4 min read

·

Jul 9, 2025

Despite not being a developer, I’ve built and owned my website, www.ankithagadag.com, for almost 10 years.

When I first built it, I didn’t have a design or engineering team. I had a tight budget, a lot of patience, and Squarespace’s native CMS tooling. It got the job done — but barely.

Every update meant battling static templates, breaking mobile layouts, and reworking content from scratch. I spent hours trying to make updates look intentional, aligned, and responsive.

As a product manager who believes in rapid iteration, that experience felt…dated.

So I asked myself:

For context, here’s what updating my site used to look like:

Hunt for the right template

Add widgets and copy blocks

Fight the drag-and-drop editor to keep layouts consistent

Manually edit across desktop and mobile

Lose hours of work because of versioning limitations

Even after all that, the result wasn’t particularly responsive, dynamic, or engaging. Static templates made it hard to reflect modern usability and updating content felt like working against the grain.

The whole process was frustrating and at odds with my product mindset: test, learn, iterate quickly.

Here’s what I used this time around:

🛠 V0.dev — a prompt-to-UI tool that generates React code

🚀 Vercel — for one-click deploys and hosting

📁 GitHub — for version control and collaboration

I uploaded a screenshot of my old Client Portfolio page. I only began with one page to test and keep things simple

I gave V0 a prompt to reimagine my client-portfolio page to be dynamic, responsive and visually engaging while navigating a better user experience. Intentionally open ended so I can refine as I go. For more advanced or high-stakes use cases where consistency, code quality, and scalability matter, you can get more specific. V0 can help you build a component library from scratch. Here’s a great example prompt, inspired by AI Prompt Instructor Colin Matthews:

Component library prompt:

V0 returned a full UI scaffold with modern styling and responsive layout

I refined it using a few more prompts and tweaks

It generated React code and file structures

I pushed it to GitHub and deployed via Vercel with one-click

Done. My new site was deployed. Check it out here

What once took weeks of formatting and frustration was now done in a matter of hours, without compromising design or function.

And I wasn’t just building, I was collaborating. It felt like pair programming with a designer-engineer hybrid, where we resolved any bugs or code issues… together

GenAI is lowering the cost of exploration.

As OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy put it:

That has major implications for how we ideate, test, and validate ideas, especially as PMs.

We can now:

✅ Build MVPs, Landing Pages, Internal tools and Component Libraries

✅ Launch proof-of-concepts

✅ Rapidly iterate on experiments

✅ Prototype quickly for user research

But with this new speed comes a new responsibility.

When it becomes easier to build, we’re more likely to build all the things, not necessarily what’s solving a problem. The future of PMs might not be just about scoping or prioritizing features but about using AI-powered tools to validate opportunities and user problems before they ever hit engineering sprints.

We can test ideas in production-grade UIs in a fraction of the time AND that opens the door to feature bloat and “AI slop”- products filled with half-useful stuff we added just because we could.

The best PMs in the age of GenAI won’t just build faster; they’ll focus better.

AI is a powerful tool, but it can’t define product vision or decide what matters to users. That’s still a deeply human skill — one of judgment, empathy, and clarity.

AI removes the technical complexity and speeds up execution. But it also raises the bar: PMs must be even more intentional about what to build and what to ignore.

In the end, AI empowers, but it’s your focus and product sense that will set you apart.

What’s changed? It’s a shift that opens up new possibilities for PMs, designers, engineers and creatives who can think in systems, build with intent, and scale with care.

We’re entering a world where the boundary between idea and execution is razor-thin.

That’s exciting. But let’s not confuse speed for strategy. The future isn’t just about building fast, it’s about building with purpose.