Vibe Coding Isn’t a Revolution — It’s a Cultural Signal
Why product leadership matters more than ever in the age of improv development
There’s a new phrase making the rounds in product and engineering circles: vibe coding.
It’s being positioned as the next big thing — a fast, intuitive, developer-led way to build software without the burden of traditional roadmaps, tickets, or process. The idea is simple: trust your instincts, build what feels right, and ship quickly.
But if you’ve been in the business of building software for any length of time, you’ll recognize this for what it is: a rebrand of something engineers have been doing for decades.
Before it was called vibe coding, we called it hacking. Or spiking. Or just “building something cool over the weekend.”
What’s changed isn’t the behavior — it’s the branding. And in some teams, it’s being misinterpreted as a product development strategy. That’s a mistake.
While vibe coding is being framed in some corners as a bold new paradigm, let’s call it what it is: the same exploratory, bottom-up engineering that’s always existed — just with a new name, new tools, and a Gen Z aesthetic.
In my time leading product teams at Amazon and advising dozens of high-growth companies since, I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly. Engineers — often with good instincts and real creativity — go off-script, start building, and come back with something promising.
Sometimes those projects turn into breakout features. Sometimes they’re dead ends. But either way, this kind of creative energy has always existed in strong engineering cultures.
What makes vibe coding different is the way it’s being treated now — not as a creative exception, but as a viable alternative to structured product development. That should set off alarm bells for anyone leading a product organization.
Because when vibe coding becomes the dominant mode of building, it’s often a signal that product leadership has stepped back. Engineers aren’t rebelling — they’re reacting. They’re building in the gaps left by unclear strategy, lack of prioritization, or a PM function that’s stuck managing backlogs instead of leading.
At first glance, vibe coding sounds aligned with Agile. It’s fast. It values working software. It supports individual autonomy and adaptability. But in practice, it often drifts outside the bounds of true Agile.
There’s no shared sprint goal. No discovery framing. No clear linkage to customer value. It’s improvisation under the guise of iteration — and while that might work for a prototype or a front-end tweak, it’s a dangerous habit when applied to core systems, scalable architecture, or anything customer-facing at scale.
Agile done right creates guardrails. Vibe coding, unstructured and unchecked, blows through them.
Part of why vibe coding is catching on is that it just feels better than waiting. Developers are tired of grooming sessions, bloated ticket queues, and scope docs that don’t reflect how software is really made. They want to build. They want to solve problems. And they want to move.
In some places — like UI tweaks or low-risk internal tools — that spontaneity can be valuable. You don’t need a product strategy to experiment with hover states.
But when you’re shipping features that touch user data, platform architecture, monetization logic, or compliance? The cost of being wrong goes up fast. And improvising in those domains isn’t scrappy. It’s reckless.
This is where the distinction matters.
Vibe coding often produces features — isolated, clever, sometimes delightful. But a product is something else entirely. A product solves a validated problem. It aligns with business goals. It integrates with go-to-market planning. It can be supported, sold, maintained, and scaled.
Those things don’t come from instinct alone. They require leadership, structure, and collaboration. And they require product teams who do more than move tickets — they have to set direction.
This is why I still advocate for Amazon’s Working Backwards process and wrote about it recently— not because I came from Amazon, but because it works. I’ve seen how powerful it can be in clarifying intent before code is written.
The mechanism is simple, but rigorous: start with a mock press release that describes what you’re building and why a customer would care. Then write an internal FAQ that addresses the assumptions, edge cases, and potential objections. Finally, define what success looks like — for the customer and the business.
It’s not heavy. It’s not theoretical. It’s just clear.
Working Backwards forces product managers to articulate value before they scope features. It aligns teams before anything is committed to code. And it respects the time of engineering teams who want to build — but also want to build things that matter.
Traditional PRDs often collapse under their weight. But clarity is never optional. And the Working Backwards approach is one of the few frameworks I’ve seen consistently strike the right balance between structure and speed.
The rise of generative AI has only made vibe coding more tempting — and more dangerous. Developers can now use AI tools to scaffold components, write boilerplate, and generate UI in minutes. It’s powerful stuff.
But when you increase development speed, you also increase the cost of misalignment. Vibe coding with AI behind it doesn’t just move fast — it can drive off a cliff faster, too.
I’ll say this plainly: when AI is capable of running the entire product management function, it will also be capable of building the whole software product, end-to-end. And soon after, hardware will follow.
Until then, product leadership isn’t optional. It’s essential.
The answer to vibe coding isn’t to shut it down. Creative energy should be welcomed. Great products often start with someone asking “What if?” and following a hunch.
But hunches need to be tested. Ideas need to be framed. And features need to be part of a bigger whole.
That’s the role of product leadership.
Your job isn’t to kill the vibe.
It’s to give it context.
It’s to turn sparks into something that scales.
It’s to translate motion into momentum.
Because speed is easy.
Shipping the right thing — at the right time — for the right customer — that’s product leadership.
If your team is feeling the pull of vibe coding but losing strategic clarity, we help product orgs like yours bring energy, structure, and outcomes together — without killing creativity.
📬 Let’s talk.
Coming Soon:
From Feature Management to Product Leadership
A deeper look at how the PM role has drifted into ticket triage — and how to reclaim it.
