Productlab Newsletter

#88: The Future of PMM; AI Discovery, Outcome-Based Pricing, and the New GTM Playbook

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 11 May 2026 07:01:00 GMT

This week’s issue is a bit different.

Building has never been faster. Shipping is almost frictionless now. But getting to people, actually reaching them and making something land, is getting harder every month. Everyone is building. Not everyone is being heard.

So we dedicated a meetup to that exact tension. PMMs, GTM leads, and operators, in a room together, not to sell solutions but to map the situation.

That’s what this issue is about.

Navigating GTM Ownership and AI-Driven Discovery

A huge thank you to those who joined our second “Product Marketing Management in Real Life” (PMM_IRL #2) meetup. While our first gathering laid the groundwork, this second iteration shifted toward a more tactical and organizational dialogue.

Here is a refined recap of the key themes and strategic insights from the session:

Real-World Case Studies

Burnout Prevention & Workplace Wellness: We conducted a roundtable analysis of a startup navigating B2C, B2B, and B2B2C motions. The discussion highlighted that in crowded categories, trust-based distribution—such as insurance partnerships—and measurable ROI for employers often outweigh raw features. A key takeaway: ambassador programs and community-building can provide a more sustainable competitive moat than product functionality alone.
Community-Led Growth: We explored how communities now serve as vital distribution channels and positioning laboratories. The core insight? The most impactful communities don’t just market a product; they actively co-author the product narrative, helping PMMs validate messaging and influence internal adoption through champion users.

The PMM Ownership Gap

A recurring theme was the inconsistency of the RASCI model for PMMs across organizations. Despite influencing foundational pillars like segmentation, GTM strategy, and category narratives, many PMMs lack direct ownership of revenue outcomes. This disconnect often forces PMMs to fight for a strategic seat at the “drawing board” rather than just being execution-focused. The consensus: securing the future of the role requires PMMs to move toward strategic influence and commercial accountability.

The Evolution of Product Discovery

Product discovery is moving beyond traditional SEO. With users increasingly discovering products through LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude, PMMs must now pivot toward AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). Tools like FindableApp were discussed as essential for managing how AI systems interpret, compare, and recommend products in conversational interfaces.

From Linear to Multi-Threaded GTM

The room agreed that the “silent build followed by a big bang launch” model is increasingly risky. Instead, a multi-threaded GTM approach—characterized by small, iterative launches and continuous feedback loops—is becoming the standard for resilience. The prevailing mindset: “Dream big, start small, scale fast, fail cheaply.”

Key “Hot Takes” from the Session:

AI is shifting discovery from search-driven to conversation-driven.
Community is becoming a more defensible moat than content.
“AI-powered” has lost its value as a standalone positioning statement.
PMMs must transition from messaging experts to commercial and operational influencers.

To thrive in today’s landscape, PMMs must become more cross-functional and commercially integrated. Success no longer belongs to the loudest launch, but to the organizations that build the tightest feedback loops between their product, community, and market understanding.

Looking forward to seeing you at the next one!

🛠️ Let’s Build Together: ProductLab Hackathon

We know you’re wired to solve problems, so we’ve decided to stop just writing about them and start solving them together. We are officially planning the first Hackathon, and in true product fashion, we want to co-create the roadmap with you.

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

Growth Unhinged explores the GTM in 2026 shifts from manual “plays” to AI systems. Agents now use dynamic signals for closed-lost re-engagement, automate micro-campaigns based on real-time patterns, and map relationship graphs for warm intros, moving beyond “spray-and-pray” automation.
Intercom has launched a first-of-its-kind outcome-based pricing for its AI agent, Fin for Sales. Shifting away from activity-based costs, customers now pay $10 per qualified lead, ensuring costs align directly with pipeline value rather than just chat volume.
OpenAI projects an 80% drop in its $20/month ChatGPT Plus subscribers, from 44 million in 2025 to just 9 million in 2026. To recover, the company aims to grow its cheaper, ad-supported ChatGPT Go plan by 3,600%, targeting 112 million subscribers. Read More

