Why every exec should be vibecoding

With examples of 2 projects I built myself

Career progression has traditionally looked like this: become a kick-ass individual contributor (IC), get promoted to manager, then to leadership, and slowly abandon the actual work for coordinating other people’s work: Planning. Supervision. People management. And of course, calendars full of meetings for said ‘tasks’ (10 hour meeting days, anybody?).

But what happens when ICs become far more autonomous, leaner teams mean coordination and supervision matter less, and every company is shipping faster than ever? When the cost of a wrong decision drops and people on the team just… go. Because that is the vision behind AI-native employees and something that AI-native companies are striving and organizing for.

The role of leaders changes. We still need decision makers. We still need context setters. But what we won’t need is pure leadership or management as a full-time job.

That role is dying. I stand behind that prediction.

The future looks more like this: senior leaders and execs who stay part-time ICs. People who still build, ship, review, and create, not just talk about it.

Vibecoding is a great way to experience the balance and the opportunity, here:

On the traditional IC side, you can put things in motion and ship external-facing products in hours.

And on the exec side, you now have the ability to create products and interactive apps on your own that can level up your leadership impact - like aligning around the company’s goals, coordinating with investors, or connecting with elite talent.

If you’re a company leader, you can’t afford to miss out on this skillset.

I wouldn’t suggest something without doing it myself first. So here are some projects I’ve recently vibecoded, myself.

---

This post is brought to you by Cor: Obi by Cor is a voice AI agent for customer onboarding and user activation. Embedded directly in your product, Obi guides users through real workflows in a two-way conversation, helping them understand how to implement their specific use cases, not just showing where to click.

Obi learns from your existing training videos and docs, then guides every user with on-screen awareness, like a human on a training call. After every session, Obi delivers reports that show where users struggle, what drives engagement, and why activation succeeds or stalls.

With Obi, companies see 2× faster time-to-value and 30–50% deeper feature adoption.

---

Elena the IC: SheBuilds hackathon platform

I’ve always been very passionate about getting more women in tech. And when I joined Lovable, I was thinking that because of all of the pink and purple and hearts in the brand, plus the fact that vibecoding all of a sudden opens up the ability for people to build software apps without an engineering background, that there would be a lot more representation of women. There wasn’t. Less than 20% of the Lovable user base were women. I was in total disbelief.

But I had the ability to do something about it.

Everybody around us was hosting these hackathons, so I thought: Why don’t we host our own? Because we usually played a supporting role for those hackathons and gave away credits to everyone involved. But I saw the opportunity to do our own and invest in the community we wanted to grow.

The idea was planted: SheBuilds on Lovable - a 48-hour buildathon for women, powered by Lovable.

The problem

This felt like a one-off program, with limited support. When I shared it in our marketing chat channel, our amazing community lead, Whitney, raised her hand and said, ‘Yep, I feel super passionate about it, too. Let’s do it!’ But we still needed a system to distribute and manage the whole thing. I needed a portal to talk about the contest, accept applications, and have a full back-end for Whitney and me to manage applicants to get everybody accepted.

If I were in my previous roles, this would have been my workflow to get the software I needed, to handle software registrations for me.

• Option 1: I need to submit an engineering task for us to build a quick tool.

• Option 2: I need to source an external platform.

Either way: Because I have a clear vision for this, it would take significant time and/or money to get the right thing, even if I’m delegating it. Hours of scoping and meeting and reviewing, just for things to get lost in translation.

What I built

With Lovable, we skipped all of that noise. I just went into Lovable and vibecoded the whole thing. (Well, first, I immediately claimed the domain so that nobody else would steal it: SheBuilds.Lovable.app was born!)

Here was my prompt:

I need to create application form for hackathon I want to hold called ‘SheBuilds’. it should have very feminine feel. Following are the details that I want to feature:

Format: Online, 48 hours Buildathon Days: Oct 6 & 7 Applications: Open - 60 teams/individuals will be selected sources across 3 categories (20 teams/individuals per category): b2b app, b2c app, other. Build Time: 48 hours to ship your app on Lovable Resources: Unlimited Lovable credits Winners: 1 winner per category (3 total) Prizes & Benefits: Personal Mentorship from Elena Verna, 5K Credits, Visibility & Promotion.

Application (should be a link out) Personal Information: Full name,Email address, Location (city, country, timezone if virtual), Age / Date of birth (to confirm eligibility, e.g. 18+), Background & Skills, Technical skills (e.g., programming languages, design, product, hardware), Resume / LinkedIn / GitHub / Portfolio links. Hackathon-Specific Questions: Why do you want to participate? (short motivation) What would you like to build? Which category would it fall into: b2b, b2c, other?

Add Consent & Agreements: Code of Conduct agreement, Photo/video consent, Data usage/privacy agreement

It wasn’t perfect right away. Lots of iterations to make functionality work. But in the end it had front end, back end (cloud), submission forms, authentication, AI-scoring, admin panels, participant portals… you name it.

Our design team of course puked all over. (It was my fault, I put too many pink hearts and shimmering stars into it. There were some high heels flying around, too. Not good.)

Live footage of my design team’s reaction. I had one too many hearts in there.

But they sent me the correct color palettes and a couple screenshots, which were just fed into Lovable, which directly updated it into the beautiful visuals you can see today.

And Whitney has continued to evolve it, expanding the admin capabilities to a massive level - but the core ‘product’ stayed.

The results

Instant traction! As soon as we posted it, we got over 2,000 applicants. The hackathon itself went great and now we’re expanding into multiple seasons of the SheBuilds event.

