Why PMs Must Stop Coding Once Engineers Arrive

Key Takeaways

• Atlassian built an internal incubation called Rovoclaw after a PM named Josh and a designer named Kevin vibe coded a working alpha from scratch.
• When full-time engineers joined the project, the PM kept writing code, which caused the engineering team to drift off track.
• Shifting from coding ("rowing") back to product management ("steering") restored team focus, while the PM's hands-on coding experience made unblocking technical hurdles faster.
• To eliminate manual status reporting, the team built an AI agent directly into Rovoclaw that generates its own weekly updates.

Building an Alpha Without Engineers

Starting a new product inside a large company usually requires months of headcount negotiations, roadmap horse-trading, and spec writing before a single line of code gets written. Atlassian bypassed that entire cycle for an internal incubation called Rovoclaw.

Instead of waiting for an engineering team, a product manager named Josh paired up with a designer named Kevin. The two of them vibe coded the product from scratch. As Atlassian Chief Product Officer Tamar Yehoshua explained: “It started with a PM Josh and a designer Kevin. They vibe coded the whole thing. They from soup to nuts got to a working alpha that they got customers using internally.”▶ 10:21

They proved demand and built a functioning tool before asking for a dedicated engineering team. The code was good enough to get real internal users on board and prove the concept was worth serious investment.

The Trap of Continuing to Row

Once the alpha gained traction, Atlassian staffed the project with full-time engineers. That created an unexpected bottleneck: Josh did not stop coding.

Because he enjoyed building, Josh stayed in the codebase. But while he was busy writing pull requests, the new engineers lacked clear priorities and context. Yehoshua described the realization: “Josh started to see that the engineers started veering off track because he was busy writing code and he one day is like wait a minute should I be spending my time coding? Is this actually the highest leverage activity that I could be doing?”▶ 10:46

He realized the answer was no. He stopped writing production code immediately. “He decided to step back from the coding and to focus on what a PM usually does setting direction prioritizing and unlocking,”▶ 10:59 Yehoshua noted.

Stepping away from the keyboard did not waste his technical effort. Because Josh had built the original alpha himself, he understood the architecture, the technical debt, and the actual difficulty of incoming feature requests. As Yehoshua put it: “The fact that he had started out by coding significantly helped him because he could understand what the blockers were. He could understand what the challenges were and it made for a much better environment of how he could steer the team.”▶ 11:13

Automating the Busywork

Once Josh stepped back into the steering role, he looked for ways to eliminate traditional PM overhead rather than returning to manual administrative work.

Instead of spending Friday afternoons compiling weekly status emails, he used the product itself. “Josh used Rovoclaw and built an agent in the product he was developing to give the weekly updates on itself which were super amusing and so he no longer writes weekly updates,”▶ 11:41 Yehoshua said. By having the software report on its own development velocity and metrics, the team reclaimed hours of weekly alignment meetings.

What to Do With This

Audit your calendar from the past two weeks. If you are a PM or founder who writes code, tally the hours you spent submitting pull requests versus the hours you spent clarifying tickets, talking to customers, and unblocking your engineering team. If your developers spent more than one hour blocked on product decisions while you were building features, hand off your open PRs tomorrow and spend the rest of the week unblocking them.