← Embracing Digital Transformation
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- [00:00]
A
Let's talk about where you think the future's going. Let's say five years down, down the road. Do you think I'm still going to need developers or is their role going to change? That's one area I want to touch on first. And then I have another crazy thought later after that.
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B
Their role is without a doubt going to change. But I, I think we're going to need developers. We're going to need developers, we're going to need designers, we're going to need product managers.
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A
To embracing digital transformation, where we explore how people process, policy and technology drive effective change. This is Dr. Darren, Chief Enterprise architect, educator, author, and most importantly, your host on this episode, Vibe programming savior or.
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B
Destroyer of software developers.
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A
With special guest Drew Faltman, Vibe programming expert. Rue, welcome to the show.
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B
Thanks, Darren. Thanks for having me.
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A
Hey, when, when I first heard you talk about this, I said, yeah, we absolutely need to talk about Vibe programming and product managers and the conflicts between developers thinking they're losing their jobs and product managers thinking they don't need developers. There's a whole bunch we gotta unpack. But as everyone knows, on my show, I only have superheroes on my show and every superhero has a background story. So, Drew, what's your background story?
- [01:36]
B
So I kind of fell into web development. I actually studied journalism in college and when I graduated, this was like the end of the 90s, you know, sort of out in the world, pretty much realizing things were changing a lot in journalism and the web was coming up. And so I was really excited about that. And so it was a total pivot for me. And I got into it and I started designing web pages. And then I started a design company with a couple other guys. I was living in Portland at the time. It was called Project Alpha. And we, you know, we were building all kinds of websites. And we had this programmer that was doing our work and he bailed on us. And so me and the other designer, we like Paper, Scissored, Rock to see who was going to become the programmer because we figured we need to have it in house. And I lost, so, so I became a programmer. But you know what? I loved it. I was using cold fusion at the time, which was like this was before PHP and it was like a tag based language. And I got into it and so we kind of came up and our reputation was building at the time, a lot of people were building kind of non functional websites. They were more like brochureware we called it. And so we were building things with databases and CRMs built in and E commerce and all this stuff. And I loved it. And what I really loved about it was when clients first came to us because everyone felt like they had to get on the web and so we would be like, well, you don't just get on the web. Like let's figure out how you can add value to your business and what you could do. And that's what I really liked. And so that's kind of where my career ended up moving towards. So after that we ended up creating our own technology and getting venture funding and all that. And when that was over, I sort of went off on my own and I published a couple books and I was doing some training and a lot of consulting and a lot of working with startups and companies to figure out that zero to one product. And, and that's pretty much where I've been ever since. You know, I just love that aspect of like figuring it out and applying the new technology.
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A
I'm living on the edge of technology, it sounds like I do.
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B
And what I like the most is I think a lot of people, they want to plug in the technology and there's like solutions in search of a problem. And so I like helping sort of companies and founders like really get into that problem space and figuring out how you can apply these new technologies to solve a problem for your customers. That, that's what I enjoy the most.
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A
Well, and that's a sweet spot to be. And today we would call that kind of the emergence of product management.
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B
Right.
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A
Because that's really a sweet spot.
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B
Right? Yep, yep. Yeah. And that's where I ended up sort of moving, you know, and I started, you know, I was doing a lot of consulting and helping companies with product strategy effectively. And then I ended up from like 2016 until 2021, I work for a consultancy and help them start a product strategy division. And so we sort of mapped out like what is product management, what is the sort of voice of the user and how do you do best practices and how can you be really effective? Because when you're consulting you can't. You can experiment a little bit, but you got to find something that hits pretty quickly or they're just going to not renew their contract. So figuring out a way to like be successful in that. So I did that for about five years and then I sort of went off and I ended up having my own startup for a little bit and now I'm just out sort of AI technology and I'm really into just kind of empowering people to use this technology because it's amazing what product managers and designers too can do now that they never could have done before without really any help to experiment and to like learn about users and create prototypes and all that kind of stuff.
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A
You know, it's fascinating because I've got a gaggle of kids, I've got 10 kids and two of them are product managers. One a product manager for a regional cloud service provider and the other one a product manager for a movie studio.
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B
Oh, very cool.
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A
And it's, and it's fascinating watching these, these two kids of mine and they both come from different angles at it. One's technical and one's more design based, but they're both, they're both playing around with Gen AI. Both of them are from their different perspectives. And it's fascinating to watch them go through this journey which leads to what we want to talk about today, which is that vibe programming, that rapid prototyping that I think almost every product manager has wanted for years, because software engineers, of which I am, we don't speak English very well or. All right, we don't understand English very well. When, when a, you know, someone that has a background in communications like you and, and you, you're gathering requirements, you're gathering all this cool stuff and then you hand it to a developer and then they go away for three weeks and come back and you go, what did you just read? I have no idea what just came up. Is that your experience too? Have you seen that same thing?