The big win for me in all of this was having full autonomy. I didn’t have to get any budgets - I just built it myself. It’s a product that sits outside of Lovable, but it uses our brand and is part of the overall Lovable umbrella. It’s both an internal tool and an external interface for people to interact with. And it’s working beautifully. It was so easy to create, but it’s not something that I would have ever been able to do three years ago.

I also loved how quickly I could get into it: I didn’t have to take a ton of time figuring out the tradeoffs - which features do I need? Which ones can I sacrifice? What’s worth the investment? I just went in, told Lovable the three things that I wanted every woman to experience as they came to the platform and applied. And their application process and their acceptance process. And Lovable just built it for me.

Investment vs. Impact

There was definitely a direct value in dollars: The app consumed ~1,000 Lovable credits or ~$300 USD. But there is so much more:

• It saved me a ton of time. I didn’t have to research platforms, learn new tools, or coordinate internal logistics. The entire initial build, including the site and registration flows, took just 5 hours. Even if I’d delegated it, I would’ve spent more time on scoping and reviews. And sourcing an external platform would’ve easily taken 5x longer for something far less tailored.

• Saving the company time, because we were able to get this project out the door so much more quickly. If we’d needed to buy or fully code the platform, it could have taken months. Instead, it took ~2 weeks from idea to launch.

---

Elena the Exec: North Star alignment app

We’re actually rolling this one out right now! At Lovable, we’re big on aligning around a single “North Star” metric. Revenue is important, but that’s not something that we align the team against. Now, last year’s North Star metric was chosen fairly quickly and it was number of paid users. Ever since I joined, I’ve wanted to update that because it didn’t communicate the value that we’ve provided to our customers. So, as we’re entering 2026, this was my moment.

Our analytics team did a deep dive to understand all the inputs, we consulted with John Cutler (obviously) and arrived at the new North Star metric: daily active apps. We define this as either in the building stage (the app is still being built and actively edited) or the growing stage (it’s already getting traffic and being used). It’s a great metric and I’m really excited about it. But…

The problem

How do we roll this out to the company?

Traditionally, I would have put together a boring Google or Notion doc. I’d put it into the slide deck and then I would go and ask the team to pick their inputs to roll up into the North Star. A static document and a super manual plan to circulate it within the company. Boring.

What I built

It’s almost embarrassing how easy this was. I just took all of the exploratory analysis and write-ups from our analytics team and I fed it all to Lovable. Then, I just told it to build me an app that I can share internally with everybody. Here’s what I actually said:

I want to create an interactive app that explains lovable's new northstar metric - Daily Active Apps (i'll provide a full write up on it) + create an ability for visitors to select KPI's they’ll work on to drive this NSM forward. It needs to be interactive and beautiful. On brand for Lovable.

From that, I got an incredible explainer on what the North Star metric is. With a bit of help from my analyst, it even got hooked into Hex directly, so it updates in real-time to show progress toward the goal.

But it’s not just that it’s comprehensive - it’s interactive. You can click on things that expand. The graphs move, based on your inputs. It’s beautifully visually engaging.

Now, it wasn’t perfect at first. I had to tweak a bunch of text that I didn’t like, or didn’t think was necessary. I added things and removed things to make it just right.

Most importantly, I developed the KPI selector for teams. This allowed them to make the whole thing relevant for them. Beyond seeing the overall North Star metric, they could see what it meant for them. They could also get a KPI tree that shows all of the growth metrics, which you can pick from or add your own. Or, you can view by team and see how the different KPIs feed back up into the North Star. So, after the team does all of their inputs, all of that is recorded, so that we can build all of the Hex dashboards to link everything together.

It started as a simple presentation of the information, but it’s become an epicenter of our North Star metric health. At a glance, I can track against the goal or against the stretch, vs. our baseline, and all of the team’s inputs and how teams are contributing to it.

All of this is like a massive dashboarding or notebook exercise, but it’s so interactive. This custom experience makes it actually fun to distribute and align what is otherwise some of the driest content in the world, which usually puts people to sleep if they read it at all. Now, our team can engage with it.

Investment vs. Impact

This one took me some time to do. I probably spent close to 20 hours making it perfect - especially with adding the capabilities for team inputs and the backend of storing, editing, and commenting. But I used ~200 credits, or $50 in total to build this. Totally worth it.

And although this project doesn’t have explicit ROI, it’s a perfect example of an executive project: What we got was legit engagement and alignment with the team. Think about how many hours/days/weeks/MONTHs your exec team spends building out organizational goals, and how often they get ignored. That’s probably hundreds of your most expensive hours going towards refining details that don’t have the impact they could. Not to mention the fact that even the leadership team can lose the plot if those metrics aren’t monitored and updated.

This system provides the infrastructure that lets everyone execute at absurd speed and still stay aligned.

Join in the fun

So yes, it’s essential that you start developing this skillset, but I’m also here to tell you: It’s so much fun.

I mean it: Vibecoding is my new favorite activity. And it’s been a big shift - for most of my career, I’ve always materialized things through my team, whether that’s engineers, designers, marketers, or analysts. But now I can just do things completely on my own, end-to-end… and it’s completely addicting. I love so many parts of growth, but it’s been amazing getting to put something together, entirely on my own.

If you’re a leader reading this (or a manager aspiring to leadership!), ask yourself:

• IC work: Is there a project you’ve been looking to kick off, but it was just too much of a lift to communicate your vision? Build it yourself! Or at least create a prototype to give your team a running start.

• Exec work: What important communications are getting stalled in boring decks or bland, super long docs? How could a more dynamic, interactive surface help to keep everyone in sync?

These steps are just the beginning. Once you start doing this kind of work, you’ll realize just how much you can do.

I’m loving my new exec-IC era and I hope you’ll start yours.

---

Edited by Jonathan Yagel.

---