💪 Open Roles

Brought to you weekly by Alessia Marchi

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

From our DJ Marco D’Avila

by M∆D","description":"🚀 High-energy Tech House set featuring tracks from Prospa, Max Styler, GENESI and others. \n\n📍 Recorded live in Berlin, Germany","thumbnail_url":"https://i1.sndcdn.com/artworks-z1pUtOTwQ1EO2Bx9-18YhxQ-t500x500.jpg","author_name":"M∆D","author_url":"https://soundcloud.com/thisismaddj","targetUrl":"https://soundcloud.com/thisismaddj/marco-davila-product_lab-2025"}" data-component-name="SoundcloudToDOM">

The Product Builder Is Showing Up in Berlin. Here's What We Know — and What We Don't.

Daniele Ronca — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:08:27 GMT

They are calling it a Product Builder: someone who can own the product direction, design the UX, and ship code to production. One person. Three disciplines. AI as the infrastructure that makes the breadth possible.

I have been pulling this thread for a few weeks. I sat with Guannan Li, Director of Product Growth & Design at ablefy, who is actively hiring for this role and has screened more than 200 applications. These are some reflections from that conversation and from what the market is already showing.

What we already know

Ablefy has a live job posting for this role right now. Mid-to-senior design experience, strong product thinking, and enough technical reach to build product components in production. The expectation: 80% independent ownership, AI tools as the infrastructure that makes the breadth possible. That is not a whitepaper. That is a job posting with a salary attached.

Zoom out and the signal gets louder. LinkedIn had its decade-long APM program: the most copied entry path into product management in the industry. They scrapped it in December 2024. The replacement is an APB: Associate Product Builder. No resume accepted. Candidates submit a working product and a 60-second demo. LinkedIn stopped selecting for credentials and started selecting for the artifact.

Linear has been running a version of this for years without calling it anything. No product managers, one Head of Product, teams that assemble around a project and disperse when it is done. Typically one designer and two engineers. Profitable for two years. $35,000 spent on paid marketing in the entire history of the company. The model is not theoretical: it has a track record.

At the other end of the scale, Walmart filled all their agent builder roles internally. Every single one. Their CPO confirmed it publicly. And at Meta, PMs are already calling themselves AI builders without any title change. The title stayed the same. The output changed.

A few kilometres away, Nick Mulder at Hypofriend posted something even more direct. A team of fewer than 20 people, rebuilding a mortgage broker AI-native from scratch. The role: Junior AI Product Manager. His note: “The title doesn’t matter.” The application: build something with Claude and show us. Fresh out of university is fine.

This should not surprise anyone. The Product Manager role has had the same problem since the beginning. At some companies a PM writes code and sits in engineering sprints. At others they never open a Figma file. At others still they are project managers with a better title. The label has always landed differently depending on stage, size, and what the founder decided mattered. The Product Builder is inheriting that same ambiguity on day one. Hypofriend wants someone who can ship from zero. Ablefy wants a senior specialist who has been quietly crossing disciplines on their own time. Both call it the same thing. What sits underneath both definitions is the same question the PM role never fully answered: can you decide what to build, build it, and know if it worked?

What this means if you’re hiring

The ROI case for this role has two parts. The first is communication overhead: three people doing one job spend more time transferring context than most companies admit. Think about the simplest case: a customer reports a minor UX issue on mobile. As a PM, you validate it, write a ticket, brief the designer, wait for the solution, brief the engineer, wait for the build, then validate again with both. Five or six touches to fix one small thing. A Product Builder sees the issue and ships it. Two fewer people to bring into context. No back-and-forth on whether the brief was understood correctly.

The second part is accountability. The user does not experience your spec, your design, or your code. They experience the integrated thing. When three people own three separate pieces, accountability is distributed across the seams between them. When one person owns all three, there is a clear owner for what the customer actually encounters: the full experience, not a handoff.

