Product Is More Than Prompts

Summary

In this episode of the Aboard Podcast, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade discuss how the rise of AI and “vibe coding” is disrupting the traditional roles of product management and design. Rich defines the ideal product manager as a “three-legged stool” balancing design usability, business objectives, and engineering constraints. However, the hosts argue that the current AI boom has allowed the engineering “leg” to dominate the conversation, often at the expense of user experience and business context. While AI allows for the rapid shipping of software, the results frequently reflect the underlying data models rather than intuitive tools designed for human needs.

The hosts predict that this engineering-centric phase is temporary and that the “stock” of product managers and designers will soon rise again. They suggest that the traditional role is evolving into a four-pronged discipline, where the professional must also act as a “diplomat” to AI-based systems. Ford warns that as “ship risk” disappears and tools become accessible to everyone — including executives — process and strategic alignment will become more critical than ever. Their primary advice for product professionals is to lead with their core disciplines of empathy and business strategy while learning enough about the technical landscape to effectively interrogate and guide AI-driven development.

Highlights

”Product managers are meeting people”

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“No, product managers are meeting people. Let’s be clear.” — Rich Ziade, 3:20

”Design has been absolutely shown the door”

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“I cannot emphasize enough how badly design, and by design, I mean user experience design, like good intuitive design, design has been marginalized in this explosion of like AI and code.” — Paul Ford, 9:00

”The engineers have taken all the coins and they’ve run away”

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“What no one has noticed is the engineers have taken all the coins and they’ve run away. They’ve left the party.” — Paul Ford, 9:49

”Ship risk was the organizing principle of our industry”

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“Ship risk was the organizing principle of our industry. There is no ship risk anymore. I guarantee you no matter what you want to do, I can get that software over the line.” — Paul Ford, 18:58

”I don’t want you anywhere near me right now. You’re too dangerous.”

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“If you told me that, I’d be like, ‘I don’t want you anywhere near me right now. You’re too dangerous.’” — Rich Ziade, 22:25

”Your boss is going to have access to the same vibe coding tools”

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“Your boss is going to have access to the same vibe coding tools that the engineers do.” — Paul Ford, 17:31

Key Points

• Intro banter and jokes (0:00) - Paul and Rich open with snail jokes and carrot riddles before getting into the topic
• What each role does (3:00) - Engineers code, designers design, product managers ask both groups to do their jobs — primarily through meetings
• Product managers as gatherers (3:22) - Rich explains he thinks through problems via dialogue, which people mistake for guiding to a predetermined answer
• Vibe coding excitement vs. product craft (4:34) - Paul observes that AI conversation centers on shipping speed, while the craft of product management is being neglected
• Most vibe coded apps are just database reflections (5:18) - Vibe coded products tend to map one-to-one with the data model rather than being designed around user needs
• The three-legged stool of product management (6:36) - Rich defines the apex PM as having design usability, business context, and technical understanding
• The “inspect the element” hiring metric (7:49) - Paul’s test for whether a PM knows enough technically to right-click and identify broken code
• AI has let engineering dominate (9:00) - Engineering has sucked all the oxygen out of the room, marginalizing design and business context
• Vibe coded interfaces reflect the stack, not the user (9:41) - Most vibe coded interfaces are one-to-one reflections of database schemas
• Engineers took the coins (9:49) - While everyone worries about engineering jobs, engineers have actually gained the most power in this shift
• Product managers will be needed again (10:50) - Paul reassures designers and PMs that engineers will come back hat in hand
• Claude Code launched like it was 1983 (12:53) - Rich notes that Claude Code proudly lives in a terminal, a “love letter to engineering”
• 99.5% of people don’t think in the shape of software (15:59) - Paul argues most humans cannot naturally think in modules, components, and data flows
• A fourth prong: diplomat to LLM systems (17:31) - Product management is evolving from three prongs to four, adding AI systems diplomacy
• Boss with vibe coding tools (18:00) - The worst scenario: your boss can now refactor the entire system on Sunday night before Monday morning
• Ship risk has disappeared (18:58) - The organizing principle of the software industry — the risk of not being able to ship — no longer exists
• Product managers’ stock will surge (15:18) - Rich predicts PMs who hang tight and learn tools will see their value increase dramatically
• Lead with your discipline (19:54) - Rich advises designers and PMs not to abandon their expertise to become pseudo-engineers
• Two product manager interview scenarios (21:28) - Rich role-plays two PM candidates: one who just prompts everything vs. one who collaborates across disciplines
• Solution engineers at Aboard (24:30) - Aboard calls their product people “solution engineers” reflecting this evolved role

