The team behind n8n, a visual builder for AI orchestration and process automation, is committed to shipping over perfectionism. “We default to building and shipping quite a lot,” says Niklas (Nik) Hatje, Group Product Manager at n8n. “And we believe in refining product taste and product sense to make the right decisions.”
Lovable has become a core tool for the product management and design teams at n8n. With Lovable, n8n has overhauled how it develops new ideas and feature, including:
- Using Lovable to support rapid prototyping.
- Consolidating user feedback in an internal tool built with Lovable.
- Using Lovable to showcase, align on, and refine their product roadmap with cross-functional partners.
The result is that n8n can keep moving at the breakneck speed necessary in the AI startup space, while maintaining confidence and clarity in their product decisions.
Why Lovable stood out
As a PM leader, Nik is often thinking about how to solve user problems and how to translate user feedback into improvements and solutions. Before vibe coding, he had to write everything down and try to communicate those ideas to a designer or engineer. The written format felt limiting.
“Sometimes, you're thinking through things and having a visual helps you really explore the details,” Nik explains. He recognized the potential of vibe coding early — having used it in his personal life to build apps for his hobbies, he knew it could help overcome this problem.
When it came time to implement a vibe coding tool at n8n, Lovable stood out. He’d already used it for a few personal projects, but unlike other vibe coding tools, Lovable provided a suite of features that made it ready for the workplace.
“I looked into different vibe coding tools, and Lovable seemed to be the one that worked best, especially for building end-to-end products,” Nik says.
Prototyping was Nik’s first use case, but he wanted his team to take the technology well beyond that. “There are quite a few vibe coding products that focus on prototyping, but with Lovable, you can do that and take it one step further,” Nik says.
The better code quality for end-to-end products meant his team could accomplish what they needed, from rapidly prototyping new ideas to developing complete internal tools.
Prototyping faster and with higher fidelity
Lovable first stood out to Nik because it was one of the rare vibe coding tools that promised end-to-end capabilities. Beyond prototyping, Lovable integrates front-end, back-end, and deployment in one workflow: you can build with a connected backend (via Supabase), export and move to GitHub, and deploy to production environments in minutes.
“It’s much faster to develop ideas because you can use it as a thought partner, especially if you don't know precisely what the UX should be,” Nik explains. “I can find edge cases in my thinking, which is much easier than trying to write down everything and imagine how the UX might look.”
Lovable helps Nik and other team members refine and communicate their ideas, and the prototypes are often launching pads in their own right.
‘Now, when we talk about a new feature, instead of creating wireframes (which were always a little fiddly), I can quickly build a prototype to bring my idea across before we build a higher fidelity version,” Nik says. “I definitely feel faster.”
Because Lovable’s prototypes generate deployable code, “Sometimes, we don't even need a high fidelity version,” Nik says. “We can just give the prototypes to the engineers.”
Building internal tools without compromise
Beyond prototyping, Nik faced a common problem as the lead product manager for a lean startup: how to communicate roadmap plans to numerous stakeholders across the company. Because n8n is such a user-driven organization, he also wanted to ensure that everything tied back to insights from user feedback.
He spent a while searching, but the right tool didn't exist on the market. “There are many platforms that try to do this, but they either wouldn't have everything we needed, or would have quite a lot that we didn’t need,” Nik explains.
With Lovable, Nik was able to build the tool himself. Today, the tool stores all the team’s initiatives and matches customer feedback to existing projects. Nik continues to refine it with feedback from internal users. In the future, it may be used to even present the roadmap externally and to collect feedback on the n8n platform.
With Lovable, Nik doesn’t need to find a compromise between his priorities and those of a third-party vendor. “Where you would normally turn to some other tool, you can now build exactly the right tool you need, and this empowers you to solve issues,” Nik says. “Without Lovable, we wouldn't have built it, or we would have used some existing tool that was suboptimal.”
Building a team of builders
Like many PMs, Nik comes from a technical background, but he doesn’t code as often as he used to. Lovable is helping him reconnect with a discipline he loves. “Lovable enables me to build things again without having to get too deep into the details,” Nik says. “I am a builder at heart, so it's really cool to build stuff again.”
As a team member and user of n8n, Nik is deeply familiar with the pride that can result from solving your own problems and building your own solutions. “We really live for this,” Nik says. People feel confident when they can build. And the same is true for me — I'm really proud.”
That pride is the emotional fuel for a virtuous feedback loop. Instead of letting ideas die on the blank page or letting small internal problems go unsolved, Nik and his team have Lovable at their fingertips.
