The work around the code.

Hi, I am Valerio. I am a Senior Digital Product Manager with a background in digital anthropology and research. My work spans across financial services, e-commerce, marketplaces, and digital publishing, with nearly a decade of experience in product management, website development, SEO, digital marketing, and conversion rate optimisation.

Earlier in my career I worked across conversion rate optimisation, user experience research, and market research in digital publishing, financial services, healthcare, and consumer brands. That mix of research and product work, rooted in a digital anthropology background, is the lens I bring to the newsletter.

Most writing about AI coding tools is developer-to-developer, focused on the code itself. I am more interested in the work around the code: finding the right problem, validating it with real users, deciding what to build, getting it in front of people, and learning from how they use it. AI has made writing code faster, not easier. Writing good code still depends on the work around it, and all of that work still decides whether anything actually ships.

A word on scope. AI has not made developers obsolete and I am not going to tell you that it has. Career developers still ship better software, faster, with fewer bugs, and with more foresight about the things that will hurt you later. What AI has changed is the class of thing a non-engineer can reasonably attempt. Some things you used to need a developer for, you can now do yourself: carefully, slowly, with learning, and knowing where the edges are. This newsletter is about that class of work, and it is honest about where the edges sit.

This newsletter is about the work between a working prototype and a real product, when you are the one building it with AI tools. It is for current and aspiring builders, whether you have worked on products alongside developers or this is your first time taking software to real users. I am sharing what I have learnt from nearly a decade working alongside developers and now applying that technical knowledge to ship real projects with AI tools.

I have deep technical literacy from years of working with engineering teams, and I use that knowledge daily through Claude Code. Recent things I have been shipping include an independent e-commerce project and this newsletter itself. The bridge between product thinking and shipping with AI tools is rare and useful, and that is what this newsletter is about.

The format is deliberately simple. Markdown files in a Git repo, rendered through Tailwind Typography. No CMS, no tracker, no popup. The site itself is a working example of the kind of thing the newsletter discusses.

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