Mentions

Companies

• Aboard (0:04) - Paul and Rich’s AI software company; building tools for solution engineers
• Anthropic (13:03) - Referenced as having built Claude Code as a “love letter to engineering”
• Figma (15:00) - Mentioned as doing AI-related work for designers
• Airtable (5:18) - Referenced as an example of data-model-as-interface software
• Canon (13:56) - Scanner manufacturer that abandoned Mac driver support
• Epson (13:56) - Scanner manufacturer mentioned alongside Canon
• HP (14:16) - Referenced in joke about vibe coding printer drivers

Products & Technologies

• Claude Code (12:53) - Anthropic’s coding tool that lives in the terminal
• ChatGPT (2:27) - Paul uses it for generating riddles for his kids
• Slack (3:15) - Mentioned as a communication tool for product managers
• Tucows (13:35) - Nostalgic reference to the old shareware download site

People

• Paul Ford (0:00) - Co-host; self-described engineer-first who is good at shaping organizations
• Rich Ziade (0:02) - Co-host; self-described product person first

Surprising Quotes

“What no one has noticed is the engineers have taken all the coins and they’ve run away. They’ve left the party.” — Paul Ford, 9:49

“Ship risk was the organizing principle of our industry. There is no ship risk anymore.” — Paul Ford, 18:58

“If you told me that, I’d be like, ‘I don’t want you anywhere near me right now. You’re too dangerous.’” — Rich Ziade, 22:25

“Claude Code for those who aren’t engineers, literally launched… like the experience is inside of a terminal like it was 1983. And proudly so.” — Rich Ziade, 12:53

“I get tired of thinking of humans as lumpy non-learners. I think people like to learn.” — Paul Ford, 24:52

Transcript

Paul Ford: 0:00 I’m Paul Ford.

Rich Ziade: 0:02 And I’m Rich Ziade.

Paul Ford: 0:03 No, it’s the other way around.

Rich Ziade: 0:04 Nobody cares anymore. This is the Aboard podcast, this podcast about how AI is changing the world of software.

Paul Ford: 0:10 I’m gonna be clear Rich, it’s been a long day, we’re recording at the end of the day instead of the beginning. I’m a little punchy, I’m a little silly.

Rich Ziade: 0:18 Yeah, that’s the entertaining Paul Ford.

Paul Ford: 0:20 All right let’s go, let’s record.

Paul Ford: 0:40 Okay, you got any jokes?

Rich Ziade: 0:42 I have some good jokes.

Paul Ford: 0:44 What do you got?

Rich Ziade: 0:45 There was a guy who was in his living room lounging around watching TV and then he heard a knock on the door.

Paul Ford: 0:52 Thank you.

Rich Ziade: 0:53 He gets up, opens the door, and there’s nobody there.

Paul Ford: 0:58 Mmm.

Rich Ziade: 0:59 Looks around, nobody’s there. Closes the door, goes back to his Lazy Boy. Lazy Boy for the young people listening is a brand of recliner.

Paul Ford: 1:07 Mhm.

Rich Ziade: 1:08 Five minutes go by, he’s watching Wheel of Fortune. He’s got the remote, he’s switching line. Another knock on the door.

Paul Ford: 1:16 Gets up, opens the door.

Rich Ziade: 1:17 Gets up, opens the door.

Paul Ford: 1:18 Yeah.

Rich Ziade: 1:19 And nobody’s there. Again.

Paul Ford: 1:21 It’s mysterious.

Rich Ziade: 1:22 Very mysterious. Goes back to his Lazy Boy, sinks into his relaxing chair. Have I told you this joke before?

Paul Ford: 1:28 No, no, I don’t know this joke.

Rich Ziade: 1:30 Guess what happens next.

Paul Ford: 1:31 Opens the door.

Rich Ziade: 1:32 Knock on the door. He gets up, walks over to the door, opens the door, looks around, he’s like ‘what the hell’s going on’, looks down, and sees a little snail at the doorstep. Picks it up, throws it across the street, goes back to his seat.