And the expectation is not that this stays rare. The companies running this experiment are not building around one exceptional person:

“We do not expect this to go into one person as a hero. We actually expect the majority of people will become product builders” — including engineers who can own a problem end-to-end, from customer feedback to shipped fix.

The hiring approach that seems most honest right now is running two parallel bets: promote one person internally, hire one externally, and see which model works better. The internal bet is on expandability: someone who already knows the product, the users, and the context, and can grow their craft into adjacent disciplines. The external bet is on someone who has already crossed disciplines on their own time, through their own projects, out of their own curiosity. The real interview is not a whiteboard: it is a case study. Identify the problem, connect it to business metrics, audit the UX, improve the design on brand, ship something. Show the artifact, not the slide.

“You do not have to prove you can draw, or use Figma. But you need to prove that you can create a user-friendly product yourself.”

The portfolio is now non-negotiable — not just for designers, but for product managers and engineers applying for this role too. That is a structural shift in how candidates are evaluated.

But the harder implication is the one nobody writing about this role seems to surface. The first friction when moving someone into a Product Builder role is not capability. It is time. PM work is organised around availability: many meetings, constant stakeholder contact, scattered attention across many parallel conversations. Design and engineering require the opposite: deep focus, sustained craft time, the ability to hold a problem in your head for hours without interruption.

“Skill is not the only benchmark.”

Which means that before you hire or promote a Product Builder, you have to decide whether you are willing to restructure how that person’s time works. If you are not, you are giving someone a new title and the same impossible calendar. This is why Linear’s model works. The whole organisation is designed to protect focus time. The structure is what makes the role possible, not just the person in it.

One more risk worth naming: what breaks when the Product Builder is not exceptional? In a traditional triad, a weak PM gets caught by the designer or the engineer. In a team of one PB and two engineers, the gap has no one to catch it. The risk concentrates instead of distributing.

What six months of preparation actually looks like

At ablefy, one person has already been successfully transitioned into the role. It took six months. The story of how it went wrong before it went right is more useful than the outcome.

The first problem was not the person being transitioned. It was the engineers reviewing their work. When a designer starts submitting code, the PRs are rough. They do not follow internal engineering standards, naming conventions, or the review processes the rest of the team has spent years internalising. It was slow, it created friction, and some of that friction came from something more uncomfortable than code quality: engineers worried that the industry was changing in ways that were not good for them.

What helped was treating the transition as a two-sided problem. Engineering training for the product and design team: workshops, knowledge sharing, learning how to use AI to review your own code before submitting so you are not dumping half-baked PRs on engineers who feel like they are babysitting. And on the other side: volunteer engineers who stepped up to give educational feedback on early PRs rather than simply rejecting them. Both sides had to move.

There was also a technology factor: an Anthropic model release in late 2025 meaningfully improved the quality of AI-generated code, making it easier for non-engineers to produce work that engineers could actually review without wincing.

Six months in, it works. The resistance that felt structural turned out to be time-based. The team needed to see it working before they stopped pushing back.

What this means if you’re looking for a job

The question worth asking yourself: is your career built on coordination that is disappearing? A lot of senior PM careers were built on moving work through the system: aligning research, design, and engineering, managing the handoffs, holding the context across three separate calendars. That work is genuinely valuable when the roles are separate. When one person owns all three, the coordination layer compresses dramatically. What remains visible is the craft itself.

Roger Wong wrote something sharp about this. The senior people succeeding in Full Stack Builder roles at LinkedIn almost all spent years as a specialist first. They developed taste through depth in one discipline, then crossed into others sequentially. The profiles that stand out are the ones who are already senior in one domain and have spent the last six to twelve months expanding into adjacent skills on their own.

If you are trying to make this transition yourself, the threshold is not vibe coding. It is whether you have good taste: do you know what good UX looks like? Can you use a product and feel when something is off, before anyone tells you? That does not require a design background. It requires having built enough things, used enough products, and cared enough about the experience to develop an eye for what works. That gap does not close through a course. It closes through building things and being wrong enough times that you start to recognise the pattern before it happens.

