One of My Best PMs Just Pushed His First Line of Code. He’s Also Terrified

Let me tell you about Chris Colosimo.

I've worked with a lot of product managers in 30 years of building software. Chris is one of the good ones. Quietly confident, relentlessly curious, never interested in politics, always interested in the work. He has an instinct for where a product actually hurts, not just what the roadmap says it hurts. He's the kind of PM companies wish they had more of.

Yesterday morning, Chris sent me a note. He had just made his first push to a company git repo. He wrote it from his office, staring at the screen, equal parts proud and freaked out.

He's not an engineer, and he's never claimed to be one. But yesterday he committed real code to a real company repository, and by the end of the day he had written me something I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

Here's how he got there.

A calculator that saved his calendar Chris runs a technically complex, consumption-based product. The pricing model is hard to explain, variable, dependent on how customers actually use the thing. He was spending a significant portion of his week in one-on-one calls walking people through the same explanation. Sales reps. Prospects. Internal stakeholders. Over and over.

Nobody was going to fix this for him. Not high enough priority for engineering. Not someone else’s problem to own.

So he built a calculator. Interactive. Self-service. Anyone could open it, plug in their numbers, and see the pricing in their own context.

Almost overnight, the conversations stopped. He didn’t have to explain the model anymore. He just sent a link.

In his words: “That feeling of liberation, of I don’t have to have this complex conversation anymore, lit my fire.”

What he built next After the calculator came a sales metrics app, because the standard reporting wasn’t organized the way he needed it and he was tired of waiting. Then competitive intelligence dashboards, because static documents go stale and spreadsheets are a chore. Then an auto-discovery tool that other people on the team can use.

This isn’t a one-off story. This is a pattern worth paying attention to. He sees the friction everyone else has learned to live with, and he fixes it. That instinct existed long before any of this involved git.

Notice the pattern. Almost everything he built was to make his own life easier. Not to impress anyone. Not to prove he could code. Just to stop losing time to friction nobody else was going to fix.

And here’s the thing that makes this worth writing about. Chris isn’t becoming an engineer. He’s doing his PM job with a broader toolkit. His domain knowledge, his instinct for where the friction lives, his empathy for the prospects who couldn’t follow the pricing math, those are 10+ years of product management finding new expression.

Experience doesn’t disappear in the agentic era. It relocates.

The part he was brave enough to say out loud After the git push, alone in his office, this is what came up for him:

“Did I create a security mess? Is this my lane? Am I taking someone’s job? The imposter syndrome is loud today.”

Read that again.

This is a senior PM with years of hard-won instinct, asking out loud whether he was even allowed to do what he just did.

If Chris was scared, what do you think every other PM in your org is feeling right now?

Those three questions are the wall that keeps senior PMs from building anything. Not the code. Not the tools. Those questions.

And they aren’t dumb questions. They’re the questions of someone who’s been doing this long enough to know what it costs when things break, who respects the craft they’re wading into, who cares about their team’s role and their own. A junior PM doesn’t ask those questions because they don’t know enough yet to be worried. A senior PM asks them because they do.

That’s also why senior PMs don’t build. They think the questions are the problem. They’re not. The questions are a sign you should keep going, not stop.

Permission is the bottleneck, not capability Here’s what I told Chris, and what I’ll say to anyone else sitting on the same fence.

The thing stopping you isn’t that you don’t know how. The tools got good enough. A PM with domain knowledge and a little curiosity can go from idea to working product faster than at any point in the history of software. That’s just the truth right now.

What’s stopping you is that nobody said out loud that it’s okay.

So I’ll say it.

It’s okay to try. It’s okay to make a mess the first time. Your job isn’t going away because you automated part of it. You’re becoming more effective at the job you already have. Go fast. Be bold. Build the thing that’s slowing you down.

And to those of us who lead product orgs: your best people are holding back right now because they’re waiting for someone with authority to tell them it’s fine. Tell them. Say it in an all-hands. Say it in a one-on-one. Say it more than once, because they’ll assume you didn’t mean it the first time. The permission you give is more valuable than any tool you’ll buy this quarter.

One more thing The note Chris sent me that morning was drafted with Claude’s help. That’s not a footnote. That’s the point. He had the experience, the story, the emotional honesty. Claude helped him put it into words.

That’s the whole shift in one small moment. The instinct stays human. The expression finds a new medium.

If you’re a PM reading this, go build the calculator. The one specific thing eating your Tuesday. Don’t wait for permission you were never going to get in an email.

And if you're already good at the job, already the person your team turns to, already a little restless with how much faster you could move, this is me telling you that you're ready.

Chris, thanks for letting me tell your story. You were already the PM other people wanted to become. Now you’re also the one showing them what’s next.

With gratitude to Chris Colosimo.