- Product Management is Evolving
- AI Accelerates Development, But Demands Control
- Strategic Discovery is Key to Success
- Distribution is as Critical as Product Building
The landscape of product management is undergoing a significant transformation. No longer confined to strategic planning, product managers are increasingly expected to be "builders" capable of taking a product from conception to market. Ran Erez, a product leader, embarked on a challenging 30-day project to demonstrate this shift, aiming to build a real product for paying customers using AI tools, all while dedicating just one hour a day.
This ambitious project wasn't about creating a flashy demo, but about solving a genuine, painful problem for real users. Erez established clear principles: build a real product, leverage AI for every task (development, marketing, sales), limit work to one hour daily, and share both successes and failures publicly. This transparency aimed to demystify the process, showing that while AI accelerates many steps, the core product development journey remains.
The journey was meticulously structured into four weeks. Week one focused on intense discovery, identifying a problem within the Monday.com ecosystem that was both high-impact and high-frequency. Erez utilized tools like Perplexity to scour Reddit and Monday.com communities for user pain points, then mapped them on an impact-frequency matrix. A technical Proof of Concept (POC) was built rapidly to de-risk the riskiest technical assumption: exporting Monday.com data to editable Google Slides. Week two shifted to solution validation, emphasizing direct user feedback and avoiding the "lazy input" trap where AI generates documents without critical human oversight. Erez highlighted the power of two AI agents working in parallel for requirements and fulfillment, but stressed the crucial need for human checkpoints to maintain control and understanding.
Week three delved into product iteration and pricing strategy. Erez warned against getting stuck on "bottom of the backlog" tasks, advocating for a structured AI-driven development system that mimicked a real product lifecycle, including demand gathering, prioritization, planning, execution, code review, and testing. For pricing, instead of anecdotal competitor research, Erez used AI to analyze the pricing models, ratings, and installs of all Monday.com marketplace apps, enabling a data-driven approach. The final week, week four, was dedicated entirely to go-to-market and distribution. Recognizing that even a great product fails without adoption, Erez focused on leveraging existing channels, such as commenting on relevant YouTube videos with AI-generated, context-specific responses, and optimizing for marketplace virality by integrating AI features.
Erez concluded by sharing three critical rules for aspiring "builder PMs": invest heavily in discovery, leverage existing distribution channels, and develop a robust system for product building that incorporates AI while maintaining human oversight. The project, though still in its final days, successfully attracted users to a free tier, with some nearing upgrade quotas, proving that building a product from scratch for paying customers in 30 days is an achievable feat for product managers embracing new tools and methodologies.
“The industry is changing, and the role has changed. If until today there was a place for product managers who only dealt with the process, today there is no longer a place. The process is you, and you need to be able to build the product end-to-end.”
- Ran Erez, Independent Product Consultant
