🦦 My journey from employee to running a business
I’m adjusting my focus to help you build your own products and use AI tools. Join me as I honestly share my process, so you we can learn together.
Hi, it’s Kinga. 👋🏼 I’ve spent the last eight years creating digital products as a product manager. Now, I’m developing Little Parrot at my two-person company, productkind, to help women and underrepresented folks build products.
It’s been a little while since you last heard from me, and I’ve been doing quite a bit of reflecting in the meantime. I’d like to share the exciting changes you can expect in this newsletter.
If you’re new here, welcome! Here are my most popular posts from 2025:
Finding a New Impact
Throughout 2025, I experimented with different revenue streams. When I say “revenue streams,” I mean doing work that makes me fulfilled, has a positive social impact, and also (not insignificantly) pays the bills.
This turned out to be quite a challenging combination.
I left my full-time job at the end of 2024 to do something impactful. I’ve worked in tech for 11 years, the bulk of which was spent in product management.
I love product management. It’s such a complex and exciting amalgamation of diverse areas: business, technology, design, psychology. I hadn’t had enough of that.
But to be perfectly honest, I’d reached my limit with the corporate side of things.
I was tired of the corporate politics, the lack of real value, and building products that executives wanted, while the people actually using them had different ideas.
Call me idealistic, but I wanted to have a positive impact beyond increasing revenue for shareholders.
I knew I wanted to help girls and women, though it felt vague at first.
I started by completing an executive coaching program. I loved mentoring, so I thought getting more tools through this program might be the way forward.
Did I enjoy coaching people? Yes; the nice ones.
It’s weird to admit, but I didn’t want to coach people who I didn’t share the same values with.
And, one of my inkling thoughts was that I wanted freedom. I wanted to be able to do my work from anywhere. I’m writing these lines from the veranda of the Botanical Art Gallery in Singapore. It’s an inspiring place.
Discovering Vibe Coding
I also began exploring AI and vibe coding tools, which allow you to build software without having to know how to code. I started building products, even though I don’t know TypeScript. And it was a really empowering feeling. So I gave talks, and ran workshops about my learnings.
By the summer, I started building Little Parrot, a micro-learning app to teach product and tech skills, primarily for product managers. I knew that world and I saw that practical skill development was still either too expensive or too theoretical.
In the autumn, I got accepted to the first cohort of SheBuilds on Lovable, a 48-hour hackathon for women. There, I saw a sea of professional women from various industries, all with ideas they wanted to build.
But I also noticed something frustrating: most vibe coding content is currently made by tech bros, for tech bros, in a way that doesn’t speak to women.
Closing the Gender Gap in Generative AI
In this publication, I primarily focused on corporate product management but I also want to write more about building products as a solopreneur or a micro-business. That’s exactly what we are doing at productkind, a 2-person company, and we believe sharing our learnings can be helpful for others.
After countless conversations with people at conferences and my partner, we have also refocused our work on our micro-course platform, Little Parrot, from teaching product managers, to helping women who can’t code yet, build digital products and use AI for their own benefit.
Our goal for these two pillars (the newsletter and the digital product) is to support each other. So we’re also introducing a new logo to signal that all the pillars belong together. We want this space to be inviting for anyone with a desire to build.
To understand why we feel so strongly about shifting from helping product managers to women, we have to look at how we got to a tech industry where women are a minority.
The term “software engineer” was actually coined by a woman, Margaret Hamilton, in 1963.1 By 1984, the share of computer science degrees awarded to women in the US peaked at 37.1%. But then, the numbers began to drop.2
What happened?
In the 1980s, a new technology, personal computers were marketed almost exclusively to boys and men.3 This meant that men saw themselves in software-related fields, and also had early access to computers. While women didn’t.
Now, a new technology is here: generative AI and amazing tools built on it, like vibe coding.
Yet again, most vibe coding influencers are men, and a meagre 14% of Lovable’s users are women.4 And this worries me, because you can only benefit from AI by using it.
I heard from Advait Sarkar, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, that you cannot develop AI literacy with all the “AI cheat sheets.” But you need to continuously experiment with the tools, and everyone develops AI literacy in their own specific way.
That’s why we need more voices who encourage women to experiment with vibe coding and other AI tools, so they see themselves using them. And they are able to produce high-quality output that helps them in their work.
Our mission
Our mission is to close the gender gap in AI technology adoption.
Women and non-binary folks should benefit from this new technology equally as men.
If you identify as a man, you are, of course, very welcome to stay. I want to build a community where everyone feels they belong, provided we all agree on one non-negotiable rule: being kind to one another.
Nobody has ten years of experience in vibe coding yet. We are all starting from the same line. We are all experimenting to figure out how to make our lives easier and build sustainable businesses with the help of AI.
What’s Coming Next
I plan to share my discoveries in an honest, transparent way.
Not in a “become a 10x product manager” way, but by sharing what I tried, what I learned, and how you can adapt those techniques.
I’ll share about:
My hesitation to monetise my work
Learnings from building a digital product in 2025: what worked and what definitely didn’t
How I doubled my subscriber number and why then stopped posting
Techniques we used to acquire users for our digital product
And many more practical learnings
If there’s anything specific you’d like me to write about, please do leave a comment or send me a message.
And if you know a friend who might find this helpful, I’d be so grateful if you’d share it with them.
Thanks for being here,
Kinga
Mohammed AbuJarour: An Introductory Guide to Software Engineering Basics and Concepts, Open Institute of Technology Magazine, accessed 2026, https://www.opit.com/magazine/software-engineering-2
National Center for Education Statistics, accessed 2026, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp
Steve Henn: When Women Stopped Coding, NPR, accessed 2026, https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding
Lovable: The build economy a first look, accessed 2026, https://thebuildeconomy.lovable.app/