When agentic coding startup Kilo launched Kilo Pass, its subscription plan, in January, the idea was only three days old.
While most AI coding tools have customers pay per user or buy set amounts of monthly usage via a subscription, Kilo is pay-as-you-go. Still, some loyal users were saying they wanted some kind of subscription plan. So CEO Scott Breitenother asked Igor Šćekić, one of the company’s 14 engineers, to go for it.
At Kilo, that meant conceptualizing the product on his own, building it end-to-end, and speedily launching it into production, skipping common steps like wiring framing, drafting a PRD (product requirements document), and even seeking approval from the team or leadership. Šćekić designed the gamification approach that ramps up monthly credit bonuses over time, built it, and worked with a partner in marketing to create a landing page. After going live with Kilo Pass in just three days, he then kept iterating based on customer feedback and pushed a new version every day for five days until landing on a finalized product.
“We essentially did the full product life cycle in a week,” Breitenother told Fortune.
This isn’t a one-off, but rather exactly how Kilo’s engineering team is designed to operate. When Breitenother and his cofounder, Sid Sijbrandij, former CEO of GitLab, launched the company in early 2025, they made the deliberate decision to remove the product management layer and give engineers the license to work autonomously and even ship of their own accord. Responsibilities typically held by product managers—like product discovery and prioritization decisions—sit directly with engineers, whom Breitenother describes as operating like “mini CEOs” of their own products.
