Kevin Armstrong

@EthanEvansVP My only caution is that it would be beneficial to at least be familiar with git functionality so you can rollback changes that Codex one-shots and are completely wrong

After not writing a line of code in over 30 years, I produced 3000+ lines with OpenAI's Codex in one day. "Vibe coding" works and is easy to learn. If you have never written a line of code or built a piece of software in your life, now you can.

@AhmedGhazey QA-to-PM is an underrated path. Strong testers already think in edge cases and failure modes, which is exactly the mindset you want when writing acceptance criteria and reviewing engineering tradeoffs.

لكل الناس 😅 فى تصورى لو الناس بتاعت ال QA راحت لل product management هيعملوا طفرة كويسة أنا خلاص جضيت من ال non technical product manager و لو فاتح hiring لحد لازم يبقى عنده technical background. نرجع بقى للموضوع الاساسى حوار ال ai مأثر على عقلية ال decision makers لما يلبسوا السنة الجاية الوظايف هتفتح تانى عادى! المنتجات اللى اختصرت ال sdc الطبيعية هتلبس فى الحيطة الموضوع اكبر من تويتة و عايز كلام كتير!

@nurijanian The PRFAQ approach is probably the highest signal move on this list. Writing a Working Backwards doc for a problem you spotted in their product shows PM thinking in a way a resume can't.

One piece of PM job search advice I keep coming back to: create work as if you already have the job. Build a prototype of a feature gap you spotted in their product. Write a PRFAQ for a problem their users clearly have. Do a competitive teardown and send it directly to the hiring manager. This level of specificity tends to separate applications that get forwarded from ones that get filed. The objection was always time: building a credible prototype or spec from scratch, while actively searching, was genuinely expensive. A focused weekend at minimum per company. With Cursor and Claude Code handling the structure, that same output is down to a few hours. The approach is identical, but the cost of executing it is different. Most PMs know they should go this far. Very few do, because until recently the cost was too high. Pick one company you're genuinely excited about, spend an afternoon on this, and see what happens. I think you'll find it's worth doing for every role you actually want. → How PMs can use these tools not only in their job search: prodmgmt.world/cursor-for-pro…

@abdrahmanbid The exhaustion is real. I spent several years as a PM at Capital One and the structured resources and cleaner scope are genuinely worth it for a reset, plus they hire PMs regularly if you want to explore that direction.

Any bank hiring product manager? Let me start from there. The startup life is exhausting.

@sankalpdomore Positioning as research-heavy rather than map-first is a sharper wedge. Job seekers have noise everywhere, a tool that surfaces the right discovery signal fast solves a genuinely underserved problem.

Everyone thinks I am building a map-first product when it comes to NextDoor.Company. They're all wrong. I am actually building a research-heavy tool for job seekers. Akshansh Shrivastava, an AI engineer and NDC user, messaged me the other day: "having startup discovery and job details in one place feels genuinely useful during a job hunt." That is exactly it. The map is just the front door. Most people see NextDoor.Company and say "wow, jobs on a map, that's novel." But the map is not why I am building this or users are raving about it. What I am actually building is everything that comes after you click a company pin. Funding rounds. Investors. Financial health. Benefits. Work mode. Team size. Founding year. Everything you would open 20+ browser tabs to find, in one place. Because a bad job choice does not just cost you a salary. It costs you 12 to 24 months of your life. A startup can look exciting from the outside while running on fumes internally. That information exists on the internet. It is just scattered, buried, and impossible to connect when you need it most. That is the hard problem I am solving. Aggregating this data, verifying it, keeping it updated across hundreds of companies is genuinely hard work. But it is solvable. It'll take time but it's solvable. And no, you can't delegate this to AI. Job discovery is very personal. A wrong data about a company can cost someone their career or a few years. This is why I am still taking the manual and long route than most peer-products who're going all in on AI with their offering. The vision is grand but simple: A candidate-first job discovery platform. No company ads. No sponsored bumps. Companies pay a listing fee to get on the platform, which I recently shipped. But everything about the experience is built for one persona: the job seeker. I have been that person. I know this pain from the inside out. The map is how you find the door. What is behind it is what changes helps you build a better career.

@jyothiwrites @lennysan That absorption of research into PM is happening fast. The upside is faster loops between insight and decision, the downside is that lightweight user interviews often miss depth that a dedicated researcher would catch.

Thanks for this Lenny! Interesting that Research does not get its own category here. Is it being counted within Design? Is product growing because discovery research has been absorbed into PM responsibilities. A lot of PMs are now doing their own user interviews and validation, especially at leaner orgs or there is some other reason!

STATE OF THE PRODUCT JOB MARKET IN EARLY 2026 In spite of the headlines about layoffs and AI taking jobs, we’re actually seeing a lot of promising signs in tech hiring, and some interesting new trends: 1. PM openings are at the highest levels we’ve seen in over three years 2. AI hasn’t slowed the demand for software engineers (at least not yet) 3. AI roles in general are absolutely exploding 4. Design roles have plateaued 5. The Bay Area is increasing in importance 6. Remote work opportunities continue to decline 7. Despite ongoing layoffs, the overall number of tech jobs continues to grow More in 🧵

@SirPresidentty Prototyping faster changes what questions you ask. When you can stub something together in an hour, you stop debating whether an idea is worth it and just run it, which is a different kind of PM leverage.

I’m a Product Manager with minimal “real” coding experience. Lately I’ve been using AI coding tools to vibe + prototype ideas faster. And… it’s changing how I think about 2026 product/dev. Not doom, just observing.

