Skip to content
Aakash GuptaAakash Gupta

The Claude Code Setup for Non-Technical PMs That Nobody Shows You

Most PMs are still bureaucrats stuck in Jira, Linear, and PowerPoints. The best PMs have stopped waiting on engineering and started shipping code themselves. In this episode, Andre Albuquerque (founder of Builders Camp, Europe's largest product builder school with 4,000+ students) walks through his exact 4-level builder PM stack live - Lovable, Claude Code, Cursor, Vercel, and a multi-agent CLAUDE.md setup that AI-native teams actually run. Full Writeup: https://www.news.aakashg.com/p/claude-code-for-non-technical-pms Transcript: https://www.aakashg.com/albuquerque-podcast/ --- Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:27 - The biggest problem non-technical PMs face today 04:50 - The 4-level builder PM framework 05:28 - Level 1 - Why you start with Lovable 08:04 - Level 2 - The Lovable + Claude Code bridge 10:21 - Ads 12:14 - Live demo: connecting Lovable to Claude Code via GitHub 28:37 - Level 3 - Cursor + Vercel for real production 31:02 - Ads 33:22 - Why Andre prefers Cursor over Claude Code desktop 35:40 - Mental model: Lovable vs Cursor vs Vercel 41:17 - Level 4 - Agents, skills, and CLAUDE.md 42:50 - The CLAUDE.md memory file explained 45:24 - The PM orchestrator agent pattern 53:26 - How AI-native teams spend 50% of their time 01:01:33 - Why 90% of European PMs are still non-technical 01:07:45 - The Monday morning move 01:09:07 - Outro --- 🏆 Thanks to our sponsors: 1. Customer.io: Send smarter messages using your product data - http://customer.io/productgrowth 2. Amplitude: The market-leader in product analytics - https://amplitude.com/session-replay?utm_campaign=session-replay-launch-2025&utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=organic-social&utm_content=productgrowthpodcast 3. Bolt: Ship AI-powered products 10x faster - https://bolt.new/solutions/product-manager?utm_source=Promoted&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=aakash-product-growth 4. Ariso: Ariso: Your AI chief of staff for meetings, follow-ups, and coaching - https://ariso.ai/aakash 5. Product Faculty: Get $550 off their #1 AI PM Certification with code AAKASH550C7 - https://maven.com/product-faculty/ai-product-management-certification?promoCode=AAKASH550C7 --- Key Takeaways: 1. Non-technical PMs are stuck in Jira, Linear, and PowerPoints - Most European PMs are still product owners in disguise, paper-shuffling between strategy and engineering teams. The way out is to actually start building, not to lobby for more autonomy. 2. Start with Lovable on a personal project - Build something for your family, your friends, yourself. The codebase does not need to be pretty. The point is the safety to make mistakes without breaking anything that matters. 3. The Lovable + Claude Code bridge nobody documents - Connect both tools to the same GitHub repo. Write code in Claude Code with all its depth. QA visually in Lovable with its hosted preview. Publish from Lovable's button. The perfect transition layer. 4. Lovable, Cursor, and Vercel are not competitors - Lovable bundles the IDE, the hosting, and the deployment in one product. Vercel exposes the hosting layer so you can run real branches with real preview URLs. Cursor is just an IDE with a generous free tier. 5. Cursor has a free debugging agent - When Claude Code breaks, open a Cursor agent and paste the error. The free agent unsticks you instead of leaving you stuck at step zero. 6. CLAUDE.md is your team's culture - Loaded automatically every session. The first rule should be "for every task, call the PM agent." When you notice yourself fixing the same issue twice, update CLAUDE.md so it never happens again. 7. The PM agent never writes code - The PM orchestrator's only job is to decide which other agent should handle the work. The researcher investigates. The designer proposes. The engineer architects. The implementer writes. 8. Do not copy famous people's skills wholesale - Going on LinkedIn and downloading 100 skills from product celebrities creates more confusion than value. Look at how your real team works. Write each role down as an agent. 9. Fix the agent, not the feature - When something ships wrong, do not patch the output. Identify which agent in the pipeline failed, update its instructions, and run the pipeline again. The next session inherits the fix. 10. The Monday morning move is exactly three steps - Get added as a collaborator on a low-risk repo. Pick the oldest ticket in the backlog. Push a branch and demo by Friday. --- 👨‍💻 Where to find Andre Albuquerque: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andre-albuquerque/ Builders Camp: https://builderscamp.com Newsletter: https://www.andrealbuquerque.com 👨‍💻 Where to find Aakash: Twitter: https://x.com/aakashgupta LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aagupta/ Newsletter: https://www.news.aakashg.com #BuilderPM #ClaudeCode #AIPM --- 🧠 About Product Growth: The world's largest podcast focused solely on product + growth, with over 200K+ listeners. 🔔 Subscribe and turn on notifications.

