How I Became a Product Manager Without the Title

I’ve been a product manager for most of my career. I just didn’t have the title for most of it.

The work showed up long before the job description did. Looking back, every step I took was quietly building toward the role I have now, which is the most complex product job I’ve ever done. Here’s the actual path, including the parts that don’t fit on a resume.

The PM instinct showed up before the job title did

I was studying software engineering in my bachelor’s. Everyone around me wanted to write code. I wanted to talk about what we were building and why.

I kept ending up in the same spot: in a room with the CEO or founder of whatever project I was on, pitching new features. Then I’d go test the edge cases nobody asked me to test, find the bugs, and hand them back to the developers.

That was the fun part for me. The developers would groan. We’d fix it. And we’d all end up laughing by the end of it.

At the time I thought I was just a curious engineer. I was actually doing the two things product management runs on: figuring out what to build with the people who own the vision, and protecting the quality of it with the people who build it.

Keyweemotion taught me I’d rather build the product than market it

I founded Keyweemotion in 2019, right before the 2020 content boom. On paper, we helped entrepreneurs build their personal brands. Content, not software.

But in the back of my head, I was always looking for a chance to build an app or a platform for someone. So I started offering it. A few of my content clients let us build theirs.

The feeling I got working on those builds was different from anything in the content work. It lit something up. I kept reminding myself, quietly, that this was the point. This was the work I was actually meant to do. I didn’t have the language for it yet, but I was choosing product over marketing every time I got the chance.

The Leveraged Mining project made it official

By 2023, AI started eating the old agency model. Content that used to take a team could be spun up in an afternoon. So I stopped chasing content work and leaned hard into AI, automation, and product development.

Then Colin at Leveraged Mining handed me a real one: a managed Bitcoin mining app, months of design and development, from scoping to ship. The process itself is a whole story on its own. What matters here is what it did to me.

I fell in love with the process all over again. Not the code. The shape of the job:

• Figuring out which features actually help the users, not the ones that sound good in a meeting.
• Sitting with the founder and every department to find where they’re stuck.
• Turning those bottlenecks into features that work.
• Explaining all of it to designers and developers so we’re genuinely on the same page.
• Drafting the document. Writing everything down on paper.

That last part is my jam. The spec, the feature list, the thing that gets a whole team pointed in one direction. I’d do that part for free.

Back then I was already AI-enabled, but in a light way. I’d sketch interfaces in v0.dev so my designer and developer could see what I meant instead of decoding a paragraph. Useful. But it wasn’t the shift yet.

Claude Code changed how much I could carry alone

I started using Claude Code in late 2025, and it changed the whole game for me.

I built a few hobby projects with it, the way you’d expect. Then one of them turned into an obsession: AI discoverability. How do you actually get cited by ChatGPT and other language models when someone asks a question in your field? I went deep. I learned the mechanics, the schema, the structure that makes a site readable to AI instead of invisible to it.

I ran that whole build the way I run any product, which I’ve documented in I can’t code, I made 6 working apps in 30 days. I used the PM skills I’d spent years sharpening. Specs. Feature lists. Clear thinking on paper. The AI did the building. I did the deciding.

That obsession became a product. It lives at connectmy.tech today, and I’m genuinely proud of it. Not because I wrote the code, but because I owned the thinking.

My product is how a founder found me

Here’s the part I still find funny.

I built a product about getting found by AI. And a founder named Ari found me through her own AI search.

We’re working together now at Creator Genius, on the most sophisticated product work I’ve ever done. Complex backends, real scope, hard tradeoffs, the kind of decisions where getting it wrong is expensive. It’s the clearest proof I’ve seen that the whole point of AI discoverability isn’t vanity. When your work is structured and public in a way AI can read, the right people find you.

If you want the technical version of how I made myself findable, it’s in how I made my website AI discoverable. The short version: the discipline that built the product is the same discipline that got me hired.

And the reason the title finally caught up to the work is the thing I’ve believed since my engineering days. The best product people aren’t the best coders. I made that case in why the best AI agent builders are not developers. The job is judgment and translation, not syntax.

I use AI to get better at the job, not just to do the job

Ari and I use AI to build. That part’s obvious. But I also use AI to become a better PM every single day, and that’s the piece most people skip.

I built a personal dashboard I call the PM Mentor. Every morning it runs, reads all my project docs and my meeting notes, and then tells me what I’m missing, what to do more of, and what to cut. Alongside that, it gives me a lesson and a quote for the day.

It’s part of my morning routine now. The PM Mentor runs, reads everything on my machine about the project, and generates one lesson. I read it. I apply it. I wait for tomorrow’s.

That’s the difference between using AI as a crutch and using it as a coach. One does the work for you. The other makes you sharper at work you already own.

The tools got better. The purpose never changed.

I’m grateful for the era we’re in. Using AI in my day-to-day is a privilege, and I’m growing faster because of it than I ever could alone.

But I hold one thing tight: I don’t need to lean on it. I’m still sharpening my own skills, on purpose, so the judgment underneath the tools stays mine.

If you’re doing the work of product management without the title, pay attention to that signal. Shahab Papoon spent years testing edge cases, annoying developers, and writing specs before anyone called it a job. The title is a lagging indicator. The instinct is the real thing.

Do the work. The name for it catches up.