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B
Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, that's the thing, like so much work of a product manager and like you said, like both of your kids, they have different angles, right? And the product management role is so different wherever you go, like based on the organization and the individuals. But so much of what we do, no matter what angle, is just defining what it is that you want everyone to build and getting everyone aligned on that vision of what it is so that we're all working towards the same thing. And that's why I think these tools are so cool, because you can go away and instead of just like writing these PRDs that nobody's going to really read and coming up with these user stories and figuring out how to fit it into the acceptance criteria and all that so that they really understand what it is. We can spend time like just throwing together a little prototype, like this is what I'm thinking and these are the important aspects of it and we can eliminate so much of that communication failure. You know, at the very least, I mean, in some degrees you could actually, you know, Turn them into apps. That's, that's the ideal ultimate. But we're not there yet.
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A
Do you, do you think so, so you think that Gen AI and vibe programming type things actually bring developers and product managers closer together?
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B
Ironically, yes. It doesn't always feel like that. Especially doesn't feel like that. Yeah, you're right. No, yeah, it doesn't always feel like that. But I think when you get into, like, how organizations are working and doing this, you start seeing that that is what's happening. The organizations that are adopting this is. It is sort of bringing them together and bridging it because it makes, it also makes product managers understand the complexities of code and like these things like debugging and stuff. And it's so easy to get frustrated with devs and. But when you get caught in like a vibe coding debugging loop and you just want to pull your hair out. Yeah. You have some sympathy for devs who are actually writing this stuff, you know, line by line. And so I think there's, there's, I think it can help in the long run bring us all closer together.
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A
So I really like, I really like this concept because you're right. We, we've moved from that waterfall methodology that we all Learned in the 90s and then transitioned to Agile and then transitioned to Nogile, which is free for all. Chaos. Yeah, chaos. And we're constantly producing assets that provide no value to the end customer, like a PRD or an mrd. There's no value to the customer at all.
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B
No.
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A
But with this new technique, I can now work hand in hand with the product manager and the developer to build these rapid prototypes that we can show customers and get immediate feedback directly on the app without creating miles and miles of documentation.
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B
Exactly.
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A
There's our whole podcast right there.
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B
That's it. It's a wrap.
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A
That was so. But that's easier said than done, right? I mean, when, when push comes. So what. Walk me through what it looks like for you when you're, when you're using this new technique. Because 5 programming's people go, oh, Darren, it's been around so long, like what, six months, maybe a year.
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B
Yeah. I mean, the actual tools that, that we're using, they're all pretty new and they're pretty sparkly and they have some bugs. You know, they're not perfectly ironed out yet. So. But yeah, it's, it's new. And, and honestly, like so many organizations that we work with, they're not really adopting it that much, you know, but one of my favorite tools and I've actually just sort of recently been using it. And I, I met with the CEO yesterday because I'm doing a course for LinkedIn on that. Just like a quick, short course. It's called Magic Patterns. And what's cool about them is it's, it's a vibe coding tool. So you, you, it's prompt based, so you write your prompt in and I want to build this thing and it outputs code and it's like React with style sheets and all that. But what's cool about it is they only do the front end. So their whole premise is we're not looking to empower you to build these apps. We're looking, what we're looking to do is empower you to build what your app looks like. And so that's their whole model. And really they're targeting product managers and designers, and it's mostly product managers for exactly what we've been talking about. Because you can get in there and build a front end. You can set it up, you can, you know, go screen by screen. You can implement designs and they have ways that you can, you know, save, you can actually pull in figma files and, and start from there, or you can, it'll scan a website. So you can, you know, I want.
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A
To mimic this over here.
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B
Yeah, yeah. So you can say and, and it'll just sort of copy the style paradigms and then every sort of new screen that's built will do that. And you can save those profiles so that you can reuse them again and again. But that's, I think that's a great use case. So you create your front end and then a lot of times they don't even keep the code. You can push it to code to GitHub or whatever, or you can publish it to a URL and share it out. And whether or not you use the code is irrelevant, but you've communicated what it is and the devs can actually look at the code and they can use that as a reference if they don't want to use the code itself.
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A
Okay, so how is this different than all these frameworks that we've created over the years? Like even back in the 90s with cold fusion, and there were a whole bunch of that were like that, right. That were supposed to make it easier to write a web page or to write a web front end or even the React framework is supposed to just make it easier. Why is this different? Yeah, why is this different than that?