Paul Ford: 1:53 Mhm.

Rich Ziade: 1:54 Two years go by. Another knock at the door.

Paul Ford: 1:59 Who is it?

Rich Ziade: 2:00 He gets up, walks over to the door, opens the door, looks around, looks down. Snail looks up at him and says, ‘what the hell was that about?’

Paul Ford: 2:10 Okay, so… let’s talk about some… actually, you know what? I have a good one.

Rich Ziade: 2:13 I think that’s a very solid joke. It’s wholesome, it’s clever…

Paul Ford: 2:20 Okay, what’s orange and rhymes with parrot?

Rich Ziade: 2:23 Carrot.

Paul Ford: 2:24 Yeah, there we go.

Rich Ziade: 2:25 That’s your joke? That’s not a joke, that’s a riddle.

Paul Ford: 2:27 Somehow it was better. Mine sounded human, yours sounded like AI. I do that by the way, I hit ChatGPT and I say ‘give me 10 riddles for my kids so I can shut them up’.

Rich Ziade: 2:39 That sounds great. That’s a really good use. You’re paying 20 dollars a month for that?

Paul Ford: 2:44 Um… all right, so… let’s… let’s get back to work. Okay?

Rich Ziade: 2:47 Yeah. We can have a little fun and frolic and we can work.

Paul Ford: 2:49 I don’t know if that was frolic.

Rich Ziade: 2:51 We fell short of frolic. Lot of meetings. You know, executive life is… and this is actually a good segue into it, because what is… Engineers do all day?

Paul Ford: 3:01 Code.

Rich Ziade: 3:02 Okay. What do designers do all day?

Paul Ford: 3:03 Design.

Rich Ziade: 3:04 What do product managers do all day?

Paul Ford: 3:07 Ask engineers to code and designers to design.

Rich Ziade: 3:10 And what do they — in what format do they usually do that?

Paul Ford: 3:14 A meeting.

Rich Ziade: 3:15 A meeting, an email, a Slack message. No, product managers are meeting people. Let’s be clear.

Paul Ford: 3:22 They do like to gather. I am kind of I think at my root like introverted writer technologist type. I’m always convinced that, you know, we could’ve done an email instead. We don’t have to meet.

Rich Ziade: 3:39 Yeah, I’m the opposite.

Paul Ford: 3:41 You like to gather.

Rich Ziade: 3:42 It’s one of the things I’ve learned from working with you is like, no, you just gotta get in a room. Yeah, I gather people in a room because I actually work through things through a dialogue more than others, I think. People think I’m trying to guide you to an answer, but very often I’m actually thinking out loud and —

Paul Ford: 3:58 It’s often because you’re very assertive and you say, “Let me offer an answer.”

Rich Ziade: 4:02 Yes. Yes, that’s true.

Paul Ford: 4:04 People don’t necessarily interpret that as you, you know, entering into Socratic discourse. The odd thing is it is.

Rich Ziade: 4:12 It is. The dynamic you look for. I actually — a good product manager, a good manager frankly, seeks out that discourse because you can get very in your own world.

Paul Ford: 4:21 Your root culture is product. Like you think of yourself as a product person first.

Rich Ziade: 4:25 I do.

Paul Ford: 4:26 I think of myself as engineer first, but I work — I’m good at shaping an organization. That’s sort of like —

Rich Ziade: 4:31 I think that’s right. I think that’s right.

Paul Ford: 4:34 So, I was thinking about — I wrote about this recently in the newsletter a couple weeks back and — it’s very, very interesting to me how much the AI conversation is about vibe coding and making things and shipping things and I see a lot of product managers that I know leaning into that because they’re so excited they can build.

Rich Ziade: 4:53 Yes.

Paul Ford: 4:54 But I don’t see a lot of conversation about what this is going to do to the craft and discipline of product management. And let me just go on for like one second because what I see actually getting shipped under the banner of vibe coding are lots and lots of things that basically are a data model brought into an interface, right? Like I put the data in the database —

Rich Ziade: 5:18 Most software looks like that.

