Vibe Coding at Scale: Where Does the User’s Journey Stop?

By Matthew Andrews · October 7, 2026

Vibe Coding Management · Part 4

Every team can report progress while the user remains stuck.

One team finishes the editor. Another finishes the review screen. A third finishes notifications. The project board moves forward, but the person trying to submit a report still cannot get a decision.

In my experience leading software teams across multiple projects, the connections between teams deserve as much attention as the work happening within them.

As AI accelerates implementation, I think that becomes a central management responsibility: keeping the whole user journey visible while its pieces change.

Organize the View Around the User’s Goal

Most delivery boards reflect how the organization divides its work. Frontend work sits in one place, backend work in another, and each team reports its own status.

That structure helps people manage their assignments. Management also needs a view that follows the user across those boundaries.

Consider a hypothetical reporting workflow:

Prepare → Submit → Review → Revise → Approve

Under each step, I would show what the user can currently accomplish and what prevents them from moving forward.

Now the consequence is visible. Work has advanced, but the usable journey stops at review.

Keep Local Progress and Overall Readiness Separate

Suppose four of those five steps have been implemented. Calling the journey “80% complete” may sound reasonable, but it does not tell us whether the user can finish their job.

A missing connection can prevent several completed pieces from being useful together.

I would report both views:

Four steps are implemented. The user cannot complete the journey because the review handoff is blocked.

That preserves the team’s progress while making the remaining limitation clear.

Task counts can still support workload planning. For decisions about readiness, I want to know how far the user can get.

Give the Connection an Owner

When two teams depend on each other, “waiting on the other team” is an incomplete status.

Someone needs responsibility for moving that dependency forward. They do not need to own both teams or write every part of the solution. They need to coordinate the connection.

For the reporting example, a useful dependency record could say:

Blocked outcome: The reviewer cannot open a submitted report.
Decision needed: Which reviewers should receive access?
Owner: The person coordinating the review workflow.
Next action: Resolve the access rule with the relevant teams and update the affected work.

This distinguishes a decision that has not been made from implementation that has not been finished. Management can respond to the actual problem.

Watch for Changes That Cross Team Boundaries

A team may improve its own part of the system while changing what another team depends on.

For example, allowing an author to revise a submitted report raises a question for the reviewer: am I approving the version I opened, or the version the author just changed?

That decision reaches across editing, review, and approval. It needs to remain visible beyond the team that introduced the change.

When reviewing a proposed change, I would ask:

Who depends on this behavior, and what changes for them?

This is where a journey view becomes useful throughout delivery. It helps the team see the consequences of a change before those consequences become someone else’s blocker.

Make the Review About Decisions

A system-level review should help management decide where to intervene.

I would organize it around three questions:

• How much farther can the user get since our last review?
• Which blocked connection affects the most important journeys?
• What decision or coordinated action would move it forward?

That gives the meeting a purpose beyond collecting updates.

With vibe coding, teams may produce more work between reviews. My goal would be to keep that growing volume understandable: show where the user can go, where they stop, and who is helping them move forward.

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