Teach Texas to build.
Every business school is teaching MBAs to understand AI. I want to teach them to build and ship with it — decks, landing pages, web and iOS apps, video, podcasts, and agents — and to lead the cultural shift that turns managers into builders. I'm doing exactly this, right now, at the frontier.
The next generation of leaders won't delegate the building. They'll do the building — and lead everyone else to do it too.
I'm not writing about this revolution. I'm running it.
I'm Noah Kindler, Head of Product for alexa.com — Amazon's answer to ChatGPT — and I lead the cultural shift inside Amazon's product org to turn product managers into builders.
Stanford CS major. Harvard MBA. I sit on the exact seam this course lives on: technical enough to know what AI can really do, and a trained general manager who knows what a business actually needs from it.
My day job is the syllabus. I ship a frontier consumer AI product, and I spend my weeks convincing accomplished PMs to stop writing requirements for other people to build — and to build it themselves, in an afternoon, with AI. That change is hard, human, and political. It's also the single highest-leverage skill an MBA can leave school with.
Texas McCombs trains the operators who run the economy. I want to give them the unfair advantage I watch reshape teams every day.
The Résumé Behind the Course
Everyone is teaching AI literacy. Almost no one is teaching AI fluency.
The faculty question isn't "should we teach AI" — that's settled. It's which AI education compounds. Here's where the market actually is, and the gap this proposal fills.
The "understand & deploy" tier
- AI for Leaders — online, 'understand & deploy without coding'
- AI & Machine Learning: Business Applications — 7-month online journey
- Agentic AI — postgraduate certificate, conceptual foundation
- Generative AI for Business Applications — online, via partner
Texas already leads here. These programs are strong, online, conceptual, and explicitly "without coding." They make a leader conversant.
The "build & ship" tier
- No course where MBAs actually build and ship working products
- No hands-on studio for decks, sites, apps, video, audio, agents
- No 'turn managers into builders' change-leadership content
- No instructor who is doing this at frontier scale right now
This is where the leverage — and the differentiation for McCombs — lives. Literacy is becoming table stakes. Fluency is the moat.
The half-life of "AI literacy" is shrinking fast — by graduation, basic AI awareness is assumed. What appreciates instead is the ability to produce: to take an idea and make it real, alone, in hours. The schools that teach building — not just commentary — will own the next decade of management education.
The Builder's MBA: AI for the General Manager
A flagship MBA elective that becomes a signature course, plus a Texas Executive Education intensive that turns it into revenue and reach. Both are representative — designed jointly with the faculty and easily tailored to time, format, and class size. Start with one of each; build a track from there.
The Builder's MBA
A flagship elective where every session ends with a shipped artifact and the arc ends with a live Demo Day. The MBA leaves with a portfolio, not a transcript line.
The Builder's Sprint
The hands-on counterpart to the catalog's online AI programs. Senior leaders personally ship real artifacts and leave with a 90-day adoption plan. Open- enrollment and custom in-company versions.
The Builder's Mindset — Why the GM Is Now the Bottleneck
The shift from 'managing people who make things' to 'making things yourself.' We reframe the manager's job around leverage: what you can now produce in an afternoon that used to take a team a quarter. Live demo: an idea to a working artifact in 40 minutes.
▸ Ship: your first AI-built one-pager, live, before you leave the room.Prompting as a Management Skill
Context, constraints, examples, and critique loops. Treating the model like a brilliant new hire who needs a great brief. Prompt patterns that separate amateurs from operators: role + reference + rubric.
▸ Build a reusable 'brief library' for your function.Decks That Persuade — From Blank Slide to Board-Ready
Generating narrative-first decks, not bullet soup. Structuring an argument, designing visuals, and using AI to pressure-test the logic before a human ever sees it. The McKinsey-quality deck, built solo.
▸ A 12-slide strategy deck on a real decision you face.Landing Pages & Brand — Test an Idea Before You Fund It
Standing up a real, deployed landing page to validate demand. Copy, design, and a working waitlist. The MBA case-competition idea becomes a live URL you can put in front of customers tonight.
▸ Deploy a live landing page with analytics + a working signup.Web Apps Without Engineers — The Internal Tool
Going from spreadsheet to working web application. Data models, forms, and logic, built and deployed. The 'we should build a tool for this' moment, resolved by the GM, not a backlog.
▸ A working web app that solves a real workflow problem.Mobile in Your Pocket — Prototyping an iOS App
From concept to a runnable iPhone prototype. When a mobile experience is the right answer, and how to get to a tappable demo without a six-month roadmap. Demoing to stakeholders on a real device.
▸ An interactive iOS prototype of a product concept.Video & Motion — The 60-Second Story
Scripting, generating, and editing short-form video: launch teasers, internal explainers, recruiting reels. The kinetic music video for this very course as the worked example. Sound, pacing, and the cut.
▸ A produced 60-second video for a product or initiative.Audio & Podcasts — Owning the Channel
AI voice, audio editing, and producing a polished podcast episode. Why audio is the highest-trust, lowest-cost executive channel, and how to produce a show without a studio.
▸ A published podcast episode (intro, interview, edit, distribution).Brainstorming & Strategy — The Model as Sparring Partner
Using AI for divergent and convergent thinking: red-teaming a strategy, generating 50 options then killing 47, steelmanning the opposing view. Decision quality, not just speed.
▸ A red-teamed strategic recommendation with an AI 'dissent memo.'Data Without a Data Team — Analysis & Decisions
Loading messy data, asking questions in plain English, and getting to a defensible answer. Charts, cohorts, and the discipline of not trusting the first number. Where models help and where they lie.
