I went to the Berkeley Haas AI Conference expecting to hear about AI strategy and go-to-market motions. I got that. But the through-line across every single session — from Adobe to Perplexity, from Box to Webflow — was something simpler: build things.
The Message Was Unanimous
Rachel Wolin, CPO of Webflow, said it most directly: "If you want to get a job, you are going to have to demonstrate that you are AI native. Have a portfolio of different kinds of projects." She wasn't speaking only to product managers. "I say this not as just a product manager — if you're in finance, marketing, corp dev, it doesn't matter."
Michael Pratt, Head of Product at Apple's Platoon: "Hack on projects, even if you're not technical. Download Cursor, toss your resume in, and build a resume website. That's an awesome first step of showing product sense and execution."
Idan Gazit, GitHub Next: "Nothing speaks like a prototype. As much as my official title is research, it's not research — it's prototyping. Our job is to make."
Rohan, VP Growth at Perplexity, on what they look for in hires: "Have they tried to spin something up of their own and failed gloriously? That's the kind of stuff where we're like — check mark, get them in here."
Six different companies. Six different speakers. One message: ship things.
Why Building Beats Everything Else
Rachel Wolin articulated why this moment is different. She calls herself "a builder first and an executive second" and has instituted "builder days" at Webflow — no meetings, just building. At a recent virtual offsite, 86 people published repos and prototypes.
Her argument: we're at a point where building is so accessible that NOT building is a signal. AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Lovable have made it possible for non-engineers to ship real software. Rachel mentioned building apps for her wife (personal shopping), her son (a bedtime audio memory app using OpenAI's voice API), and her brother-in-law (a case study interview prep app for his OpenAI interview).
"There's never been a better time to build personal software," she said. "It was janky. You're never going to see this project. But using these tools, there's never been a better time."
The implication for career-builders: if Webflow's CPO is spending her nights and weekends building side projects to keep her product intuition sharp, what signal does it send when you're not building anything?
The Builder Advantage Compounds
What makes building so powerful as a career strategy is the compound effect:
Layer 1: You learn by doing. Rachel on developing product intuition: "Pick a problem. Go talk to people who have that problem. Realize the way they think about it is wrong. Show them something. Get feedback." With AI tools compressing the build cycle, you can get more reps faster than ever before.
Layer 2: You have proof. A live product is infinitely more credible than a case study or a PowerPoint. Multiple speakers mentioned that they look for tangible evidence of building in hiring processes.
Layer 3: You develop taste. Rachel: "You will run through walls. And sometimes you shouldn't have run through that wall. But that's how you develop taste." Taste — the ability to know what's worth building — only comes from building enough things to learn what works and what doesn't.
Layer 4: You understand distribution. Rachel emphasized this: "Critical thinking skills and creativity become so much more important than ever before. And then also understanding how to get distribution — find people to discover your product." Building teaches you not just product, but go-to-market.
The Hybrid Superpower
Idan from GitHub Next connected this to a broader career insight. He described being asked throughout his career: are you the best developer? No. The best designer? No. So what's your value?
"I can glue those functions together because I live with one foot in either side. Today with AI, it's like wearing rocket boots. Hybridity was undervalued in the past. Now it's actually a superpower."
Building things is how you become a hybrid. You can't credibly bridge product, design, and engineering if you've never shipped software. You can't understand the trade-offs engineers make if you've never deployed something. And in the AI era, you can't claim to be AI-native if you haven't used AI tools to build.
What This Means for Me
This is why I build. Not because I think I'm a great engineer — I'm not. But because the act of conceiving, designing, building, and shipping a product teaches you things that no amount of reading, discussing, or strategizing can teach. Every product in my portfolio exists because I believe that PMs who build have a fundamentally different understanding of what's possible than PMs who only manage.
The tools have never been better. The barrier has never been lower. And the signal has never been louder: the people getting hired, promoted, and trusted with big bets are the ones who build.