On salary: the market has not caught up yet. Companies are not paying significantly more than senior PM. The harder question is seniority. If the role is genuinely new, how do you evaluate it? Do you need to be senior across all three disciplines to earn a senior title? If yes, almost nobody qualifies. Most companies are working around it by using the PB path as a promotion track for senior PMs who have hit the ceiling of their current band. The financial case is real: but it is a career structure argument, not a market premium.

Speed was never the problem

AI compresses the execution layer. That is visible now. What remains is judgment about what to build and why.

This is where the Product Builder framing gets partially wrong. The excitement is mostly about execution capability: one person can design, ship, and iterate without waiting on three separate calendars. That is real. But it says nothing about whether that person has the critical thinking to decide what is worth building in the first place.

Leah Tharin put it plainly recently: most teams now ship the wrong things, faster. AI did not solve the speed problem. It exposed the direction problem that was always there. The PM wrote a spec. The designer interpreted it. The engineer built something adjacent to both. Each translation lost a little fidelity. The Product Builder does not fix this by being faster. They fix it by being the only person in the room who has to live with all three decisions at once.

Speed without direction is just chaos with better tooling. [Epic sentence Leah!]

One view on where leadership lands: the role bifurcates into product strategists who focus on direction and product builders who own execution end-to-end with a small team. Fewer layers in between. It is a compelling hypothesis for now.

What is already visible is that more small teams running in parallel does not mean fewer meetings. The coordination problem moves but does not disappear. More teams means more alignment surface. AI has not helped with this part yet.

What I do not know yet

The Product Builder at its best is a return to an older shape of the role: one person who sees the problem, designs the solution, and builds it. Before companies got large enough to justify splitting those three into three headcount, that was just called building a product.

What I do not know is whether that role, inside a company that is not yours, can develop the same sharpness that founders develop. The founder’s critical thinking gets honed by something specific: the knowledge that if you build the wrong thing, it costs you everything. That is not a capability you develop from a job description, however well written. It comes from skin in the game.

There is a second thing founders have that the Product Builder inside a company does not: control over their own calendar. The focus that makes good craft possible is not a personality trait. It is a structural condition.

And there is a third thing worth sitting with. What happens to the people who are genuinely good at this and start to feel the pace as accumulation rather than progress? AI makes you produce more. But more for whom, and at what cost? The Product Builder model assumes that removing friction in the handoff is a clean win. I am not sure it accounts for what happens when there is no one else in the room to slow you down, and whether the time you used to spend in those handoffs was also, sometimes, the time where the thinking happened.

LinkedIn is running the experiment at scale. Berlin startups are running smaller ones. In a year or two, we will know more.

Sources

Daniele Ronca — Founder, Productlab
Guannan Li — Director of Product Growth & Design, ablefy
Ablefy Product Builder job posting
Why LinkedIn is replacing PMs — Lenny’s Newsletter
How Linear builds product — Lenny’s Newsletter
Who Teaches the Product Builder? — Roger Wong
In AI land, everyone’s a builder now — SF Standard
Direction Over Speed — Leah Tharin
LinkedIn APB program — Sophia Sun
Jr. AI Product Manager at Hypofriend — Nick Mulder

#87: PM in 2026; More Pressure, More Opportunity

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 04 May 2026 07:02:17 GMT

Product Builder: The New Market Reality in the Age of AI

Alongside everything we’re already juggling as product people, where our biggest headache is honestly just trying to keep up with AI and not get left behind, there’s this new role called the Product Builder starting to pop up... It’s basically the answer to that "how do I stay relevant" anxiety. Instead of just using AI to write an email or a doc, these folks are using it as their entire engine to do what used to take a whole team. They’re blurring the lines between strategy, design, and shipping code, turning the job from "managing the process" into "actually building the thing." Major players in Berlin and even LinkedIn and Linear are already shifting their focus toward these all-rounders who can show a finished product instead of just a fancy slide deck.

The full deep dive will be in next week’s newsletter. Stay tuned!