@sandislonjsak One thing I have seen that is a good counterpoint: AI makes it much harder to debug. When Claude/Codex writes 100k lines in a couple days, there’s no way you’re able to trace down a memory leak issue the same way you would if you wrote that code by hand over a period of months.

You wouldn’t believe how many software engineers I know refusing to use the AI. Digging their own grave. How can someone be engineer and decel at the same time is beyond me. I haven’t heard any good reason not to use it so far. Will someone enlighten me?

@MarkyKent That mix of doubt and drive is where most of the real growth happens in the first year. Blockchain PM specifically has a steep ramp because you're shipping for users who are also figuring out what they want.

I started my journey as a software/blockchain product manager 2 months ago. And it has unveiled a lot of experience. Some are filled with doubt and uncertainty while others are often filled with zeal to work-hard and breakthrough in my newfound career path, as I transition from being just a community growth manager to a product manager. Here are a few things I have learnt during the course of my learning journey as a software/blockchain product manager in view. 1. Transitioning isn't easy. You must learn to embrace the path of change, and change is a constant element of life. 2. You must build mental agility to overcome your fears. 3. Be open to connecting with other's in-line with your career path, ask questions, and accept constructive criticism. 4. As you learn, do well to act upon what you have been taught (action is key). 5. Before transitioning into software product management, I managed, built, and grew a decentralized e-commerce marketplace from a raw idea to a functional MVP with a decent number of early users and adopters across the APAC region with such proof of work, one must be prepared to take on more advanced challenges, especially in products that have achieved strong market fit. If you find this helpful, feel free to share it with other aspiring product managersyou never know who might need these insights.

@trikcode Sadly, this is correct. It becomes even more true with 100k+ line codebase

Vibe coding creates a dangerous illusion: You think you built it. You think you understand it. You push to production. Your users find the bugs you never could. Because you can't debug what you didn't write.

@MishTechie @JuwonTheTechie @jeedoe0 @TheHuntSpaces Start by framing everything you do in your current role around outcomes, not tasks. That mental switch is the biggest thing that separates PM thinking from coordinator thinking, and you can build that habit before you make the title change.

@JuwonTheTechie I didn’t know until a career advice I got from @jeedoe0 on the @TheHuntSpaces! This is quite informative. I am a project coordinator/manager and trying to transition into Product Management would appreciate it if you share any tips or advice. Thanks in advance!

AI Product Managers are one of the highest paid in tech, here’s what they actually do.

@wagslane Wild guess- people’s capacity for empathy is spent. News bombards every feed, draining most from caring about customers as if they are us. I try to keep that in mind from my PM coaching sessions, and ask myself, if I were them, how would I find this valuable?

More and more people I meet day to day, I come away thinking "do you hate making money?!?" Plumbers that ghost appointments, fast food that serves 5 people an hour, websites with broken checkout, dealerships that refuse to order inventory... What has happened???

@zuess05 Binge dream in my hammock outside under the trees listening to my favorite playlist. We need to be able to detach from the screen and dream too

Be brutally honest. What do you actually do on days when you have absolutely zero motivation to do anything?

@fhinkel Working on a free non-profit site to match non-profits with grants (no subscription fees or anything). Let’s help others most in need!

What's everyone building this weekend?

We only hire builders (and we’re on a hiring spree)! Reply with something you've built. I'll read them personally. We’re interviewing the best ones. You’ll be a good fit if you: - work best without permission - default to “how could I automate this” - had weird teenage hobbies - spend your sunday making side projects - have more Claude agents than cousins - shipped something this week - make prototypes, not powerpoints - don’t like hierarchy - are good at games: chess, monopoly, poker - would take dinner with Elon over $100k Good luck, Eric

Claude needs to do whatever it takes to reach at least 99% uptime. A 5-hour outage today is unacceptable. Wish them to get more GPUs and TPUs.

@KCodes7777 Congrats and good lick! Please post your marketing learnings :) SEO is the hardest part with so many apps live

MY APP GOT APPROVED. Took me 3 days to build and ship: Literally 3 steps: →Build →Publish →Launch Didn’t write a single line of code. Didn’t even need Apple Xcode Rork lets you publish from within. I still can’t believe someone like me with 0 coding experience actually has an app live on the App Store. Now we finally start marketing.

@ieskelaemsti Building something that fails commercially but sharpens your product thinking is a better outcome than most courses. The specific gaps you hit building a research paper manager probably showed up in your main project in ways that would've been invisible otherwise.

2. Side projects: Dedicated time to build several SaaS apps (a research paper manager with AI and a learning plan generator). It failed in terms of revenue, but delivered priceless lessons in building a real product. Everything I learned was directly applicable to my main project

Left X for a year. Updates from the last year: 1. Main focus: Built the antibody design platform we planned. Researched EU grants, applied to several programs (no luck yet). Pitched the startup — potential collaborators, investors, smart connections. 2. …

@asishcodes Codex does a great job of spreading out the usage so you don’t run into kersplat! dead timeouts that frequently hit Claude tasks

codex is super cheap compared to claude. I hit 10% usage in 1 day on claude max and on codex it was just 2%

@craigzLiszt The question I struggle with here is, what is AI competency? Does it mean you can validate AI when it messes up a task, be it design, engineering or marketing? Or does it mean you’re a skilled prompt engineer?

companies are always going to hire the person with ai competency over the person without it keep that in mind