You Don’t Need to Be a Developer—But You Need to Think Like One

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is a leading expert in project management and strategy implementation, recognized by Thinkers50 with the prestigious award “Ideas into Practice.” He is the creator of concepts like The Project Economy and the Project Manifesto. He is author of Lead Successful Projects (2019, Penguin) The Project Revolution (2019, LID) and The Focused Organization (2012 Gower). He has been teaching project management for more than a decade to senior executives at Duke CE, Skolkovo, Solvay Business School, and Vlerick. Antonio has held executive PMO positions at PricewaterhouseCoopers, BNP Paribas, and GlaxoSmithKline. Former Chairman of the Project Management Institute, he is the co-founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute and the global movement Brightline.

  Agile   Artificial Intelligence  

Let me tell you something I never thought I’d say: I’m learning to code.

And I say that as someone who, until recently, had never written a single line of code in my life. Not because I didn’t want to—but because I didn’t need to. I’ve always worked in business, projects, strategy, transformation. I was the one leading the work, not building the systems.

But things are changing. Fast.

Like many of you, I started dabbling with AI tools like ChatGPT a while ago—using them to summarize meeting notes, write better emails, or brainstorm ideas. Then I got curious. I built my own GPTs—custom AI assistants tailored to my needs as a project manager. That opened new doors. It made me faster, sharper, and more experimental.

But recently, I asked myself a bigger question: Could I use AI to actually program something—without ever having learned to code?

(Spoiler alert: Yes, I could. And the results were better than I expected.)

The Google Form That Changed My Mindset
Let me give you a real example.

I needed a way to gather feedback from project stakeholders across five different markets. Normally, I’d create a Google Form manually—clicking through menus, setting up logic conditions, formatting sections. It would take at least an hour, probably more.

But this time, I asked ChatGPT:

“Can you …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.