Over the past few years, Product Culture has solidified around four simple and powerful principles: ship fast and frequently, stay focused on the problem, pursue outcomes (not outputs), and think of the product as part of an ecosystem. These principles emerged from practice and were reinforced repeatedly by companies that transformed the way they learn, test, evolve, and scale solutions.

However, we are now facing a new technological inflection point.

Vibe-coding tools — environments where prototyping, simulating, and automating functionality become dramatically faster and more accessible — are shortening the distance between intention and implementation. What once took weeks can now be completed in hours. Ideas take shape even before we have a complete understanding of them.

This is powerful. But also risky. Because the impact of these tools isn’t just about speeding up the work. They directly influence culture. Culture is always about habits, incentives, and how decisions are made.

I once heard a story about three engineers who decided to use a vibe-coding tool to build a simple internal system — something they estimated would take two days to complete. After three months of back-and-forth, they gave up and admitted they didn’t actually know what they wanted to build. The principles of Product Culture exist precisely to provide that clarity.

So, let’s examine the upside and potential pitfalls of these tools, principle by principle.

1. Deliver Early and Often

What changes with vibe-coding

Vibe-coding tools significantly accelerate the creation and delivery of solutions. The “think → test → adjust” cycle gets shorter. Experience prototyping occurs almost simultaneously with the emergence of the idea. This reduces the cost of exploring possibilities and expands the space for experimentation.

The Benefit

More cycles → more learning → more evolution.

The Risk

Confusing speed with progress. When it becomes easy to ship something, it’s tempting to release without measuring whether it generated learning or value.

How to sustain the principle

Speed is still a means, not an end in itself. Every delivery should answer: What did we learn or (in)validate here?

2. Focus on the Problem

What changes with vibe-coding

With faster prototyping, it becomes much easier to test hypotheses early, provided the problem is clearly defined. If the problem definition is shallow, the prototype becomes a distraction. If the problem is well understood, the prototype becomes a lens and an accelerator.

The Benefit

Better alignment between intent and solution.

The Risks

Skipping problem discovery and jumping straight into solution discovery. Building a solution without clarity about the problem being solved is guaranteed to be a waste. We need to understand the problem, who experiences it, and the motivation to solve it — before working on solution discovery.

Another critical risk: vibe-coding tools enable product people to create prototypes and even MVPs without coding knowledge. This can give the false impression that engineers are not needed in the solution discovery. Even with vibe-coding tools, engineers remain essential because they understand what is actually feasible, far beyond what these tools alone make possible.

How to sustain the principle

The team must bring engineers into solution discovery — but only after there is real clarity about the problem. The sequence matters: problem → understanding → solution → evolution.

3. Deliver Outcomes (Not Outputs)

What changes with vibe-coding

Faster prototyping enables the quick observation of whether an idea has the potential to generate outcomes, before incurring significant investment. This makes it easier to validate impact early, not just functionality.

The Benefit

Fewer big, blind bets. More experiments driven by impact.

The Risk

Falling back into the old trap of thinking that “shipping features = delivering value.” With fast-built features, this confusion becomes even more likely, not less.

How to sustain the principle

An outcome refers to an observable change in user behavior and/or business metrics. If the only thing that changed is the code, then nothing meaningful has actually been delivered.

4. Ecosystem Mindset

What changes with vibe-coding

The new pace of prototyping makes it easier to test distinct value propositions for different actors in the ecosystem (end users, partners, internal teams, suppliers, etc.).

The Benefit

More opportunities to create distributed value, not just value for the actor who pays today.

The Risk

The ease of development can lead to prioritizing one actor at the expense of others, creating imbalances that become expensive to fix later.

How to sustain the principle

Prototype for multiple actors, and measure the impact on relationships between actors — not just individual gains.

Example 1: Zapando

Zapando was born from a talk where I discuss the 4 Essential Principles of Product Culture. When I explain Principle #1, ‘Deliver Early and Often,’ one of the reasons behind it is the return on investment. In short, the longer your product takes to reach real users (and eventually, paying customers), the more time, money, and energy you will need to invest from your own pocket. I explain this in more detail in this article.

