Introduction · Page 6
Where the bottleneck went
For you only
| Then | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| Build an MVP | Months and tens of thousands ($50k, 7 months for GrowthMentor in 2019) | Days and pocket money ($38, 3 days on Lovable) |
| Who can build | Developers | Anyone who understands the problem |
| The bottleneck | Engineering capacity | Deciding what is worth building, testing it, and selling it |
When building was expensive, it was the bottleneck. Now it is cheap, the bottleneck moved. Spyros Tsoukalas, the founder of Ionian Technologies, said one thing that stayed with me: building got so easy that the hard part is now promoting and selling the product. Product-market fit is the bottleneck. The decision about what is worth building is the bottleneck. The user test is the bottleneck. None of those is the build.
This lands on product and UX people in a specific way. Many PMs already vibe-code solutions on their own, without UX, marketing, or dev input. If they are not, they will be next week. There is real FOMO out there, and a lot of people are shipping straight to development without users or UX anywhere near the room. Nielsen Norman Group ran a survey asking UX people about our biggest struggle. It was not design skills. It was impact and influence. That was true before AI, and AI sharpened it.
So here is the honest situation. Shipping faster does not mean shipping good. Teams often ship confusion. The build is no longer your value. The question is. Is this worth building? Who is the user? What does good look like? Those are the questions we have always owned, and now everyone can build, so the questions matter more, not less.
The old map of product work was: align first, then build. Weeks of discovery, and only then does anyone build something real. Flip the cost of building and the logic flips with it. You build first, in order to decide. You put a real, clickable thing in front of a real user on day one, and their reaction settles the argument that a workshop would have run for three weeks.
A Product Build Day is that flip, with a decision bolted to the end.