Introducing the "App Gap"

Product LeadersAI Product Creator

Feb 20

Written by Jim Morris

In my time in technology development, there’s always been a “missing middle”…call it the “App Gap.”

On one side, we’ve got the productivity tools we all live in: Sheets. Docs. Slides. Email. Calendar.

On the other side, we’ve got enterprise apps: Salesforce. Workday. Jira. Systems of record.

For the most common tasks, we buy enterprise systems.

For everything else, we shoe-horn the task into a productivity application.

We duct-tape roadmaps into spreadsheets.
We manage strategy in slide decks.
We run “systems” inside a wiki or a doc.

Here’s the shift we'll see in 2026...we’re going to start filling the "App Gap" with micro-apps:

Hyper-customizable apps that match your workflow
Disposable apps you use for a month and throw away
One-time apps that solve one annoying problem once

We need these niche approaches because product management isn’t one-size-fits-all. It changes by industry, business model, team topology, tech stack… and a thousand local constraints.

And some of these apps will be so good they will grow up to be the new enterprise apps (but on a smaller scale).

My example → Scheduling is death by a thousand cuts.

Every “do you have 30 minutes next week?” email costs me 5–10 minutes.

Multiply that across a week and it’s just… wasteful.

So I built a tiny tool that lets me chat with my calendar and copy/paste clean availability into email or Slack.

No engineering team. No design sprint. No roadmap committee.

Just solve the problem → save the time. Get feedback from real usage.

Is it perfect? Nope. Getting LLMs to understand dates/times = chaos.

But it saves me ~20 minutes/day and that’s sweet!

What's a tiny app you've built to solve the "App Gap"?

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Enterprise apps aren’t going anywhere (for a while). The doomsday articles are getting you keep scrolling but are missing the point of the new tech. The "App Gap" that vibe coding solves sits in the space between productivity apps and enterprise apps.

Enterprise apps are too embedded. Too many workflows, too many approvals, too many custom flows and dependencies. AI isn’t going to magically replace Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, Oracle, etc.

Introducing the "App Gap"

Introducing the "App Gap".

On one side, we’ve got the productivity tools we all live in: Sheets. Docs. Slides. Email. Calendar.

On the other side, we’ve got enterprise apps: Salesforce. Workday. Jira. Systems of record.

For the most common tasks, we buy enterprise systems.

For everything else, we shoe-horn the task into a productivity application.

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Jim coaches Product Management organizations in startups, growth stage companies and Fortune 100s.

He's a Silicon Valley founder with over two decades of experience including an IPO ($450 million) and a buyout ($168 million). These days, he coaches Product leaders and teams to find product-market fit and accelerate growth across a variety of industries and business models.

Jim graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Computer Science and currently lectures at University of California, Berkeley in Product Management.

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