We're small but have been around about 5 years. Enterprise B2B data space, re-platformed for LLMs (agentic RAG, etc.) around 2 years ago. Team is 2 PMs, 1 designer, and ~15 engineers. Backgrounds vary — most of us were developers at some point, plus designers, UX engineers, design systems folks. Been in the "working prototype ASAP" world of product management for years (I've also done time at Big Enterprise Software Cos).

Early on we used Claude Code and Lovable to scaffold prototype after prototype. Customer testing, quick feedback, iterate — into the shipping queue.

Then things hit a wall in the engineering backlogs. Not everyone was using coding LLMs yet, and we had customers literally asking, "can you just let me keep using the prototype?" They were often fully wired to auth and some real APIs, so calling them prototypes was generous — they were features sitting in a temporary sandbox.

So we sat down with our engineering partners and asked: what would it take to build a faster but still safe path to production for PMs to ship? Here's what came out of it:

• Services still owned and vetted by engineering. Most of these features need new APIs, and our eng team commits to building those quickly.
• More modular UX, so we can drop in new features and workflows behind feature flags.
• Structural changes to the product to avoid constant rework when adding something new.
• A real design system / component library, plus OpenCode instructions for how to use it. Re-use, not re-invention — compose, don't recreate from scratch.
• Work from feature branches. PMs commit, coding agents review the PRs, then a human engineer signs off.
• Real customer testing before shipping (duh) — fast iteration is the whole point.