mamabuilds
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Hi, I'm Liza, welcome to MamaBuilds

#intro

If you’d told me two years ago that I’d be shipping my own iOS app, I would have laughed and gone back to writing user stories. I’m a product manager, not an engineer. I’ve spent my career translating between “what users need” and “what engineering can build”. I’ve never been the one doing the building.

Then AI coding tools got genuinely good, and something shifted. The distance between “I have an idea” and “I have a working thing” got a lot shorter, short enough that a PM whose last snippet of code was for a class final could close the gap herself. And my fear of deployment? AI has solved that too!

Why “MamaBuilds”

I’m a mom to a toddler and I wish all the time that I could do more. As a girl mom in particular, I really wanted my daughter to know that women can do so many different things. So this working mama decided to pick up a new hobby: building!

I wanted a name that honestly reflected the parts of my identity that I wanted to amplify and bring together: being a mama and being a lifelong builder, whether that is building apps or rebuilding myself and the world around me as life changes.

What this site is

Two things, mainly:

  • Projects - small, real apps I’ve built with AI. Right now that’s mostly tools to help me as a product manager and things I’ve made for my own family, starting with Tiny Tongues, a language-learning flashcard app for my toddler that’s in beta right now. I plan to keep adding more over time.
  • Blog - write-ups on the actual process. What prompts worked, what I got completely wrong, how I think about scoping a side project down to something shippable, and general lessons from being a PM who’s now also (sort of) an engineer.

Why I’m doing this in public

Partly selfish since writing things down helps me actually learn and reflect. I also miss writing, so this was as good an excuse to start a blog as any. Not everything I share will be best practice. In fact, I already have a few mistakes and failures queued up in my head to write about.

More soon. Thanks for reading.