Coding Got 10x Easier. Product Should Too.

AI broke the writing-code bottleneck. The next one is harder.

AI made writing code dramatically faster. The output of any individual builder went up something like 10x in the last year. So did shipping go up 10X? Are products getting 10X better? Not really.

The new bottleneck isn't the code writing part, it's the actual product part. The ideas, the conviction, knowing what to build, how to make the product amazing for customers. PMs are feeling the "brain fry" of having to go so much faster to stay ahead of engineering teams. The worst case scenario is building bad products faster. The best case scenario should be using faster loops between customer feedback product ideas and building to make products dramatically better.

That's the goal of Simple Product. To be the "product brain" that gives product managers, builders and product teams what they need to build better products in an AI world.

The term "PM" might change, but the job is more important than ever

The job title "product manager" might not exist in ten years. I'm not sure it should. But the job PM does — when it's done well — isn't going anywhere. If anything, it matters more now.

Customer centricity. The conviction to back an idea. The judgment to kill one. The ability to move fast and iterate when the ground keeps shifting. None of that is going away. All of it gets harder when the people doing it are also expected to direct AI agents shipping code at 10x speed.

This work got more important, not less.

PM tools were never built for PMs

Builders need tools that help them build the right things. If I'm being honest, I didn't always think this. I spent fifteen years building great products at HubSpot. For most of that time, my view was something like — I'm an artist, you can't put what I do on an assembly line.

There's some truth in that. Ken Kocienda wrote a whole book about it called Creative Selection — the iterative, taste-driven, irreducibly human process of building great products at Apple. He's right. You can't reduce that to a Jira ticket.

But here's what I missed for years: most "PM tools" were never built for product management anyway. They were built for project management. Two completely different things. Project management is about coordination, deadlines, dependencies. Product management is about taste, customers, conviction. We've been using project management tools, complaining they don't fit, and concluding the work was unfit for tooling at all.

On top of that, the nature of how software used to work meant we were always building a linear flow, which doesn't capture the true creativity and chaos of what it takes to build > get feedback > iterate > repeat.

AI changes the equation. AI isn't an assembly line. It's non-linear by nature — it doesn't force the work into rigid steps the way the old generation of software did. It breaks the rules that made the old PM tools so confining.

That means you can finally build a tool that supports the actual work — taste, judgment, iteration, customer obsession — without flattening it into a process. A tool that's there when you need structure, and out of the way when you don't.

The mission: help builders build great products

That's what we're building. Simple Product is a product brain — one place for all the primitives the work actually requires: ideas, feedback, customer context, docs, what shipped and why. Designed from day one to be used inside an AI operating system. Designed to fit how building actually feels, not how project management software thinks it should feel.

What's live today is the MVP. There's a lot still to figure out. We're dogfooding it, getting feedback, learning, iterating toward the product builders deserve.

If you're building products in this new world — whether you've called yourself a PM for years or you've never had the title and now you're shipping software anyway — I'd love your help shaping what this becomes. Try it. Tell me what's broken. Tell me what's missing. Tell me what's right.

We're building the future of how builders build. Come build it with us.

— Andy