Paul Ford: 5:19 It is, and that’s, you know, that’s Airtable and that is sort of most software, most forms on the web. But if you really do product, and — and — product is never that. Product is like this form has 16 steps, and each step requires a little bit someone to upload a PDF and like — a good example would be like the DMV. Like you gotta upload all this stuff to the DMV. Usually those are bad products, but they’re not mapped exactly to the database. They’re based on research, they’re based on sort of how stuff is supposed to work, etc. etc. Anyway, what I’m getting at is like we’re not talking about that. We’re talking not about how like product management or program management are actually shipping or changing software so that it really maps to the user.

Paul Ford: 6:00 User is going to change. We’re talking about how fast it is to ship, which actually is in a funny way, I don’t think is good for people who use software. I think we gotta talk about like product is about making something usable for a person so it aligns with the goals of an organization.

Rich Ziade: 6:17 Yes, right.

Paul Ford: 6:18 Engineering is about solving a problem using a system.

Rich Ziade: 6:22 Yes.

Paul Ford: 6:23 Okay, so you’re a product manager. We’re building an AI product management acceleration company. Yes. Okay. How do you, like when you see vibe coding and you see I’ve been vibe coding a lot, when you see the outputs, what are your first thoughts?

Rich Ziade: 6:36 Before I answer that, I’m going to draw out for you what I think makes the apex product manager.

Paul Ford: 6:43 Okay, it’s prongs, everybody. Prongs.

Rich Ziade: 6:46 Okay? The first is design. And by design, I don’t mean color scheme, which is important. Some product managers are very tuned into marketing and branding.

Paul Ford: 6:53 Yeah.

Rich Ziade: 6:54 What I mean by design is usability, which you just touched on.

Paul Ford: 6:58 Right, right.

Rich Ziade: 6:59 The second prong is business. The truth is, business is like, our turnaround for support tickets is too slow, right? Or our customers are waiting over 30 days to get a refund, right? That’s a business objective.

Paul Ford: 7:12 I mean, just to interrupt you, we’ll get to the third prong in a minute, but the, if you work at a large org, it’ll be like, okay, if you want to ship a product inside of this org, like a big, like a hyper-scaler type, you’ve got to show that you can make 50 million dollars.

Rich Ziade: 7:23 Yeah, but this is often packaged up as KPIs or key performance indicators, which they’re never as mushy as like, make sure our customer support people are satisfied with the tools they use. That’s not a KPI.

Paul Ford: 7:33 No, it’s 32% retention rate because today we’re at 28.

Rich Ziade: 7:37 Et cetera, it’s some quantitative thing, right? The third prong is they understand the contours and limitations of engineering. They are technical just enough to understand it.

Paul Ford: 7:49 I always used to have a metric when we were interviewing, which I called the inspect the element metric, which was, do they know the system well enough to go in and be, and what I, what I mean is you can right-click on a web page and you can, if something’s broken, you can kind of look at the code. You don’t need to necessarily understand the code, but if you can pinpoint the code and say, I think something’s wrong here, when you file the bug back to engineering, you’re accelerating engineering like tremendously. So that specificity is really important.

Rich Ziade: 8:13 Absolutely. So again, the three-legged stool of a great product manager is they understand business context, they want users to have intuitive tools because they’ll work better, and they understand the technical limitations of what they’re asking for and the contours of it.

Paul Ford: 8:29 I mean, it’s a famously diplomatic role. You have to run…

Rich Ziade: 8:33 Shuttle diplomacy is a key part of product management.

Paul Ford: 9:00 Now let’s bring AI into the picture. And what’s happened with AI is one leg of that stool, engineering, has sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Like, I cannot emphasize enough how badly design, and by design, I mean user experience design, like good intuitive design, design has been marginalized in this explosion of like AI and code.

Rich Ziade: 9:22 I’ll just tell it to use a component library, that’s enough.

Paul Ford: 9:25 Exactly. And so what you have is a lot of sort of pedestrian, recognizable designs that have nothing to do with optimizing for use. So design has been absolutely sort of shown the door.

Rich Ziade: 9:41 This is what I’m getting at, like most interfaces I see that are vibe coded are one-to-one like what’s in the database.

Paul Ford: 9:46 They’re reflections of the stack.

Rich Ziade: 9:48 Yeah, that’s right.

