What’s next? Good question

Over the last few months, I’ve been asked “What’s next?” more than ever. Honestly, I’m not afraid of saying: I don’t know.

But bear with me. It’s not that I don’t know what I want to do. I probably have the clearest picture I’ve ever had.

I just no longer know what it’s called.

This summer I closed one of the best chapters of my life. I finished my master’s after accomplishing what I wanted with my thesis, and wrapped up six months at Microsoft working in Product Management. When I decided to move to Copenhagen, I couldn’t have asked for much more.

But somewhere along the way, what I wanted next became harder to label.

As a kid, I wanted to be an engineer. Life pushed me towards Business and Innovation instead. I loved it, but after finishing my bachelor’s I still regretted never going down the engineering path.

I knew how to identify problems, rethink processes and design better ways of working. But when it came to actually building the solution, I usually stopped at complex Excel sheets, process redesigns and ideas that somebody else would eventually have to implement.

That started changing in 2023, when I decided to get more technical and learn how to program.

Interestingly, I have never really programmed without AI. I started learning at a point where AI could already help me write code, explain what was happening, debug things with me and let me attempt projects that were probably slightly above my level. Today, AI can take a vague idea surprisingly far before you fully understand everything happening underneath it.

That creates its own problems, but it also changed something important for me:

Programming didn’t suddenly make me want to become a software engineer. It removed a constraint.

I could now go further. I could understand the problem, think about the user and the process, design the system, prototype it and actually build enough of it to see whether the idea worked. Everything I’ve programmed has been built alongside AI.

Am I an experienced software engineer? No. Have I independently run complex production systems for years? Definitely not. But do I understand software, architecture and technical systems better than I ever expected to? Yes. And do I want to keep building? Hell yes.

For a while, I thought the obvious answer was Product Management. At the end of the day, I care about building systems that make people’s lives easier — including mine. But now that I can prototype, build and go much deeper technically, the boundaries feel less clear.

So when someone asks me what’s next:

• Product Management?
• Technical Product Management?
• Tech Consulting?
• AI Operations?
• Forward Deployed Engineering?
• Applied AI?

Honestly, I don’t know. And I don’t mind.

The titles are becoming less useful to me than the verbs. I want to map, understand, design, build, test and ship.

Probably I’m just the same kid who liked puzzles. Now I just get to play with bigger ones.