It's time to build.

Product marketers don't need to wait for Product, Design or Engineering anymore. We can build things ourselves.

A few weeks ago, the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen appeared on Lenny’s Podcast and described a “Mexican standoff” happening in tech right now. Product managers, designers, and engineers are all looking at each other’s roles thinking: I might not need a team anymore. With the tools available to me now, I can do most of this myself.

It’s an interesting point. But the totally unbiased PMM in me had an immediate reaction: what about us?

Because I think someone is missing from that imagined scenario. Product marketers are particularly well-placed to slot into this new kind of ‘Super IC’ role, where an individual can blur the lines of responsibility, and take on work that lives across the edges of multiple disciplines.

Part of our core skill set is about to evolve. And the direction it's heading is towards creation. Not just decks or frameworks, but agents, products, and interactive experiences. No more waiting for design or engineering. No asking for permission. Tools like Lovable and Replit now make it possible. It's time to build.

To explore this idea, I sat down with Alicia Carney, a leading voice in product marketing, and someone who has been collaborating with Lovable and its community through SheBuilds. Importantly, she’s been building her own products. So I asked her why it’s time for product marketers to start doing the same.

First of all, can you tell me about what you’ve been building with Lovable?

It came from a real frustration I’d experienced at work. When you have a clear product-market fit with a defined ICP and then suddenly get a mandate to go upmarket, a lot of those decisions are driven by senior leadership opinion rather than data. I didn’t feel I had enough evidence to show where product-market fit was actually forming.

So I built a tool. It pulls a snapshot of where your win rate is strongest, where your sales cycle is healthiest, and where there’s the least friction. It surfaces recommendations. For example: your win rate is strong in fintech, but customers often raise compliance objections early, so create collateral that addresses those sooner.

What really excited me was the process itself. For the first time in my career, I started identifying as a builder rather than someone who just influences what gets built. That felt extraordinary.

That’s a big shift. How did the experience of actually building something change the way you think about your role as a PMM?

It completely changed my relationship with the product teams I work with. In the past, a lot of my time as a PMM was spent aligning people, getting them on side for an idea, getting it on the roadmap. That whole drawn-out process doesn’t need to happen in the same way anymore.

If you can build something and start testing it, then take that to an engineering team and say “Look, this landing page is performing exponentially better, here’s the data,” you’ve just compressed the entire process. You’re influencing with evidence rather than persuasion.

At Ravio, people in the marketing team were building their own prototypes in Lovable and including them in business cases and PRDs, briefing the tech team with something tangible. It reduced the time it takes to go from idea to outcome significantly.

How does this connect to what product marketers have always done well?

The part of PMM work that’s always excited me is the moment where you’re influencing what gets built, not just how it’s marketed. Working closely with product, making sure the roadmap reflects what customers actually need. That’s where I feel most energised.

What building tools like Lovable and Replit unlock is a much more hands-on version of that. Instead of talking about an idea, you can demonstrate it. Instead of writing a brief, you can show a working version. The gap between insight and impact gets much smaller.

I think it also changes how you show up internally. So much of the drag in a product marketer’s day is the alignment work, getting people on side before anything actually moves. When you can prototype something quickly and attach real data to it, that dynamic shifts. You’re not asking for belief anymore. You’re presenting evidence.

Has this changed your thinking about AI more broadly in the PMM’s day-to-day?

A lot of the traditional PMM value was in facilitating insights. That part of the job is already changing, but I’d argue we can now facilitate insights in more scalable and reliable ways than before.

Take competitive battle cards. I find them genuinely tedious to produce. But we no longer have to spend a week manually pulling together a market snapshot that’s out of date by the following Monday. We can create always-on battle cards that take a fraction of the time and refresh in something closer to real time.

But here’s the thing: we still need a human to leverage those insights for better decision-making. Across marketing, commercial, sales, product. The mundane execution is going away, which creates more pressure to do the hard part. To push your company to have a strong point of view. To challenge the status quo with evidence rather than just opinion.

Is there a risk here? The “just spin something up in Lovable” energy?

It’s something I think about a lot. There’s so much excitement about the fact that you can build almost anything now, and the barrier keeps getting lower. But I’m worried we’re going to see a big gap between what people think they’re taking to market and what’s actually viable.

It reminds me of a Seth Godin quote: build products for your customers, not customers for your products. It’s so easy to jump in and start building, get swept up in it, and then realise you never validated whether this is a problem that’s urgently ready to be solved.

I also think there’s a subtler version of this risk at an organisational level. Someone spins up a strategy doc or a website in an afternoon, it looks polished, and suddenly a whole team is iterating on something that was never built on the right foundations. You’re not saving time as a group. You’re just optimising in the wrong direction faster.

What’s your advice to a PMM who wants to start building but doesn’t know where to begin?

If you’re just trying to get comfortable with the tools recreationally, honestly, just start talking to them. Literally verbally. It’s that accessible.

But if you want to build something real, don’t start building until you know exactly who you’re solving for. Spend a day or two genuinely understanding your ideal customer. What’s going on in their world? What’s at stake? What’s the visceral problem you’re trying to solve? You can use LLMs as a sparring partner in that discovery process, but still go and talk to at least one or two of those actual buyers.

What you’ll have at the end of that process is a repository of insights, assumptions, and hypotheses that you can take into your first build. You can hand that to AI as a starting point and get something far richer than if you’d just opened a blank chat and started from scratch.

The fundamentals haven’t changed. What’s changed is how quickly you can act on them.

---

Alicia Carney is a product marketer with over a decade of experience across companies including Deliveroo and Ravio. She runs GTM Playbook, a short course for B2B startup marketers who want to own positioning, launches, and go-to-market strategy - rather than just execute on them.

---

P.S. Inspired by the conversation with Alicia, I’m actually building something myself. If you’re a PMM based in Europe I’d love to get some early feedback - so hit reply on this email if you’re up for it!