Paul Ford: 9:49 And then business is absolutely not even like, they found out about it at the dinner party two days later. They were never even invited. So that business context, which is actually much more sort of key context for why it should be, are not even in the mix, right? And so what you end up with right now, there’s a catch-up that’s happening, where the engineers, which everyone is talking about how this is going to take engineering jobs, what no one has noticed is the engineers have taken all the coins and they’ve run away. They’ve left the party.

Rich Ziade: 10:30 It’s extremely normal engineering behavior.

Paul Ford: 10:33 It’s very normal, and I’m not saying that’s malicious or whatever.

Rich Ziade: 10:37 No, no, I’m coming to you as someone who’s very engineering, you know, sort of centric.

Paul Ford: 10:41 Yeah, exactly. “Oh my god, look at what I can do! I’m such a good, smart person.” Exactly. So I want to reassure designers and product managers in this shift, which is they will be coming back hat in hand. Like, it’s going to happen.

Rich Ziade: 11:14 You know what it is too? The focus got so… it was such a… especially with Claude Code, it was just such a radical disjunction that what everybody… everyone forgot that software isn’t really just code. And so what’s happened is instead we’ve been like, “Designers, you can code now,” which actually ties into like it’s almost a joke, like for 20 years, “Should designers learn to code?” you know? And so now you can. And product managers got all excited because suddenly they didn’t have to talk to engineers anymore. They could build all kinds of stuff. And the business is like, “Wait a minute, can I save a lot of money and not hire all these engineers?” But it’s all really swirling around this kind of set of artifacts.

Paul Ford: 11:35 Nobody gets to ace it. That’s what’s happening. It’s just because a product manager can now generate some code and make a good prototype, doesn’t mean they’re a better product manager.

Rich Ziade: 11:46 I agree with you. I don’t think that’s… I think costs can come down. I think things get accelerated, but they’ve left the user out. No one is talking about how I can really accelerate and connect to a user and drive a business case for it. They’re just like, “Oh my god, it ships!” So much stuff so quickly.

Paul Ford: 12:02 Listen, I understand why this happened. Because here’s the thing, we’re tribal by nature.

Rich Ziade: 12:06 And by the way, this is I’m like our product I think is good for this but this is actually not an ad for us, like we’re guilty of it too. Everybody’s like what?

Paul Ford: 12:12 No, no, everybody’s guilty of it. No, no, we’re tribal and in fact, look, every tribe of discipline looks at other tribes of discipline and finds them incredibly exhausting.

Rich Ziade: 12:24 Not only exhausting, but they just don’t do anything.

Paul Ford: 12:28 They don’t do anything and they bring no value. Damn it, right?

Rich Ziade: 12:30 Right? I mean, their jobs aren’t hard. If they were really smart they would come do my job.

Paul Ford: 12:35 Correct. And look, AI is… the reason why engineers have kind of bullied everyone else out of the party is because AI is an engineering invention. Like it is fundamentally, it had no UX, it wasn’t this breakthrough, it’s not a touchscreen. Listen, this is the extent we’re going to use design. It’s a box. Thank you very much. We’re anti-UX. There’s no buttons, there’s no switches, there’s no anything.

Rich Ziade: 12:53 Yeah, no. Claude Code for those who aren’t engineers, literally launched… like the experience is inside of a terminal like it was 1983. Like and proudly so.

Paul Ford: 13:00 Exactly. And proudly so. Proudly so. It’s born out of that culture, speaking about Anthropic specifically. And the truth is they found a new revenue line that’s in the billions already by just having a giant engineering lovefest. It’s a love letter to engineering.

Rich Ziade: 13:12 Let’s be clear, this is what drives a lot of business and it’s worth it’s a multi-trillion dollar industry. And so, you know, we’ve been talking on the podcast about healthcare and, you know, insurance and all these things like these are huge sectors and when you find something that locks in and can really make a difference, the money’s going to flow.

Paul Ford: 13:21 Yes. The problem is that that party will end for engineering. And the reason it will end is that most engineering, unless you’re selling your own shareware, right?

Rich Ziade: 13:27 Oh, we just you lost 80% of the audience. Yeah. Shareware was essentially what open source code used to be.

Paul Ford: 13:33 I’m 71 years old, so someone’s out there.