🎫 Join our PMM Pub Special Edition on May 7th

We're getting together for a real, no-BS conversation about where PMMs actually fit into the messy world of B2B GTM, from the levers we truly own to the moments we're accidentally left out of the room. It’s a casual night to talk honestly about winning in a landscape where AI and "agentic buyers" are changing all the rules, without the dry slides or rigid frameworks. If you want to figure out how to stop just "contributing" and start actually leading the GTM motion, don't miss it!

PMM Pub Special Edition
with Vladimir Liashenko

🗓️ 7th of May
📍 Berlin

See You in Berlin

💎 Unlock Your Team’s Power: How to Audit Your Invisible Culture Signals

Every team has invisible rules — unspoken signals that shape what gets rewarded and what stays buried. In our next free webinar, Lucie McLean (Product Leader & Executive Coach at Google, ex-Zalando, ex-BBC) will walk you through a practical framework to audit your team's hidden culture signals before they quietly run the show. Join us live from anywhere on May 13 at 13:00 CET — 45 minutes, free to attend. Register here:

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📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

The PM role is evolving faster than most job descriptions can keep up with. These three pieces look at what's actually changing, and what it means for how you work, lead, and stay relevant.

Amy Mitchell cuts through the noise with five sharp trends reshaping PM work in 2026. Her core argument: influence no longer comes from your title or org structure, it comes from how well you connect product decisions to business outcomes. She also raises something worth paying attention to: products are now being evaluated by AI systems before any human ever sees them. If the ground has been feeling shaky under your PM work lately, this piece puts words to exactly why.
Based on a survey across the US, France, and Germany, Atlassian’s latest report paints an honest picture of where product teams stand today. Most PMs feel respected and say they have a real seat at the strategic table, but that visibility comes with serious pressure to prove business value. A great data-backed read if you want the full picture, not just the optimistic version.
Skip the hot takes Ant Murphy went through actual industry reports to find out what’s really happening in product right now. The job market is recovering fast, companies have firmly shifted toward revenue and profitability as their north star, and strategy plus business acumen have become the skills that matter most. Data-grounded and written like a conversation, well worth 12 minutes.

💪 Open Roles

Brought to you weekly by Alessia Marchi

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

From our DJ Marco D’Avila

Why your leadership career success might be an advertising problem [+.md file to start now]

Lucie McLean — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 10:52:19 GMT

The rule of seven is one of the advertising industry’s oldest principles. It originated in the 1930s movie industry, where research indicated moviegoers needed to see a film’s poster seven times before deciding to visit the theatre.

But the world has also changed. Our environments are noisier and our attention is more fragmented. Effective communication in today’s digital landscape may actually require many more - up to 27 times - to build brand trust and loyalty.

Exposure also matters when trying to grow our careers. We need to be visible to the right people, with the right message at the right time.

But if it takes (at least) seven touches for a consumer to remember a brand, why would it take any less for a busy SVP or board member to remember you and what makes you unique?

Subscribe now

So I want to share an experiment.

Imagine you’re the marketing director of your own executive exposure campaign.

The brand you’re building is you - who you are, what you do, what you stand for and what you’re capable of achieving in the future.

What do you need to do to ensure that your audience (the people key to your success) see and understand your brand often enough?

Use the steps below to see if there are opportunities to be more strategic in gaining executive exposure.

1. Defining the ‘audience’

First you need to define the ‘audience’ to reach:

Who are the 3 to 5 people who hold the most influence over your current goals and aspirations?
Who are the allies and sponsors you need to influence today to get the role you want tomorrow?
Who is the one person in your organization who should know your value but doesn’t?

2. Mapping the ‘media placements’

Plot the places where executives ‘consume’ information:

Which meetings and forums do they attend where you currently or could make a contribution?
What kind of asynchronous communication do they read and engage with (ie, project reporting, launch emails, team slack channels)?
Where are there opportunities for unscheduled, authentic, in-person interaction? This might include being present in the office, other offices or industry events.

