Part 1: How to build a mobile app as a product person (stop prompting, start planning)

In 2025, a product manager built Leafed, a book search app, to understand mobile development challenges firsthand. The breakthrough came from using Cursor AI's "Plan" feature to create comprehensive roadmaps instead of prompting for individual features incrementally. Despite successfully building advanced features like AI chatbots and book scanning, user testing revealed people preferred simple search functionality over complex solutions. Using React Native with Expo allowed deployment to both Android and iOS from a single codebase for under $200 total cost.