Vibe coding practice exercise for product managers

What is the challenge scenario?

Lena, a product manager at a 200 person tech company, built a meeting cost calculator using Replit in 45 minutes this morning before she had to leave for a call. The idea is simple: enter who is in a meeting and how long it runs, and it tells you what the meeting cost in employee time and salary, a point she has been trying to make in leadership meetings for months.

She left a voice note describing four unfinished problems before she had to run: the salary input is locked to three fixed dropdown options instead of accepting a custom hourly rate, the total only shows in dollars when she also wanted it shown in person hours, the interface looks dated and she is presenting to leadership on Thursday, and there is a delete bug where removing a middle attendee makes the total recalculate incorrectly. Each fix takes roughly 15 minutes with an AI coding tool, and you have 60 minutes before she needs it in a shippable state.

What are you asked to do?

For each of the four problems, write a one sentence diagnosis of why it happens in the code, not just what it looks like on screen, paying special attention to the delete bug, where the real cause is that the delete function uses the button's position on the page rather than the attendee's actual position in the underlying array. Rank the four fixes in the order you would tackle them for a Thursday leadership presentation specifically, with one sentence justifying each position. Write the exact prompt you would give an AI coding tool for each fix, stating the current behavior, the correct behavior, and one constraint the fix should not violate. Apply your fixes, deploy to a live URL, and write the two to four sentence message you would send Lena, naming what you fixed, what still feels fragile, and being honest about any fix that is a workaround rather than a clean solution. Close by comparing what actually shipped to Lena's original mini PRD, naming what made it in, what did not, one thing the AI added that was never requested, and whether the most important gap actually matters for Thursday.

What does a strong answer cover?

This bootcamp does not publish a rubric for its practical challenge, so check your own draft against the curriculum's own questions instead of a worked solution:

• Does the diagnosis explain why each bug happens in the code, rather than restating what it looks like to a user?
• Does the prioritization reflect Thursday's specific audience and purpose, rather than just what is easiest to fix first?
• Does each fix prompt state the current behavior, the correct behavior, and a specific constraint the fix should not break?
• Does the message to Lena say plainly whether a fix is a clean solution or a workaround, rather than implying everything is solved?

Skills this exercise practises

Reading and diagnosing unfamiliar AI generated code at the logic level, prioritizing fixes against a real audience and deadline instead of personal preference, writing precise bug fix prompts for an AI coding tool, and comparing a shipped build honestly against its original brief.

Which bootcamp does this challenge come from?

This is the practical challenge from Zero to Shipped with Vibe Coding, Builders Camp's one week bootcamp on going from idea to a working MVP with modern AI assisted building tools, led by Andre Albuquerque across two 90 minute live sessions. Completing it counts toward that bootcamp's certificate. The how to build and ship an MVP with Replit and how to build an MVP as a solo founder guides both cover the build discipline this exercise assumes, and build a SaaS with AI as a solo founder is a useful next step once you want to go beyond a single internal tool. The AI MVP building practice exercise elsewhere in this series practises building and shipping your own idea from scratch rather than rescuing someone else's.

Builders Camp runs live and self paced bootcamps in product management and AI product building. See the Zero to Shipped with Vibe Coding bootcamp for current cohort dates and the full self paced curriculum.