He Built a Dashboard on His Phone at a Conference
May 27, 2026
He Built a Dashboard on His Phone at a Conference
No laptop. No plan. Just Claude open on his phone and a problem worth solving.
Zak Wiatr was standing in a conference when he had an idea for a dashboard. No laptop. Just his phone. So he opened Claude, described what he wanted, and watched React code stream across a five-inch screen.
“I just had Claude whip up an artifact and you’d see the lines of React code running and there it is on the phone — the dashboard, the drill-downs, the tables, the details, the clickable. And that was another ‘have you heard the good news?’ moment.”
He showed the person next to him. That person was still describing the problem. Zak was already showing a working version of the answer.
The backstory
Zak is a product leader at Transact Campus, which handles payments across higher education — a $50B+ ecosystem. Before that, he spent six years as an Air Force intelligence officer monitoring North Korea’s nuclear program on Palantir. He has zero software engineering background.
That last part matters. He didn’t arrive at this with a CS degree and a decade of side projects. He arrived with product instinct and a willingness to commit.
“I knew I wasn’t in the deep end of the pool. And that meant you got to build your own apps. You got to do it. You just got to commit.”
What “committing” looked like
The phone prototype wasn’t his first build. Before the conference, Zak had already built a complete real estate listing price valuation app in Replit. Real data APIs, Supabase backend, user authentication. A working product, built by someone who’d never shipped a line of code professionally.
He coached an Uber driver through a full startup build plan during a single ride. Not hypothetically — an actual plan, walking through the steps in real time while the meter ran.
And then there was the moment he tried to go deeper on his own.
“I didn’t know what a product or project library was. I didn’t know the file structures… doing that solo — whole new appreciation.”
That humility is what separates the AI player-coach from the person who watches a demo and says “neat.” Zak hit the walls. He didn’t know what he didn’t know about file structures and project organization. And instead of retreating to the familiar territory of strategy decks and roadmap reviews, he kept building.
The AI-first household
Zak doesn’t treat AI fluency as a work skill. He treats it as a life posture.
“I have to be an expert, a practitioner, a daily user — so does my wife. We have to be an AI-first household to do that.”
That sentence is worth reading twice. He’s not talking about “keeping up with AI trends.” He’s talking about a family-level commitment to practicing with these tools every day, the way you’d commit to a language or an instrument. The fluency compounds because it never stops.
Why the phone matters
The conference phone prototype is a small moment with a big signal. The tools have gotten fast enough and accessible enough that the gap between “I have an idea” and “here, look at this” can close in the time it takes someone to finish describing the problem. No laptop required. No development environment. No permission.
The leaders who are building this muscle — on their phones, in Uber rides, at kitchen tables — are the ones whose instincts will be sharpest when the stakes are real.
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Polly Allen is the founder of AI Career Boost and host of The AI Product Leader podcast. She spent years leading AI at Amazon Alexa before building the AI Career Boost Blueprint, an 8-week program for Director+ product leaders becoming indispensable AI player-coaches. Subscribe to The AI Player-Coach newsletter →