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B
I mean, the ultimate problem is there's always been such a, the, the point where it goes from design to dev has always been just a friction point. And so like React makes it easier, but it doesn't make it easy enough for a product manager to code it. Right. So. And likewise, some of these tools, they would generate code, but the code they generated was total garbage. Like the code. If you look at these and if you talk to devs. Deb, I've had some posts on LinkedIn that have had some very negative response from developers about these tools. Yeah? Yeah. Well, I think it's a combination. One is. First of all, historically these kind of tools have really output garbage code. I mean, it would. The way it named everything. Like, I don't know if you remember Dreamweaver, that was like, oh yeah, boy.
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A
What a nightmare to debug that.
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B
Yeah. And when you got, when you looked at the code, it was like, once you wrote it in Dreamweaver, it was like, forget about the code, it has to be fixed in Dreamweaver, like the code itself was it named everything with these crazy long IDs. And like the whole thing was just so messy. And so devs are kind of like gun shy about that. But now these tools are outputting much better code. And again, if we have this sort of reference of this is what I want to build and it's built, that's the other thing is instead of just doing it in figma, where you can make up whatever and put stuff in there, and then the devs look at it and they're like, well, this is cool, but the UI library we're using doesn't have these components in it, so what do you want us to do? Right, and that's a disconnect. So all those disconnects and friction points mean the code doesn't look like what you generated. But now if we're all working in the same basic environment, there's a little bit more of a sort of onetoone conversation that can be had.
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A
So it's really interesting because. Because it's generating what. What's the right word? It's generating basic code or it's generating code. Instead of generating frameworks or generating code specific to frameworks, it makes the code easier to understand because if I have a big framework, I've got to learn all the libraries in that framework and how that, how the original designers of that framework were trying to make it highly configurable so it can handle all these use cases. So do you think that these frameworks are going to go away as they add complexity as as Vibe programming can go directly to code that is highly valuable code instead of a bunch of framework connectivity stuff. You know what I'm trying to say?
- [16:47]
B
Yeah, I think so. Well, so are you talking about like the, the programming frameworks? Are you talking about frameworks like development methodology frameworks?
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A
No, I'm talking about the programming frameworks. Like for example, if I want to use React, that library is massively huge, right. And it provides a lot of stuff for me. But if Vibe programming can say, well, I could give you straight up JavaScript and HTML5, then the actual amount of code that it's generating would be substantially smaller. And so I. Yeah, go ahead.
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B
It'll be interesting to see where, where it goes in the long run right now because there's so much work that is still needs to be done on the dev side. And the beauty of frameworks like React is you're. You're not having to start from scratch. You so much is there, like you said, there's so many libraries and components and all the stuff that you can just kind of in Plug plugin. So all these tools are pretty much outputting React or React native or you know, depending on the environment and different libraries. In fact, you can often choose what styling library you want to use. If you want to use like Tailwind, which is like a, a CSS framework or Material ui, which is another sort of. So you can, right? You can choose which one you use and. And it's all rendered using in the back end. It's all rendered using React. That's part of what makes it so fast and makes it so easy is because there's like so much dev work now is done in React with all these libraries. Like it's almost to the point where it used to be, it was like this website was in J2EE and this one was in.NET and this one was in PHP and this one's in Ruby on Rails. There were so many different environments and now it's kind of the TypeScript. JavaScript with React has really become the predominant paradigm, which is one reason that makes this possible because the devs can look at the code and at least it's in the same basic environment as what they were using.
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A
Gotcha.
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B
So in the short term, I don't think it'll go away in the long term. Right. Like when we have workflows where you have the product managers and the designers outputting front end code that works and is light and tight and then you can push that to Garage, GitHub and then the pr, you Know, the, the devs can like look at that, review it and then pull it into the code and then they're using cursor or something on their end so that they're actually accelerating their time. You know, then I can see the code can be generated by AI and the AI can choose what's best based on everything in the code. Right. And it can transform it like instantaneously in ways that, see, you're taking the human out of the mix and it can find that's definitely going to happen down the road. I mean anyone who thinks that's not is really needs to get with the program because that's going to happen. But right now it's more of like a, you know, the integration is more like communicating the idea. But it won't be long, like next year this code's going to be good enough. And, and look, these environments, like I do a lot of stuff with lovable, it has two way GitHub syncing. So if I'm pushing the code and I've got some devs that are working on stuff, they can go through and they can clean everything up and when they push that code back, it'll automatically like sync to my Lovable. And Lovable is just running React in the background. So it's going to render everything with whatever they plugged in with whatever libraries they have, whatever. And I don't even have to do know that.