Rich Ziade: 13:35 But it was on websites with names like Tucows and you would download it and it would like pop up you’d be like, oh, this will help me…

Paul Ford: 13:41 I messed up bad here.

Rich Ziade: 13:43 It’s okay. This will help me like organize my hard drive and it would pop up with an alert saying send five dollars to Mike and it would be like a guy’s address.

Paul Ford: 13:51 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And sometimes, by the way, if you buy a scanner, if you’re doing a lot of scanning of documents…

Rich Ziade: 13:54 Sure.

Paul Ford: 13:56 For whatever reason, like Canon makes one, Epson makes one, all the printer guys make one. For whatever reason, they sort of bailed on Mac drivers.

Rich Ziade: 14:00 Oh, yeah. No, yeah.

Paul Ford: 14:02 And there’s this one guy…

Rich Ziade: 14:03 Wait, what is… I have it. I have it.

Paul Ford: 14:04 Everyone has it. If you have a Mac and you bought a scanner…

Rich Ziade: 14:07 It’s like 50 bucks.

Paul Ford: 14:09 It’s like 50 bucks. This guy ported all the drivers for all the hardware for Mac, right? And he and they’ve been like, Canon was like, bro, thanks. Yeah, blessings. Thank you for doing that.

Rich Ziade: 14:14 Yeah, blessings. Thank you for doing that.

Paul Ford: 14:16 Anyway, back to vibe coding printer drivers for HP LaserJet.

Rich Ziade: 14:21 That’s exactly right.

Rich Ziade: 15:00 That’s not where I was going, but um, engineers have appropriated this technology in a very, like, extreme. Look, Figma’s doing stuff, others are doing stuff.

Paul Ford: 15:09 Everybody’s doing stuff, but let’s be clear. The heat and the light is around the fact that someone can ship software so quickly.

Rich Ziade: 15:18 Correct. And I’m going to share a piece of advice and I’m going to share a prediction. And I want you to interrogate both. Let’s do the prediction first. My prediction is the winner eventually on this are the product managers who hang tight, learn the tools, and understand that eventually, their stock price is going to surge because engineers have terrible instincts and very little empathy for what’s important outside of their domain.

Paul Ford: 15:53 No, engineers like building systems. But and but…

Rich Ziade: 15:56 It sounds like I’m — it sounds like a swipe. It’s not meant as one.

Paul Ford: 15:59 I’ll actually be really clear here, which is these new products show up and it’s really disruptive what they do. But most of the world cannot think in the shape of software. Right? Software has a way of — it has a shape. Like when I — when I’m working as a writer, I think in the shape of an essay. When I am developing code, I think in the shape of the software. It has modules, components, functions, data flows through it, etc., etc. And most human beings, like literally like 99.5 percent, just kind of don’t think that way.

Rich Ziade: 16:28 It’s a discipline.

Paul Ford: 16:29 And so what’s happened is that kind of thinking is greatly accelerated through AI, but that kind of thinking, again, most humans don’t think that way. So we have to help the people who don’t think in software get access to the power in the software. Right now, it is just like — just like land rush time. Like, oh my god, I can have everything. But that — that has never been what the industry actually wants. What the industry wants is, hey, we have a business problem. The business problem is that —

Rich Ziade: 17:01 The error rate of our like signatures that are scanned into the paper like it’s that kind of…

Paul Ford: 17:08 I’ll give you another one, which is they’re delivering too many sweaters and we don’t have a place to put them in. So we have to —

Rich Ziade: 17:15 Manage inventory flow and all that.

Paul Ford: 17:16 Something’s wrong here, right? A classic business challenge. And so I think, you know, the hypothesis is you’ll just describe that to a software system. Maybe that will work, maybe it won’t. But if it’s a general problem, somebody needs to be in there to interrogate and interpret.

Rich Ziade: 17:30 Yeah.

Paul Ford: 17:31 And I do think what is going to change about product management is that they’re going to be diplomats to LLM-based systems in the same way they are diplomats to engineering, design, and to the business. I think essentially you had three prongs. I think a fourth comes in. And everybody’s talking to the fourth. Like, it’s not just them. The business… One of the things that I proposed, and I think this is real, and I think everybody has to watch out for this. This is one of the worst things that could ever happen to you. Your boss is going to have access to the same vibe coding tools that the engineers do.