In the latest versions of that talk, I often use the idea of building a simple To-Do app as an example. At some point, I caught myself thinking: “Do I really need three months to build a To-Do app?” So I decided to test that hypothesis using a vibe-coding tool, and the app was ready in a single weekend.

This experiment made two effects of vibe-coding very clear:

• Principle #1 – Ship Fast and Frequently: It dramatically accelerated creation and delivery. => App built in a weekend.
• Principle #2 – Focus on the Problem: It allowed me to test the core hypothesis early. → Do I really need three months to build a To-Do app?

Example 2: Your Astro Flow

Your Astro Flow came from a personal habit we have here at home: calculating the solar return, the astrological chart for the exact moment of your birthday, which is believed to reveal themes, opportunities, and challenges for the year ahead. The solar return depends on where you spend your birthday. Since my birthday is in January, my wife usually compares possible destinations to choose the place with the most favorable chart.

One day, I decided to see if ChatGPT could help streamline that calculation. It worked. And that sparked the idea of turning it into a product. I built the app in one week using vibe-coding tools, with a seven-day free trial followed by a subscription. I ran a Google Ads campaign and got 84 sign-ups in 10 days.

Success, right? Not really.

The relevant metric wasn’t sign-ups, it was return usage. The D1+ Login (how many people come back the day after signing up) was 3. And one of them was me.

Here, the most evident principles were:

• Principle #1 – Ship Fast and Frequently: the app was built in a week and launched.
• Principle #3 – Deliver Outcomes: the idea didn’t generate retention => so it didn’t make sense to keep investing (time or money).

Summary Table

When we compare the benefits and the risks, it becomes easier to see where vibe-coding accelerates progress, and where it can inadvertently lead us off track:

The Impact of Vibe-Coding on the Principles of Product Culture

Conclusion

Vibe-coding doesn’t change Product Culture. It amplifies the culture you already have.

• If your culture values learning, vibe-coding accelerates evolution.
• If your culture values shipping for the sake of shipping, vibe-coding accelerates waste.

This is why the role of Product leadership remains the same: reinforce how we decide, how we learn, and how we deliver outcomes — for the customer and for the business. The difference is that now all of this happens faster, amplified by vibe-coding tools.

Vibe-coding is quite powerful for prototyping and rapid testing of ideas. Product Culture is how we solve real problems. One without the other goes off track — the two together scale a lot.

Workshops, coaching, and advisory services

I’ve been helping companies and their leaders (CPOs, heads of product, CTOs, CEOs, tech founders, and heads of digital transformation) bridge the gap between business and technology through workshops, coaching, and advisory services on product management and digital transformation.

Gyaco Podcasts

At Gyaco, we believe in the power of conversations to spark reflection and learning. That’s why we have three podcasts that explore the world of product management from different angles:

• Produto em Pauta: In the new season, titled “Beyond the Buzzwords”, Felipe Castro and I demystify product terms with real examples from our clients. Available on YouTube and Spotify. Recorded in Portuguese, with English subtitles on YouTube.
• Product Chronicles, the Brazilian Way: with Fábio Martinelli Duarte and Paulo Caroli — the Brazilian way of building products: stories, challenges, and lessons learned, featuring case studies from our clients. Available on YouTube and Spotify. Recorded in English, with Portuguese subtitles on YouTube.
• Beyond the Article, Expanded by AI: C.L.A.R.A. (Creative Language AI for Reflective Augmentation) chats with my AI clone, JocAI, expanding on my articles with new perspectives. Available on YouTube and Spotify. Thanks to AI, episodes are available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Digital Product Management Books

Do you work with digital products? Do you want to know more about managing a digital product to increase its chances of success, solve its user’s problems, and achieve the company objectives? Check out my Digital Product Management books, where I share what I learned during my 30+ years of experience in creating and managing digital products:

• Digital transformation and product culture: How to put technology at the center of your company’s strategy
• Leading Product Development: The art and science of managing product teams
• Product Management: How to increase the chances of success of your digital product
• Startup Guide: How startups and established companies can create profitable digital products