Proof of Concepts with AI
Build working demos before committing engineering resources. AI has collapsed the cost of PoCs dramatically — from Figma flows to website analysis to functional mini-apps that get stakeholder alignment fast.
- Why a working prototype beats 20 slides for stakeholder alignment
- How vibe coding lets non-engineers build functional PoCs
- Where AI-assisted prototyping breaks down and how to handle it
- Build a working demo of any growth idea in under 45 minutes
- Run a structured CRO audit on any webpage using AI
- Frame a PoC as a hypothesis and use stakeholder reactions as validation data
Step 1 of 5 · Read the lesson
PoC as a PM superpower
A clickable prototype kills 10 meetings. Tangible > slides for alignment. AI made the cost of "tangible" near-zero.
Analyzing existing surfaces
Drop a screenshot or URL into Claude. Ask for a CRO audit, copy improvements, A/B hypotheses. Compare to your instincts to find your unique signal.
Functional demos in an hour
HTML or React prototypes via Claude / v0 / Lovable. Aim for "convincing enough to provoke real reactions" — not pixel-perfect.
Show don't tell
Frame every PoC as a hypothesis, not a commitment. "Here's what it could look like — what does this make you want to change?"
Vibe Coding — Building Without Writing Code
Vibe coding is the practice of building functional software entirely through natural language — describing what you want, iterating on the output in plain English, and never directly writing or reading the underlying code. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 and it's now a legitimate path to production-quality PoCs for non-engineers.
For a PM, this is the highest-leverage skill shift of the last 2 years. It means "I'll prototype that" is no longer something only engineers can say.
How it works in practice
You describe the app or feature you want to build. The AI generates the code. You look at what it produced in the browser — not in the code editor — and describe what to change. You never need to understand the code to iterate on the output.
The workflow:
- Describe the full app in a single detailed prompt (what it does, who uses it, key interactions, visual style)
- Review the output in the browser — does it do what you described?
- Iterate in plain English: "the submit button does nothing", "add a step 3", "make the empty state more helpful"
- Repeat until it matches your vision
- Share the URL or screenshot for stakeholder feedback
The right tool for the job
| Goal | Best tool |
|---|---|
| Hosted app with a real URL | Lovable |
| React component to hand off to an engineer | v0 |
| Complex local prototype, connecting to an API | Cursor |
| Quick single-file HTML demo, no setup | Claude Artifacts or ChatGPT Canvas |
What makes a great vibe coding prompt
The same rules as any prompt, but front-loaded with more product context:
- Start with the user and their job-to-be-done, not the feature list
- Describe the key screens and what happens on each
- Specify visual style (dark/light, minimal/bold, desktop/mobile)
- List what the app does not need to do (scope boundaries prevent over-engineering)
- Include one example of a similar product for reference
Bad: "Build me a dashboard"
Good: "Build a single-page growth metrics dashboard for a B2B SaaS PM. It should show: weekly sign-ups (bar chart), activation rate (line chart), and a table of this week's experiments with status badges. Dark theme. Desktop only. No backend — use hardcoded sample data. Style reference: Linear.app"
Where vibe coding breaks down — and how to handle it
Vibe coding is not magic. It fails predictably in a few ways:
- Context window overflow: Very large or complex apps lose coherence as the conversation gets long. Fix: start a fresh conversation with a summary of what's been built so far.
- Cascading fixes: Fixing one thing breaks another. Fix: ask the AI to explain what it changed and why before accepting the output.
- Hallucinated APIs: AI will sometimes write code that calls APIs or libraries that don't exist or work differently than expected. Fix: if something doesn't work, paste the error message back and ask AI to fix it with real, verified approaches.
- Design drift: The visual output gradually drifts from your intent across many iterations. Fix: re-anchor with "go back to the original visual style I described at the start."
The PM vibe coding mindset
You are the product manager of the AI building your PoC. Your job is to give clear requirements, review output against those requirements, and give precise feedback when something is wrong. The same skills that make you a good PM — clarity of thought, precise feedback, knowing when something is right — make you a good vibe coder.
What you are not doing: writing code, debugging logic, understanding architecture. What you are doing: product thinking at high speed.