Paul Ford: 18:00 Mm, usually the boss sends an email when they have a big idea. Sunday. Big idea on Sunday, big idea. You know, guys, I think we should change the website.

Rich Ziade: 18:07 I’ve written that email.

Paul Ford: 18:08 You have. But now you can just go ahead and…

Rich Ziade: 18:10 Go right in.

Paul Ford: 18:11 You can completely refactor the whole system. Sunday night. Monday morning, the engineer comes in.

Rich Ziade: 18:16 Why is everything a shades of green?

Paul Ford: 18:18 First of all, they do their 45-minute slow-pour custom-grind drip that they do in the office instead of working, which is somehow something we that happens within engineer culture. And then they sit down and there’s 38,000 emails from the AI bot that monitors the system because the boss decided to completely change the way the marketing website works.

Rich Ziade: 18:39 You think that’s gonna happen? Oh, you’re kidding! What do you? It’s probably happening right now. You cannot, like the amount of power, and, and the systems are here that anyone. So all of this sort of flexibility and fluidity is blowing up process because anybody can ship anything now, right?

Paul Ford: 18:58 Ship risk was the organizing principle of our industry. Okay. There is no ship risk anymore. I guarantee you no matter what you want to do, I can get that software over the line. Okay? Is it the right software? Who has access to it? How do we make it useful to lots and lots of users? Is it aligned with the business? Should the boss be able to come in and change the way the database schema works or update the skus? Right? Those are the problems the product manager’s gonna have. And like I said, I think it’s four-pronged. I think they’re gonna start talking to the system in the same way that the engineers are talking.

Rich Ziade: 19:34 Yeah, I think, I think you’re right. And I think let me go to the advice bit.

Paul Ford: 19:40 Great.

Rich Ziade: 19:41 Right? I think product managers are watching this right now, right? And they’re seeing engineers route around them.

Paul Ford: 19:47 As far as I can tell, they’re also, they’re thrilled to be able to code, too, though.

Rich Ziade: 19:50 They are. I don’t know if they’ve figured out how to translate that into something worth showing the boss just yet. But the advice I would share is this. I think designers and product managers are feeling like they have to learn a whole new job to compete. Their colleagues are generating code, right? And they may feel like, okay, well, eventually, I guess where the world is going, I have to ship the software entirely, all alone. And the truth is they won’t. And what they should do is this. Lead with your discipline. Because it turns out that neglect of design and product management is actually going to come full circle. Because engineers, except for a very few, and I’ve met a few, but very few will come up with something really shiny that the boss says, the business stakeholder says, wow, I really appreciate you doing that. I’ve been struggling with that for a really, really long time. They won’t do that. They’ll do other things that scratch their itches. And what they’re going to eventually do is go back to those product people and ask them what the business needs. And they’re going to go back to those designers and ask them what the user needs.

Rich Ziade: 21:00 Because they still want to do good at their job. This is what’s funny. The product manager is not really loyal to their discipline. The engineers and designers tend to be. Product managers are loyal to the business.

Paul Ford: 21:10 They are translators. Yes. If you can translate business needs to design and engineering needs, you are a great product manager. And as a translator in this future state, it is going to be everything.

Rich Ziade: 21:23 So I’m going to be two product managers. How many product managers have you interviewed in the course of your career?

Paul Ford: 21:27 Couple hundred.

Rich Ziade: 21:28 Yeah, me probably a hundred, right? And so, I’m going to be two different product managers. Ask me how I built the system.

Paul Ford: 21:35 How’d you build the system?

Rich Ziade: 21:37 Well, I just honestly just prompted the whole thing. I used a bunch of agents and it built it. And that was really cool. I didn’t even need to talk to engineering.

Paul Ford: 21:44 Wow, okay.

Rich Ziade: 21:45 Okay, ask me again.

Paul Ford: 21:46 How’d you build the system?

