From the Sidelines to Software Composition

There's a peculiar feeling that many product leaders know well – the combination of pride and slight detachment that comes during a product launch. You're there, heart racing with excitement, but you're on the sidelines.

Coaching.

Cheerleading.

Supporting the team that's doing the heavy lifting. It's a role I've played many times throughout my career, and one I had grown accustomed to since stepping away from hands-on engineering decades ago.

But something different happened during the launch week for SpecStory, our VS Code extension for Cursor. Instead of watching from the sidelines, I found myself back in the game: hands on keyboard, directly contributing to the code that would shape our very firstproduct. This return to coding wasn't just about building features – it was about rediscovering a part of myself I thought I'd left behind.

My Path to Product Management

My journey away from coding wasn't accidental. Early in my career I discovered something intoxicating: the moment when software meets the real world. Seeing how people actually use and find value in what we built – that was the hook that pulled me into product management. That, and if I'm honest, my restless nature. I loved the ideation, the broad strokes, the ability to work on multiple concepts simultaneously. What I lacked was the patience for the final 20% of coding – the corner cases, the edge scenarios, the meticulous attention to detail that great software engineering demands.

This realization led me into product roles that grew larger over time, eventually landing in product leadership positions at DigitalOcean and Docker. It was fulfilling work, but it came with a certain distance from the hands-on creation process, especially during those crucial launch periods.

Team SpecStory is a new kind of collaboration

At SpecStory, we've built something special – not just in our product, but in our team composition.

• There's Sean, my co-founder and CTO, who I've been fortunate to work with for over 15 years since our IBM days, the driver behind our launch.
• Calvin, whose engineering expertise went far beyond building our first version; he crafted the product, process, and packaging in a way that empowered the rest of the team—even those of us without engineering backgrounds—to actively contribute and build upon his work.
• Greg, our chief evangelist, brought his experience from GitHub and Pluralsight along with his passion for software composition to set pace and guide us always towards the cutting edge of this new market.
• And Han, whose depth of understanding of developer experience, design thinking, and product sense have brought clarity to our current and future product vision.

What makes this team unique is that we're a blend of developers, traditional software engineers and what we call "software composers" – people who, like myself, may not have written professional code in years, or ever, but can now contribute directly to the codebase through AI-driven development tools.

My newly shaped perspective

Last week leading up to our soft launch was frenetic. We were pushing hard to release both our VS Code extension for Cursor and our web application, where users can save and share their composer and chat history.

Instead of just articulating how I wanted the web application to feel, I myself was able to rapidly prototype it together with Han using Cursor. When Calvin saw our prototypes, his response was notable: "Wow, this is really helpful – I can see and interact with the exact concept you're going for."

This wasn't just about prototyping. When we needed a responsive design for mobile devices, instead of adding it to our backlog, I rolled up my sleeves and built it by software composing.

Using our own SpecStory extension, I was able to document my prompts and thinking in the pull request, making it easier for Calvin to review and understand my intent.

This experience for all of us was eye-opening. I found myself implementing features I would have previously only specified: branding elements, calls to action, redirect handling, the save-as-markdown button, and even user analytics integration.

Meanwhile, Han was using similar flows for interactive design prototypes, defining the conceptual and visual core of our software experience in a way that was more tangible than static mockups alone could ever be.

And Greg used software composition to build our entire marketing website, starting from a blank page, in less than a day. His experiences using these workflows for months really shaped our initial product vision.

A New Model for Software Creation

What we're building at SpecStory isn't just a tool – it's a bridge between traditional software engineering and a new way of creating software. We're one of the earliest teams to successfully blend software engineers and software composers, working together in harmony.

This isn't about replacing traditional engineering – it's about augmenting it, making it more accessible, and allowing more voices to contribute directly to a product's evolution.

For me personally, it's meant the joy of being back in the game, contributing directly to our product while maintaining the strategic view that drew me to product management in the first place. It's about finding a balance I never thought possible – between big-picture thinking and hands-on creation, between leadership and direct contribution.

As we continue to build and refine SpecStory, I'm more convinced than ever that this hybrid model of software development is the future. A future where the distinction between those who envision and those who create becomes increasingly fluid.

Where more directly contribute to the creation process.

And where the sidelines become just another vantage point rather than a permanent position.