At any given moment, I'm the product manager, the designer, the developer, the copywriter, the QA tester, the marketer, the customer support team, and the CEO of fourteen different products. I don't have a team. I don't have a co-founder. I don't even have a Slack channel with other people in it. It's just me, a laptop, and Claude Code.
This is either deeply impressive or deeply unhinged, depending on your perspective. Some days I think it is both. The one-person product team is a new kind of thing, made possible by tools that didn't exist two years ago, and nobody has written the manual for it yet. So here is my attempt. What it is actually like. What you gain. What you lose. And what I've learned about doing all of the jobs at once.
What you gain: speed
The single biggest advantage of being a one-person team is speed. Not speed in the sense of typing fast or working long hours, though both happen. Speed in the sense of decision-making. There's no meeting to discuss the roadmap. There's no design review. There's no sprint planning. There's no stakeholder alignment. I have an idea, I evaluate it against my taste and judgement, and I either build it or I don't. The gap between intention and action is zero.
In my advertising career, I watched good ideas die in the gap between having the idea and getting permission to make it. Alignment meetings. Client presentations. Budget approvals. Legal reviews. By the time an idea survived all of that, it was usually a diluted version of what it started as. The sharp edges had been sanded off. The thing that made it interesting had been compromised away.
As a one-person team, there is no sanding. The idea goes from my head to the product exactly as I imagined it. This doesn't mean every idea is good - far from it. But it means the good ideas are as good as they can possibly be, because nobody has watered them down along the way.
What you gain: coherence
When one person makes every decision, the product has a coherence that's almost impossible to achieve with a team. The tone of the copywriting matches the visual design which matches the interaction design which matches the marketing. There's no handoff point where the vision gets translated (and inevitably distorted) by someone with a different sensibility.
Think about the products you love most. They usually feel like they were made by one mind, even if they weren't. Apple products feel Jobsian. Monocle feels like it was designed by a single obsessive. It's Nice That has a singular sensibility. This coherence - the feeling that every detail was considered by the same taste - is the hardest thing to achieve in a team and the easiest thing to achieve alone.
Every one of my products has a distinct personality, but they all feel like they were made by the same person. Because they were. The typography choices, the colour palettes, the tone of voice, the interaction patterns - they all come from the same sensibility. This isn't something I planned. It's an emergent property of being a one-person team. When one mind makes every decision, consistency happens automatically.
What you lose: perspective
Here's where it gets honest. The thing you lose most dangerously as a one-person team is perspective. There's nobody to tell you that your idea is bad. Nobody to push back on a design decision. Nobody to say "have you considered that this doesn't make sense to anyone who isn't you?" You're building in an echo chamber of one, and the acoustics are terrible.
I've shipped features that made perfect sense to me and were completely confusing to everyone else. I've designed pages that I thought were beautiful and intuitive and that nobody else could navigate. I've written copy that I found funny and clever and that other people found baffling. The problem isn't a lack of skill. It's a lack of distance. When you've been staring at something for hours, you lose the ability to see it fresh. You need someone else's eyes.
My solution is imperfect but it works: I show things to my wife. She isn't a designer or a developer or a product person. She is a normal human being who uses the internet in normal ways. If she can use the thing and understand what it does, it is probably fine. If she squints and says "what's this?" I know I have a problem. She is my entire user research department, and she doesn't know it.
What you lose: sanity
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from context-switching between roles all day. At nine in the morning I'm a designer, making decisions about spacing and typography. By ten I'm a developer, debugging why something isn't rendering correctly. By eleven I'm a marketer, writing a LinkedIn post about the thing I just built. By lunchtime I'm a product manager, deciding what to build next. Each role requires a different mode of thinking, and switching between them takes energy that nobody talks about.
The other sanity cost is the loneliness. Building alone is exactly as quiet as it sounds. There's no team lunch. No Slack banter with colleagues. No moment where someone says "nice work" on a pull request. The only feedback loop is the analytics dashboard, and analytics dashboards don't give you high fives.
I'm someone who naturally works alone. I disappear into building mode and forget to communicate. But even for me, the silence can be deafening. What I miss most isn't the collaboration on the product - I'm genuinely better at that alone. What I miss is the ambient social contact of being part of a team. The chat about what you watched last night. The shared frustration about a client. The collective celebration when something ships. Those things matter more than the productivity literature admits.
The roles, ranked
If I'm being honest about which roles I'm best at and which I'm worst at, the ranking looks like this. Best: product direction (deciding what to build and why), followed by design (making it look and feel right). Middle: copywriting and marketing (I can do it, but I don't enjoy selling my own work). Worst: QA testing (I'm impatient and I miss things) and analytics (I know I should look at the data more and I keep not doing it).
This ranking matters because the one-person team can't be equally good at everything. The key is to be excellent at the things that are hardest to fix later. Product direction is hard to fix later - if you build the wrong thing, no amount of polish saves it. Design is hard to fix later - if the visual language is wrong, you end up rebuilding from scratch. But QA bugs can be fixed. Marketing can be improved. Analytics can be learned. The sequencing matters.
Would I trade it?
People ask me this, and my honest answer is: not yet. What I've now - the freedom to build whatever I want, however I want, whenever I want - is valuable in a way that's hard to quantify. I built fourteen products in a matter of months. Some of them are good. Some of them are experiments. All of them exist because I didn't have to convince anyone they were worth making. That freedom is intoxicating.
But I'm aware of its limits. A one-person team can build a product. A one-person team can't build a company. At some point, if any of these projects are going to become real businesses rather than impressive side projects, I'll need other people. Not just for the work - for the thinking. For the challenge. For the perspective that I'm structurally unable to provide for myself.
The ideal, I think, isn't staying a one-person team forever. It's being a one-person team long enough to figure out what you're building and why, and then finding the right people to build it with. The solo phase is the laboratory. The team phase is the factory. Both matter. But you have to earn the factory by doing the laboratory work first.
So for now, I'm the PM, the designer, the developer, the marketer, and the support team. It's chaotic and exhausting and sometimes lonely. But the products are mine. The taste is mine. The vision is mine. And for a strategy director from advertising who was told his career was behind a desk writing briefs for other people to execute, that feels like exactly the right place to be.