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A
So that, so that feedback loop between the dev and the product managers is a lot tighter. It's way tighter. All right, get back to me in two weeks at the end of our sprint and show me what you have. You don't, you can actually collaborate more real time now with this, with this kind of techniques.
- [20:54]
B
100%. Yeah. And, and it's so quick that you can, you can prepare like I can, they can push something to me, I can look at it, I can then tweak it and then we can hop on a call and I can show them what I did to change, to change their code. Right. And then they can either say, well no, we don't want to do it that way, but I see what you're getting at. Or like, yeah, that's great, sync it up and let's go. You know we're speaking the same language.
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A
Yeah, that's a very different paradigm than what we're used to. Even with agile programming, we're still very, maybe they're micro waterfalls, but absolutely, you're talking about true collaboration where you're actually working together, you're seeing things more Dynamically. I really like this approach. Should we call it the Falkman approach?
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B
I wish I could take credit for it, but I think it's evolving out there. I don't think, um, you know, I'm.
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A
The first one that writes it down, gets credit.
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B
I guess that's how it works, right? It was actually like the second person that writes it down, and then the first person's kind of sol. You know, it's.
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A
And it's. And it's the first person that has a good PR firm to get it out there.
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B
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. So I'll let someone else.
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A
All right, so let's talk about where you think the future's going. Let's say five years down, down the road. Do you think I'm still going to need developers or is their role going to change? That's one area I want to touch on first. And then I have another crazy thought later after that.
- [22:45]
B
Their role is. Is without a doubt going to change. But I, I think we're going to need developers. We're going to need developers, we're going to need designers, we're going to need product managers. All of these people are doing important things, right? Like the product manager is distilling out the user voice and they're determining the product strategy to make the ultimate product to solve the problem for their users, right? So that while we can use AI to help us in that, we do need a human in the mix to do all that. And anyone who's done the PM role knows that 95% of what we do is just communicating, right? It's talking. It's getting the dev team and the designers and the stakeholders and the exec team and everyone on the same page, right? So you can't replace that with AI. You can make it faster and you can make it easier and you can eliminate some of the redundant tasks and even some of the complicated tasks like doing competitive research and figuring out what pricing to do and, you know, understanding the analytics. But, you know, you still need a human in that mix for devs. It's also going to change, right? It's, it's, it's key that they're in the mix because there's always going to be new things that come up. There's. And it's developers that are going to come up with these new things, right? Like all the APIs and all that. AI is great at the moment at sort of seeing it can understand everything that's out there in a way that humans can't, because it can take all that stuff in and it's not automatically filtering out with biases and all this stuff, it's just pulling it all in and it can tell you about that and it can learn from that. And humans will never be able to do, do that. But by the same token, like innovating, truly innovating and coming up with fresh, bold new ideas. And you know that we still need humans for that. And devs, like there's, we're always plugging in all these different things and there's always going to be something like tools always get you. Even the best tools get you to 80%. Right. And then it's hard work and sweat and everything to get you that last 20%. And we need the devs for that. But I think devs, how devs work in five years will be vastly accelerated. Right. The front end will be mostly built. It'll be pretty much done by these tools. Between designers and PMs, they're going to have that all honed out. So they're just getting the code.
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A
We're shifting the responsibility of product development or the actual implementation of product development, we're shifting it left, which means I can get products out faster and the value of the developer could be, is changing, basically.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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A
I kind of like this. Now, my next big question right now, we're so used to web interfaces the way they are today. Point, click things. Do you see a different kind of interface with computers moving forward, especially when a computer can now understand natural language?
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B
Yeah, yes, definitely. I mean, look.
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A
And what does that look like from your perspective? What does that look like?
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B
It's already evolved so much. I mean, when you look at what we do and when you look at like these devices that are tracking what we're doing and taking in, they're taking inputs that we're not even entering anymore. Right. Like by me moving, I, I'm telling this thing what I'm doing. So I'm telling it so much. It can figure out so much from that. And that kind of. Those kind of interfaces where they're almost invisible, that kind of thing is going to increase more and more. You know that we always had this view of the future as like voice. We're going to be like, hey, Hal, you know, I need to do this. And it's never really happened. And the problem before was that was really about semantics because you couldn't, it didn't understand everything like, Hal, cut the lights. Well, it doesn't know vernacular, right. You'd have to learn commands. And then once you start learning Commands, you're not moving forward. You're going back to dos. And. And you.