Rich Ziade: 21:47 Okay, so I worked with engineering and they scaffolded a lot. They used a lot of Claude Code. That was cool. But then I actually got in there and, you know, I’m pretty good with this and so there were a lot of things that our design research and working with design too that I thought that the users needed. And so I prototyped a bunch of those. We were able to kind of AB test some of them. Then I went back to engineering. I’m like, do you think this is the right thing, you know, the right way to build this? Actually, it turned out that they were like, ‘Yeah, cool, you did a good job.’ So that was cool. It felt good to be an engineer for a minute. And so it’s a lot of that, like I take the core platform and then I build up on top of it. Um, so I’m using a lot of systems, but I’m I’m still like deeply in with engineering and design.

Paul Ford: 22:24 Who are you going to hire?

Rich Ziade: 22:25 The second. I mean, obviously, like I’m kind of… but but it’s seriously like I think everybody’s got this idea that the future is these big lumpy systems that you never look into. No. And I’m going to tell you as somebody who hires, if you told me that, I’d be like, ‘I don’t I don’t want you anywhere near me right now. You’re too dangerous.’ Right? So I don’t… you’re going to hear a lot of that from engineers about like, oh, this use this pattern and you just let the agents run wild. That is not what we want our product managers to oversee.

Paul Ford: 22:52 I think what you’re asking what what, you know, the advice really for product and design is go out and learn enough beyond your own discipline so you can understand these things. We’re back to your discipline. You’re still leading with your discipline. Your discipline is still going to be necessary. If you’re stubborn about it and you don’t want to use anything, you’re going to be in trouble. If you think like I’m a purist and I and I don’t use tools and I use paintbrushes and acrylics, you good luck.

Rich Ziade: 23:20 Again, hundreds of product managers hired, dozens and dozens. Inspecting the element, right? Did you go in and look at the system? You don’t necessarily have to be an expert in the system. That’s still really important. You just essentially what’s happened is a whole new set of elements that need to get kind of understood and inspected. But you also have tools to interrogate and understand those elements. That’s what people are going to be looking for if they’re good.

Paul Ford: 23:45 Markdown files are mostly in English.

Rich Ziade: 23:47 Yeah, that’s right. You can read those. Skills, agent profiles, all that stuff. Get into it.

Paul Ford: 23:52 And I gotta tell you, if somebody tells me that’s really exciting to me, I love to see the system get built that way, I like to contribute to it, I’m going to want to hire them. Just flat out.

Paul Ford: 24:00 That’s who I want to meet. So there it is. I think we’re in this funny zone where everyone has forgotten that product managers exist and why they matter. But I think you’re right, we’re going to get… it’s going to be back where we were. We’re going to need them and we’re going to want them.

Rich Ziade: 24:14 Product management has had a hard time defining itself for 20 years.

Paul Ford: 24:18 I mean again it’s… it’s basically the… the diplomat from the business.

Rich Ziade: 24:22 There’s no like certification, there’s no… like it’s always kind of been a little amorphous.

Paul Ford: 24:29 Yeah, as a bunch of… there’s also program manager and is it project and is it product.

Rich Ziade: 24:30 I think that this is actually exactly where you’d want to be professionally with this shift. Product management… we call them solution engineers here at Aboard. I think it’s a great place to be. But you’re going to have to go and learn some new things. Lead with your own discipline and experience, but go learn some new things.

Paul Ford: 24:52 I get tired of thinking of humans as lumpy non-learners. I think people like to learn.

Rich Ziade: 24:56 They should.

Paul Ford: 24:57 Yeah.

Rich Ziade: 24:58 Yeah. Aboard leans into a lot of the principles we’re talking about in this podcast. What we’re doing is we’re building a tool for solution engineers to build systems. Right now, we do that inside of Aboard. You talk to us and our solution engineers build stuff for you. In the future, who knows? Who knows? But we work with really good, really big clients all across… sometimes people are just trying to clear stuff off their roadmap and they’re like, ‘Can AI help?’ Sometimes people are just really excited to learn more about what we’re doing. We welcome all of those conversations.

Rich Ziade: 25:32 Come one, come all. hello@aboard.com. We’d love it if you… if you like this podcast and you find it useful, please cherish us on… on the Earth.

Paul Ford: 25:41 Interesting. Yeah.

Rich Ziade: 25:42 Like and subscribe.

Paul Ford: 25:43 Absolutely.

Rich Ziade: 25:44 And yeah, we appreciate your attention. It’s really good.

Paul Ford: 25:45 Keep learning.

Rich Ziade: 25:46 All right. Have a wonderful week. Bye!