Andre AlbuquerqueguestAakash Guptahost
May 18, 20261h 10mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

A four-level Claude Code setup enabling non-technical PMs to ship

  1. The episode argues non-technical PMs are becoming bureaucratic bottlenecks unless they learn to build and ship alongside engineers using AI tooling.
  2. Andre presents a 4-level progression: start with Lovable for low-risk prototyping, bridge Lovable to Claude Code via GitHub, move to Vercel + an IDE (often Cursor) for production workflows, then scale with agents, skills, and CLAUDE.md.
  3. A live demo shows how to bootstrap an app in Lovable, connect it to a GitHub repo, make changes in Claude Code, merge to GitHub, and visually QA updates back in Lovable before publishing.
  4. To avoid “slop,” the conversation emphasizes two controls: strong infra/security gates on the deployment end and stronger problem-framing rituals (JTBD, Opportunity Solution Trees, MoSCoW) on the discovery end.
  5. The “Monday morning move” is to get added as a collaborator to a low-risk repo, pick the oldest backlog item, and implement it with Claude Code on a branch to demonstrate leverage without endangering production.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Start building with a personal, low-risk Lovable project.

Andre recommends beginning with something that won’t harm a company codebase (e.g., a family booking tool) so you can experiment, make mistakes, and learn basic product/engineering concepts without social or technical risk.

Use Lovable as a bridge: prototype visually, then edit code in Claude Code via GitHub.

The workflow is: bootstrap in Lovable → connect Lovable to a GitHub repo → connect Claude Code to the same GitHub account → make changes in Claude Code and merge → Lovable updates for QA, and publishing controls what becomes public.

Don’t get stuck on Git jargon—describe intent and let Claude Code handle mechanics.

For early-stage solo work, Andre suggests telling Claude Code “put this live” or “add this to the codebase,” then using Lovable/Vercel previews to validate outcomes, rather than manually mastering branches and PR flows upfront.

Graduate to Vercel when you need safe, parallel work across multiple branches.

Level 3 is about speed and reliability: Vercel turns each branch into a preview deployment, letting you test changes independently and merge to main only when satisfied, which is harder to manage with Lovable-as-infra.

Cursor can be a comfort layer and a practical troubleshooting tool for non-technical PMs.

Andre likes Cursor’s vertical session/tab UI, while Aakash highlights Cursor’s free agents for debugging setup issues and its smooth GitHub integration, making it easier to manage multiple efforts without feeling lost.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

If you look at a lot of companies that have non-technical PMs in teams, they're bureaucrats. They're stuck in Jira, they're stuck in Linear, they're stuck in PowerPoints. They're not actually building. They're not pushing code. They're not adding features.

— Andre Albuquerque

If you're a non-technical PM and your job is still managing backlogs, your job is still writing issues, your job is still creating decks or PowerPoints to present to someone and you're not really building stuff, honestly, you're being left behind.

— Andre Albuquerque

It's way less scary than just jumping straight into an IDE or jumping straight into, uh, a code environment.

— Andre Albuquerque

The biggest fear a lot of people have is like, oh, vibe coded code is bad code.

— Andre Albuquerque

This is what AI-native teams are doing, is they're working 50% of the time on improving the infrastructure of the machine itself rather than just tweaking feature by feature, right?

— Andre Albuquerque

Non-technical PMs as “bureaucrats” vs builder PMs4-level builder PM framework (Lovable → bridge → Vercel/Cursor → agents)Lovable as prototyping + accidental hosting/QA layerGitHub integration, branches, PRs, merging to mainVercel preview deployments for branch-based testingCursor vs Claude Code desktop workflowsCLAUDE.md memory file, agents, and reusable skillsPM orchestrator agent pattern and team-wide shared configsPreventing AI “slop” via infra checks + better discoveryEurope product-owner culture vs US product culture

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.

Add to Chrome