- [27:09]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You hit it right on the nose. We in. In my house, we have Alexas all over the place. In fact, probably just come on. Which she just did because I said her name. But we speak differently because of that. Right. Because we're changing how we communicate based off of the interface that we're communicating with computer with large language models. That's changed. Yep. Dramatically. So I'm excited to see what it's.
- [27:41]
B
Going to look like. The other thing that I think about and even regarding apps is in a lot of ways, like, why even have designers and product managers in the mix? Right. If AI can figure out and create a design in real time based on what that user needs and wants to get. Imagine that. Like now there's this whole thing, it's called genui. Like, what if we applied this to. Actually. So that's like the next step of I coding. Why even figure out what app to build? Why not just let the app build itself in real time based on what the user needs?
- [28:30]
A
Now you're scaring me a little bit, Drew. Just a little bit. We need some oversight. A little bit of oversight.
- [28:40]
B
Right, well, and that's the thing. But humans will stay in the mix, right? So the product manager's role will then to be defined those parameters. Right. Like someone comes in to go shopping. Oh, okay. So these are the things that we still need to do. We still need to have these elements in here. But so what are the parameters for what the. The genui is going to put out? And the user interface, by the way, that user interface could be like via voice. It could be via observation. Right. By watching you move, like, I mean, UI in the broadest sense of like how interacts with the computer, whatever that means. Not necessarily a web app.
- [29:20]
A
Well, I'm glad you brought that up, because when we think of ui, we're thinking click buttons. Yeah, right. We're thinking, oh, a dialog box. And all the things I learned. I was a motif programmer. You probably don't know Motif.
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B
Nice. I don't remember. I mean, I've heard of it, but I never used it.
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A
Ex Motif. It's what all of the UNIX systems were running at the time. I was a motif program. I was a user interface programmer, highly sought after because there weren't many of us at the time. And then the web came on and destroyed that whole area because everything went to the browser. So, you know, I had this shift. I think we're going to see a lot of shifting in, in people's careers over the next 5, 10, 15 years as these new technologies evolve and, and make things obsolete and then create new things on the side like Genui. I love that term. Another one, you know. True. You got to get out there and write a book on Genui, man. Yeah, you'll be the next for.
- [30:29]
B
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't, I don't like. Yeah, it's cool. It's really interesting. I'd love to, I'd love to go down that road. I don't know how to develop stuff though. I mean, I do, but not like, yeah, I don't know how to train models and, and do all that stuff, so. But it's really cool. I mean, I think it's great.
- [30:50]
A
So Drew, if people want to find out more, interact with you more on these subjects, where do they go to find out more?
- [30:58]
B
So I'm working. So I have courses, I have lots of courses on LinkedIn. So if you, if you, most of the subscriptions to LinkedIn, if you have any of those, they come with LinkedIn Learning and there's actually lots of great courses. I've been working with them since they bought out lynda.com so I've been working with them since it was lynda.com and they put out some really good courses and they, they have a good sort of production team and they do everything really well. So I do that. And then I have a course on Maven. I'm working on a couple other courses focused towards product managers, mostly in vibe coding and this. And I'm working on some other self paced courses. Maven's great and it's like cohort based but it's, it's great if you have a company that's going to pay for it for you because like my class is like 1250 bucks. But I'm working on some self paced ones so people can figure it out because I really think. And I've moved more into the education element because my belief is that the new frontier and the ultimate job skill to have is just constantly learning and being on top of it. Because these changes, innovation is accelerating like as slow as it took before to get to the web. But what's happened like since the web and then mobile and then you know, Web3 and AI and it's just getting faster and faster. And so the people that are able to learn and adapt and those are the ones, they're always going to be jobs for them. Right. So I think it's really important for people to do this. So I'm just trying to make it easier for people to do that so people don't become obsolete.
- [32:36]
A
Hey, Drew, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is, I've had a lot of fun.
- [32:41]
B
Yeah, I have to. It's great.
- [32:43]
A
Yeah. And you're, you're a good, you're a good interview. So thanks, thanks for coming on the show.
- [32:47]
B
Thanks. I appreciate you having me. It's been fun.
- [32:54]
A
Thanks for listening to Embracing Digital Transformation. If you enjoyed today's conversation, give us five stars on your favorite podcasting app or on YouTube. It really helps others discover the show. If you want, if you want to go deeper, join our exclusive community@patreon.com embracingdigital where we share bonus content and you can always connect with other change makers like yourself. You can always find more resources@embracingdigital.org until next time, keep embracing the digital transformation.