At Kraft, I learned the fundamentals that AI has not replaced: understand the customer, know the economics, make tradeoffs, launch clearly, and measure whether the market cared.
As Associate Brand Manager for Kraft Barbecue, I worked on a real consumer business with real budgets, real retailers, real launches, and real accountability. The job was not abstract strategy. It was decisions under constraints.
Brand management taught me how to connect customer insight, product positioning, pricing, channel reality, and financial outcomes. Those same fundamentals matter when building with AI. The tools are faster now, but the questions are familiar: who is this for, what problem does it solve, why would anyone switch, what does it cost, and how do we know it worked?
That is why I do not separate "business" from "building." A product can be technically impressive and still strategically wrong. The market does not grade architecture diagrams.