▸ An analysis + dashboard answering a live business question.Agents & Automation — Hiring Software That Works for You
Building agentic workflows that run without you: research, monitoring, drafting, routing. The leap from 'AI as a tool I use' to 'AI as a teammate I delegate to.' Guardrails and where humans stay in the loop.
▸ A working multi-step agent that automates a recurring task.Leading the Revolution — Adoption Inside an Org
The hardest part isn't the tech, it's the people. Driving adoption, dismantling 'that's not my job,' redesigning roles, and the change-management playbook from turning Amazon PMs into builders. Taught from the front line.
▸ A 90-day AI adoption plan for your team or function.Risk, Ethics & Judgment — The Responsible Builder
Hallucination, bias, IP, data governance, and the limits of automation. The executive's duty of care. When 'because the AI said so' is malpractice. Building things that won't get you, or your company, sued.
▸ A governance + risk memo for an AI initiative.Demo Day — Ship It
Each student presents and demos their capstone: a real, working, AI-built product, tool, campaign, or system that creates value in their world. Live judging by a panel of operators and investors.
▸ Capstone demo: a portfolio of shipped work, presented live.- 01Build and deploy working artifacts — decks, landing pages, web and mobile apps, video, audio, dashboards, and agents — independently, without writing traditional code.
- 02Diagnose where AI creates real leverage in a function and where it introduces risk, and make defensible build-vs-buy-vs-skip decisions.
- 03Lead AI adoption inside an organization: redesign roles, drive behavior change, and overcome cultural resistance.
- 04Apply executive judgment to AI outputs — verifying, red-teaming, and governing them rather than trusting them blindly.
- 05Assemble a personal 'AI operating system': a repeatable toolkit and workflow that compounds their leverage after the course ends.
- Build Sprints (each session)40%A working artifact every session — the muscle of building, repeated until it's reflexive.
- Capstone — 'Ship It' Project30%A real, deployed product/tool/system that creates value, demoed live on Demo Day.
- Adoption Plan + Governance Memo15%The leadership and judgment outcomes — proving they can lead, not just build.
- Build Journal & Peer Reviews15%Reflection, critique, and learning to give feedback on others' builds.
Designed for the MBA elective slate (Full-Time, Evening & Weekend), with no prerequisite. Scope and weighting shown are illustrative and would be set jointly with the faculty.
Nine things every MBA should be able to build alone.
Not "be aware of." Build. Deploy. Own. Each maps to a graded deliverable in the course — a real artifact in their portfolio.
Decks & Documents
Board-ready, narrative-first presentations and memos — not bullet soup.
Landing Pages
Live, deployed pages to validate demand before a dollar is spent.
Web Apps
Internal tools and prototypes — spreadsheet to working software.
iOS & Mobile
Tappable iPhone prototypes to demo on a real device.
Video & Motion
Launch teasers, explainers, and recruiting reels that move.
Audio & Podcasts
Studio-quality shows and AI voice — the executive's channel.
Brainstorming
Divergent + convergent thinking; red-teaming real strategy.
Data & Analysis
Messy data to a defensible answer, in plain English.
Agents & Automation
Software teammates that run recurring work without you.
Because a syllabus should also have a soundtrack.
The kinetic intro that opened this page is the course's anthem — built with the exact tools students will learn. The medium is the message: this is what "shipping with AI" looks and sounds like.
said "manage all these people, that's what the MBA is for."
But the tools changed overnight — now the blank page is mine,
I don't write the requirements, I ship it by design.
no code, no committee, just an idea and the will.
Burnt orange and a keyboard, that's the whole degree,
the manager's a maker now — Hook 'em, watch and see.
▸ How it was made (the syllabus, applied)
SONG → Suno v4 prompt:
"Anthemic, modern synth-pop, 100 BPM, female
+ male duet, triumphant. Theme: managers
becoming builders with AI. Bright, collegiate,
stadium energy. Burnt-orange Texas pride."
VISUAL → AI-generated kinetic typography,
beat-synced cuts (the intro you saw).
ASSEMBLY → ffmpeg static-cut, no zoompan.
This is Session 07 (Video) + Session 08 (Audio)
of the course — built, not described.This is the 20-second kinetic cut, beat-timed to 100 BPM. The Suno score muxes straight in — same file, same player.
The timing is not an accident.
A new dean, a new chapter.
With leadership transitioning to Dean Bradley Staats in July 2026 — a scholar of operations, learning, and how organizations actually adopt new ways of working — a flagship "build with AI" course is exactly the kind of signature bet a new era is built on.
Texas already owns the literacy tier.
CATT, the IROM department, and a deep Exec Ed AI catalog mean McCombs has credibility and infrastructure. This proposal extends that lead from understanding AI to building with it — no internal cannibalization.
The adjunct path is built for this.
UT System's faculty rules expressly invite accomplished industry leaders in as Adjunct Professors and Professors of Practice. A frontier operator teaching a hands-on craft course is the textbook use of that title.
Recruiting & brand upside.
"The MBA where you learn to build with AI" is an admissions and employer story that travels. Demo Day becomes a showcase; the artifacts become proof; the course becomes a reason to choose Texas.
Let's pilot one of these — and prove it.
I'd love 30 minutes to walk a champion through this and scope a pilot: the MBA elective in a coming term, or a first Exec Ed sprint. I'll bring a full syllabus packet, a sample Demo Day, and references. Let's give Texas operators the unfair advantage.