How my Principle PM friend started contributing 50% of their team's code

This edition of the Full-Stack Product Leader was sent March 2026

Hi there

I just had breakfast this morning with a longtime friend who’s been doing brilliant product work in big Swedish companies for the last 15 years.

Since we last met 3 months ago, my friend has moved from leading the hairy product work of a consumer app spanning multiple teams to also contributing 50% of the PRs to the app’s code base (with the help of AI, of course).

Why would a product leader want to write code? Because you can do even better and MORE product work by running A/B tests, create functional prototypes, pull important data and technical knowledge from the code without bothering the team.

Here’s the framework they used to go from zero coding to meaningful contributor in 3 months, without disrupting their team or creating friction.

Start with non-threatening work (for the team and for you)

Rumors allege that the CEO of a $15 billion fintech has been personally crawling their codebase with Claude Code, calling developers directly (at night) questioning technical decisions in their massive code base.

Not sure you want to be that person.

Instead, go for a helpful and harmless approach where you get to know the codebase as you contribute to it in a meaningful way. Start with work that adds value without creating risk, go very small, pace yourself with the team’s needs:

  • Adding tests — unit tests, integration tests, generating GUIs for testing. This is a great way to understand the code base AND contribute.
  • Remove dead code or attend to FIXMEs — for obvious things that needed love that no one had gotten to.
  • Refactoring code — move to low risk refactoring

This approach lets you learn the terrain while building trust with your team, you’re not competing for their work, you’re doing the maintenance that always gets deprioritized.

Set a schedule for how to work with your coding agents

You’ll soon notice that your ambitions can be overwhelming. Enter: a work schedule.

Spend 15 minutes every morning and afternoon checking in with your agents, learning to set up (very small) tasks, reading everything they produce, and understanding what they’re doing before you commit anything.

This way you’ll get the work done, keep it to smaller batches, and create the habit that you can scale up over time.

Use your new skills to generate business value

When you’ve started to learn about the code base and earned your team’s trust in your contributions, it’s time to scale up and put your skills toward work that actually moves metrics. Here’s what becomes possible:

  • A/B testing new ideas: You can ship experiments faster instead of waiting for the team to do them. Also, you can (and should!) test more.
  • Prototyping ideas: Build rough versions to test assumptions before committing team, use them to get to meaningful discussions about feasibility sooner.
  • Pull information and stats: Extract data to inform decision making without filing tickets
  • Build internal tools: Create lightweight tools that support you as a leader
  • Better technical discussions: Become a better technical partner to your team and surface trade-offs earlier.

In 3 months, my friend has moved from “how should I prioritise getting this test up vs xyz” to running several A/B tests daily. Becoming much more data informed as they reason with their teams. They are now able to test more, be more precise with what they decide to build, and the code base is healthier.

Bring your team along

You want to move from “how to work with AI” (the meta job) to “what product opportunity should we evaluate next/how can we have more impact” (the real job).

If your team is not on par with this way of working, whether that’s your direct reports or your peers, bring them along. You want to be successful together, and the clock is ticking on companies and leaders that don’t adapt to this shift in how product work gets done.

Here’s how to bring others along:

  • Book daily AI coding coffee chats: get practical with your running agents and who does what.
  • Keep doing the work and share your experiences: You’ll learn from others and it’s inspiring to see people step in
  • Set expectations at some point (esp true for leaders): Make it clear: this is how we work now.

All roles are changing, and you need to be open to experimenting and redefining what a leader does and what leadership looks like. It’s not necessarily comfortable, but get cracking and you will get connected to other parts of your abilities that might have been slumbering for a few years.

Resources that helped

The unlock for my friend came from this 12 min video on tackling tech debt. And I’ve been using the tips from Kent Beck’s book Tidy First? for low-risk refactoring.

Let me know how it goes!

/Ylva PS: if you enjoy my newsletters and articles, share them with your friends!