Drew Muller has a 2026 goal for his product team at Ferry International, the company behind Tom Ferry’s coaching and training business for the real estate industry. The goal is one line: raise the experimentation rate and ship more.
Drew can already prototype anything visual on his own. Course pages. Learning paths. Navigation. Whenever the work mostly lives on the page, his PM team builds it directly using the design system in Figma.
The wall is the rest of his portfolio. Billing. Profile management. Subscriptions. Anything that needs real user data flowing between front-end and back-end. He can spec it. He can mock it. He cannot ship it.
“I would love to be more independent as a product person on those features. But they require back-end. And that takes engineering cycles, even though the data is pretty clean and easily structured.” – Drew Muller
That half of the portfolio sits in the engineering queue. The 2026 number sits on the calendar.
What he tried first
Drew tests tools the way a PM with a number to hit and a small team tests tools – fast, by feel, keeping the tools that earn a spot in his stack. Magic Patterns was his favorite for a long time, until Figma Make caught up to the design system. He used Lovable and Bolt as category reference points. He posted on LinkedIn about Google’s Antigravity shortly before he met Else, because the agent piece interested him.
The pattern across all of them was the same. None of them lived inside his code.
“You can give it a custom domain to make it look like it lives within your app. But under the hood, it’s completely separate from your code base.” – Drew Muller
“Tools really struggle with replicating the design system of your app quickly, easily, and efficiently. I want it to look like an embedded part of my app.” – Drew Muller
For the visual work, the gap was a papercut – a few hours an engineer spent rebuilding the look in code. For the work that needed real data behind the screen, it was a wall. The prototype never looked like the real thing. The back-end always needed an engineer. The hand-off always lost detail. Whatever Drew validated up front turned into a ticket, and the ticket turned into something that no longer matched what he had validated.
What changed
Else lets PMs and designers prototype and test inside their actual product, then hand engineering a PR they merge, not rebuild.
Else runs on Drew’s actual product. The Else workspace pulls his components, his CSS, his design tokens. The prototype is the product, not a drawing of it.
When Drew is ready to ship, Else opens a pull request on his Bitbucket repo. Engineering reviews it the way they review any PR. They run it. They test it. They merge it.
The artifact that used to be the start of an engineering ticket is the merge.
How that lands in the day-to-day
The first two PRs Drew shipped through Else merged to production with zero changes to the Else-produced code output. Engineering reviewed, tested, merged. That was the starting point. Drew’s own framing of the time delta on those first PRs:
“It reduced time to prod here by probably 90%.” – Drew Muller
The work he used to spec, design, and queue, he now writes once. The artifact he produces is the artifact engineering merges.
Jared Brodd, a PM on Drew’s team now using Else, describes the shape of the work. He still opens Claude Code when the idea is brand-new and there is nothing yet to refine. Else earns the work when the feature already exists in QA and needs another pass.
“I already have this in QA, so let me just go ahead and riff on it from here.” – Jared Brodd
“I really like using Else for something like that. It’s already in my environment. I can go into QA and tweak it how I would like it. Add some polish.” – Jared Brodd
How the work has grown
Drew started small. The first prototypes that became merges were lightweight changes – the kind a PM can sanity-check against QA before engineering reviews and ships them.
The PRs got bigger. Form submissions with a new top section, metadata, and tags. Page polish that used to wait at the bottom of the engineering queue. Then feature work that under the old motion would have required a PM, a designer, and an engineer to coordinate.
The clearest sign of where this lands is what is happening on Drew’s side of the building right now. The content team at Ferry – not PMs, not engineers – has begun using Else.
“The content team used Else to create a bunch of prototypes they are going to share with users. Non-technical folks are exploring the tool. They are actually going to test with users directly – something we haven’t done with Else before.” – Drew Muller
What Else does that other tools do not
- Runs on your actual product. Lovable, Bolt, Magic Patterns, even Figma Make – “completely separate from the code base.“ Else is not.
- Inherits the design system instead of re-teaching it. Existing components reused. Existing CSS applied. Existing tokens followed. No re-build per prototype.
- Hands engineering a PR, not a file export. The prototype you build is the product that ships.