Claude Code makes you a more strategic PM
An example of using Claude Code for Roadmap Review, Feature Scoring and automated Wireframing
TL;DR
PMs don’t have enough time, the role is over-defined. PMs need an always on senior assistant. The good news: You can build one. On your own. In Claude Code. You can’t code? No problem.
This article shows you what’s possible and that actually nothing should hold you back.
The example: Roadmap reviews, feature scoring and automated production of wireframe prototypes. All to engage in the crucial conversation early and often.
Meet me next Wednesday, 11 Feb 2026, 9am, Berlin time, to see it live and ask questions.
Short Preview (longer version below)
The Gap
The bottleneck of PMs was never the lack of tools or frameworks or techniques. We get lost in story splitting and the hundredth approach to that, while strategy is lacking due to missing quality time, deep work. AI augmentation through the use of — most of all Claude Code — has come to a point where that bottleneck is self-inflicted. We don’t have to wait for humans taking time for us when the perfect PRD, the final roadmap have been written. We can spar from the get go. Without tools like Claude Code, only using an LLM for chatting, this is tedious. Context has to be set up for each chat anew. The results have to be copied and pasted all over the place. With Claude Code, context is permanent, the tool works on our files and the handover to the devs is exactly that: we share the files.
To show the possibilities, I built such a thing. In four hours. Without knowing how to code.
The system is not the point. The fact that anyone can build one is the point.
The Situation
A PM sits in a room full of opinions. Stakeholders want their feature. The CFO wants margin. The CTO wants debt cleaned up. Everyone has a version of what the roadmap should look like. And the PM is supposed to synthesize all of that into something strategic — with no one around to tell them straight what the roadmap actually says.
No always on senior assistant. No second opinion. No one who looks at the whole thing without an agenda and goes: “You’re overcommitting on Horizon 1. Your capacity is at 200%. And this feature request from sales? It doesn’t even connect to your strategy.”
That doesn’t happen. Because everyone in the room has skin in the game. And the PM ends up navigating politics instead of making decisions.
So I built something more clinical, surgical for that.
What I Actually Built
It’s a system that solves a very specific (well, at least three ;) problem a lot of us have over and over again.
It connects to a roadmap in Airtable, pulls the data, and does a strategic review across a couple of angles. Actual analysis. What are the biases of the roadmap? The system shouts the analysis at me. In two minutes. Not days, weeks. Short-term cash or long-term bets? Am I overcommitting? Ignoring something obvious? And it suggests decisions. Not “consider this” — actual “do this or stop doing that.” The tone is “you should change this in the next 24 hours.” It even remembers the last conflicts and reports progress or decline.
In another flow, it ranks my stakeholder feature requests. Stakeholders can actually deliver requests through a form. (It could also connect to Slack or mail.) Every request gets weighed against the company context, the capacity, the strategic direction. Signal vs. noise. Sorted.
Next level: I can use it as a gating filter. You want your feature on my roadmap? Fine. But first, the system generates an analysis of your idea’s impact. And you — the stakeholder — need to spend a couple of minutes refining it. Based on the machine’s questions (which btw. make a surprisingly lot of sense). If you’re not even willing to engage with an AI’s take on your own idea, the idea is history. No conviction, no feature. That alone kills half the noise before it reaches me.
If a request passes my bar — and I define what that bar looks like — the system generates a wireframe prototype. On the spot. Not next week. Not after a design sprint. Now. I can take that wireframe into a conversation with the stakeholder and change it live, while we’re talking. Discuss, iterate, refine — in real time. In the system. I can even talk to the system to get the prototype changed.
This Creates Quality Time For You
All of that sounds like a lot. And it is useful. But the real impact is simpler.
I get support on the admin level.
The review, the ranking, the wireframes — they’re not final answers. They’re conversation starters. I use them to kick off discussions earlier, with something concrete on the table instead of gut-feel arguments. The human is always in the loop. Always. The AI doesn’t decide anything. It gives me ammunition and prepares me to have better conversations faster, now. Not in two weeks.
An always-on senior assistant at work. It doesn’t decide. It prepares you to decide. No context setup necessary. I actually type “/strategic-review” and the result is here in two minutes. No more copy / paste, upload, and other nasty tasks. It’s just there and knows and ready to help.
Most people still get it wrong about AI in product work. It’s not about removing the human. It’s not. It’s about the human walking into the room with the always-on senior assistant’s notes in hand — unbiased, strategic, relentless — and then doing what humans do best: discuss, negotiate, decide. It’s about more communication, earlier and more frequent.
Augmentation, with the human in the loop, not automation.
The crazy development speed up will make you the bottleneck, even more
If your engineers have not taken over on the right side yet, they will. The speed of software development, love it or hate it, will increase 10x or 100x. For some it already has. The knowledge is not yet evenly distributed. The idea still receives some hate. But economy will win.
This makes our job the bottleneck, even more. We are already running behind for reasons of an overloaded role. It will become worse.
Which is required when the software engineers are becoming 10x faster, and that’s honestly underdoing it. That means: We need to speed up, level up our game and use AI to the max: early, feedback-based on outsourced standard and admin work.
The good news: That’s what we always wanted. More time for the required, crucial conversations, leading to the best decisions.
It’s Not About This System
I built this for me. To solve my actual problem. Not to sell it to you. I can’t even.
It’s about showing what’s possible. Here is your always-on senior assistant you never had. Without an agenda, without politics, without ego. You can build one now. For your context, your strategic questions, your company. Set the context up once and here it stays. Always available. Surprisingly hyper smart. No vanity. Patient to do your admin work for you. The kind of review that used to require an expensive external consultant or a brutally honest colleague — you can get a solid first version from AI. In minutes. And then do what you always should have done: talk to people about it.
Not enough people switched already. It’s hidden in plain sight. Just like a lot of things in these early AI days. If you start now, you’re still early. In a year you will be behind.
The Barriers
The build. Because I know exactly what the first reaction is: “Cool, but I can’t do this. I’m not technical.”
I wrote my last code probably 20 years ago. Maybe more. I’m not a developer.
And I intentionally made this harder than it needed to be. I wanted database access — my roadmap lives in Airtable — and design capabilities — the wireframe generation — in the same system. Just to see how far I could push this. With Airtable, Claude, and Cursor.
Four hours. Build and test. The whole thing.
The only real mistake I made: the AI convinced me to use Python-based API calls to connect to Airtable rather than MCP. I should have pushed back. MCP would have been freer, cleaner. But I trusted the suggestion, ended up with Python scripts I honestly don’t fully understand — and it still worked. I know, though, MCP would feel much more free and explorative. This might sound like gibberish to you, but when you experience the explorative nature of this way of work, you will realize that predefined API calls feel like 2024. Or stone age. (Lesson learned: next time, MCP first. Don’t let the AI talk you into the complicated path when the simple one exists.)
Four hours. Database connection, strategic analysis, wireframe generation. For someone whose last coding experience involved Internet Explorer being state of the art.
That much about barriers. It’s not about “look what I can do.” If I can do it, you can do it. Gatekeeping is over. If a non-coder can wire up a database, strategic analysis, and design generation in an afternoon — the only thing standing between you and your own always-on senior assistant or high-quality insight is the decision to start. You will dance circles around the people who don’t use this.
See It Live
There’s a Zoom cast next Wednesday, February 11th, 9am Berlin time. I’ll walk through the system, show how it works, and you can ask anything. Challenge me. Tell me why it wouldn’t work for your context. I’m curious.
The tools are here. The barriers aren’t. Four hours and a decision — that’s all it takes to stop navigating politics and start making decisions.