not in the technological sense, but in the “this breaks our existing rituals” kind of way. Most of our time as product managers is still spent in customer validation, understanding pain points, sizing opportunities. Until now, we’ve relied on design or eng partners to bring ideas to life.
When a PM shares a working prototype, it can short-circuit that process — skipping ahead to execution without giving others space to co-create. That raises real questions: Are we helping move faster, or stepping out of our lane? Did we only bring spaghetti code and not really help the development process nor build trust with our engineering counterparts?
… How do we bring our teams along when the tools move faster than the process?
And this is where things get messy.
It’s not that product managers didn’t have tools before. We’ve always had the ability to wireframe and show our creativity.
What’s changed is that we now have the power to ship things that look finished.
And the truth is that power can break trust.
If product managers are meant to be facilitators — the connective tissue between engineering, design, and business — then vibe coding introduces a new kind of tension. When PMs start prototyping without consent, dropping polished demos into research sessions or sprint planning, it can feel like a hostile takeover.
Designers may feel sidelined. Engineers may feel like the prototype is a good idea but not actually something that could be pushed to production. And suddenly, instead of accelerating collaboration, you're disempowering the very people you need to build the product.
That’s the irony. The reason some teams start cutting product managers out of decisions isn’t because PMs aren’t technical enough — it’s because they’re too quick to act alone.
So now the question isn’t should PMs prototype? We’ve already crossed that line. The real question is: how do we prototype in a way that strengthens the team rather than fractures it? What new rituals, boundaries, and shared expectations do we need so that everyone feels ownership — even when the tools make it easy to go solo?
Because the collapse of product/design/engineering isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s already happening.
Build trust with engineering and design and spark joy with prototypes
Start with trust. As product managers, our job isn’t just to build — it’s to bring people along. With AI accelerating how quickly we can prototype, the opportunity isn’t to replace engineering or design — it’s to collaborate more tightly, experiment more often, and validate ideas before they calcify into roadmaps.
But to do that, you have to rethink how you share ideas. In most large orgs, alignment is still the bottleneck. It’s not that your idea isn’t good — it’s that no one saw it early enough to shape it with you. So don’t wait for formal sprint planning. Share that half-finished prototype in Slack. Record a 2-minute walkthrough of your concept and post it in your team channel. Bring your designer in when it’s still ugly. Ask your engineer, “What would make this easier to build?”
Because the best way to shape the future of product is to model what it can look like: cross-functional teams building fast, learning faster, and trusting each other enough to blur the lines without stepping on toes. The future of product isn’t static. It’s increasingly fluid, messy, and fast. The PMs who thrive will not only be the fastest builders — they’ll be the best facilitators of momentum.
Two years ago, you might have shipped some improvements every quarter and big updates to your product every year. Now, you can ship big step function changes to your customers every quarter by making the whole team more productive and building faster, together.
We’re not just witnessing a shift in tools — we’re living through a shift in how product gets built. Vibe coding may have started as a meme, but it’s become a signal of something deeper: the collapse of boundaries between thinking and building.
For product managers, this isn’t just a technical unlock — it’s a relationship building exercise. Move faster with your team, not ahead of them.
In a world where anyone can build faster than ever, the teams who win won’t just be the ones who ship more — they’ll be the ones who align faster, too.
If you’d like to read more on the topic, here are some posts I’ve found valuable:
