WGMaTW: Vibe Coding Focus, Tiny Teams Rising, and the Builder PM Era
What Got My Attention This Week — as a Product Leader
Here’s what got my attention this week — a short list of things I read and watched recently that felt worth pausing on, as a product leader.
TL;DR What you choose to build — and how small you keep the right team doing it — may matter more than ever.
1/ What to Vibe Code (and What Not To)
“The most important question in tech right now: what should you vibe code?
Vibe code your product. Buy everything else.”
— Elias Torres
Elias Torres (Drift Co-founder) weighed in on build vs. buy in the age of AI. If you can spin up a Calendly clone in a weekend, should you?
His answer: Only if scheduling is your product.
You can vibe code a URL shortener, a lightweight CRM, an Asana-style goals tool. But you pay somewhere — not always in dollars, often in mindshare. In a world where everyone is AI-assisted, prioritization compounds.
In response to this tweet by Naval ^, Saeed Khan wrote a post reminding us what PMs need to be strong at.
“Vibe coding is not a superpower… There are three ‘superpowers’ that Product Managers (and Product Leaders) should focus on. Discovery and Market Research. Clear and Intentional Strategy. Meaningful Differentiation.”
— Saeed Khan
I think his point is that AI lowers the cost of building, but it may not lower the cost of being wrong.
My take: Anyone vibe coding is doing discovery and strategy — implicitly or explicitly. Differentiation... not so much. We could all use some superpowers in that area.
By the way, vibe coding also will have huge implications on product design. In a recent conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, Jenny Wen (who leads design at Claude / Anthropic) shared how design is changing. She also pointed out how humans will continue to make key decisions (and be accountable for them).
2/ Software Engineering Jobs Are Up. So Are Tiny Teams.
“After a brutal couple of years, software engineering job postings are FINALLY ticking up again… BUT, if you zoom out, we’re still nowhere near the COVID peak.”
— Arjay McCandless
I'm not sure Indeed provides the best picture for Software Engineering hiring but assuming this is directionally correct... Hiring is recovering.
That said, the structure is clearly changing.
Leaner teams.
Higher expectations.
More output (and quality, overall leverage) expected per team member.
And increasingly: Tiny teams, by design.
“Small teams are what happens when you decide to fix the actual problem.”
For example… PostHog has 43 small teams shipping across products.
Their philosophy, according to this post:
Make speed the norm.
Give real autonomy, not the illusion of it.
Let teams own products, not just problems.
Optimize for long-term solutions, not short-term patches.
AI doesn’t just increase individual leverage. It makes small, empowered teams structurally advantaged.
The new question isn’t ‘How big should we scale this team?’
It’s ‘How long can we keep this team small?’
3/ The Rise of the AI-Enabled Builder PM
“The PMs who thrive will be the ones who treat AI the way the best PMs treated SaaS: Not as a threat or a replacement, but as a capability expansion that lets them focus on the parts of the job that are most distinctly human: judgment, empathy, strategy, and leadership.”
Andrew outlines three PM archetypes:
Order-Taker
Strategic PM
Builder PM
His prediction:
The Order-Taker shrinks dramatically.
The Strategic PM becomes more demanding.
The Builder PM emerges as a distinct archetype.
“SaaS changed delivery; AI changes creation.”
The Builder PM doesn’t just write specs. They prototype, automate, and test ideas. They collapse the gap between thinking… and shipping.
Wealthsimple is leaning into this shift — their new ‘AI builder program’ requires applicants to submit a working AI system as part of the process.
Not a deck.
Not a resume.
A working system.
“We’re putting together a small, high-bar team of builders who think in systems, move fast in ambiguity, and care deeply about where AI should — and shouldn’t — replace human judgment.”
The bar’s moving.
Judgment, empathy, decision-making, and strategy matter.
But the ability to build is now table stakes.
Typos and imperfections are OK… You better move quick, and iterate.
Bonus: Stripe’s Vision for Agentic Commerce
“There’s no forecasting exactly where agentic commerce will be by the end of 2026, but it’s clear we’ve already moved well beyond pure hype into a phase of building and real-world experimentation. The pace of change will likely only accelerate from here.”
— Stripe Annual Letter
In their annual letter, Stripe’s Patrick & John Collison outlined five levels of ‘agentic commerce:’
Eliminating web form
Descriptive search
Persistence
Delegation
Anticipation
Some notable data points:
$1.9T in total Stripe volume (1.6% of global GDP), up 34% YoY
Ecommerce up 30% (inflation-adjusted) vs. 5% for US brick-and-mortar
Stablecoin payments doubled to ~$400B, 60% B2B
GitHub pushes up 41% between Q3 2024 and Q3 2025
41% increase in company formations
Funding volume up 45% YoY
We’re not in the ‘AI is coming’ phase anymore.
We’re in the ‘AI is reorganizing how products are built, teams are structured, and commerce is executed’ phase.