3. Defining the problem to solve

The best advertising doesn’t interrupt; it answers. If you understand what problems your executives are seeking to solve then you can be part of the solution.

Review the following sources for clues. Even if you regularly read and observe them - revisit them with goal of seeking signals of where you can add additional value:

company and departmental strategy documents and presentations
the themes and stories execs talk about in all team meetings, newsletters and other regular updates
media interviews and presentations given by executives
investor calls (for public companies)
asking your manager what strategic topics are coming up in discussions you’re not involved in
asking your execs directly

4. Auditing your current exposure frequency

How often are you spending time with key executives at the moment and what kind of relationship do you have?

You can use the explosure ladder below to think about the volume and quality of your relationships. The numbers aren’t a hard rule - just a starting point for reflection.

👀 Interactions 1 to 3: First impressions 👀

At this stage, you are laying foundations. You are generating first impressions of who you are, and what you care about. It can be hard to get a big ‘win’ at this stage as ongoing trust and relationship haven’t been established yet.

The goal: Listen, learn the language of the room, and create a good first impression through a confident and engaged presence. Here are some questions to think about for this phase:

💡 How do I ensure I show up calm, confident and present?

Solutions might include:

preparing for any questions you might be asked (perhaps with an AI sparring partner) so you have the answers - just in case
ensuring you have a go-to way to say ‘I don’t know, I’ll follow up with the answer”
taking a few minutes to reset your posture and breathing before you join the meeting
minimizing physical and virtual distractions to help you stay present and catch the nuances of what’s being said (and what’s not)

👀 Interactions 3 to 6 : Building familiarity 👀

This is where the brand begins to form. Executives start to evaluate you more deeply against the strengths and behaviors they value. They also start connecting your name to specific ideas and themes.

The Goal: Consistency and credibility. You want them to think: “Every time I see [Name], they demonstrate x.” Some questions to optmise your approach here include:

💡 What leadership traits are valued and measured by your ‘audience’?

You can find signals of this in the following places:

speaking to people who interact with these executives regularly
looking for clues in communications which celebrate achievements, promotions and key milestones - who is rewarded and for what?
reviewing your role expectations and any documented leadership/teamwork principles to understand what is the ‘official’ benchmark

💡 What do you want your ‘x’ to be and why?

What do you want to be recognised for - based on what you do now?
What additional skills and capabilities do you want others to see to help you attract new opportunities?
How might you find ways to better demonstrate your potential?

👀 Interactions 7+ : Top-of-mind awareness 👀

This is where the magic happens. When an opportunity arises - a new territory, a promotion, a high-stakes task force - your name surfaces naturally.

The Goal: Trust and advocacy. You aren’t just remembered; you are assumed and your opinion matters. Other people are proactively advocating for you. Things to consider here:

💡 Where are you already engaging with your ‘audience’ on topics beyond your scope?

💡 How will they know what else you want to achieve?

💡 Who can advocate for you in the room when you’re not there?

5. Iterating your campaign impact

Of course, it’s also important to evaluate how successful your campaign is, and where you might need to adjust it:

Track your exposure frequency - how are you tracking towards top of mind awareness?
Look for qualitative shifts in interactions - what kinds of questions and discussions are you having with executives? What evidence is there that they see you and what you are capable of?
Proof of advocacy - is your name coming up in discussions of best practice, achievement and upcoming opportunities?

Consistency is key

Not every interaction needs to be a grand slam. Exposure can be as simple as being present, visible, engaged, and present.

But if you aren’t showing up regularly, you may be starting from zero every time a big moment arrives.

So remember that this is a numbers game, be patient, consistent and authentic in your approach.

Feel free to share below how you’ve created quality, authentic interactions which help you grow your executive exposure. Sharing is caring!

Lucie McLean is a product leader and executive coach based in Berlin. Lucie also leads the Product Lab Leaders Circles - where curated groups of product leaders come together to support, inspire and energise each other to amplify their growth and impact.

The next circle starts in June. More information here.

Bonus .md Claude file to start Now!

What this does Turns Claude into an executive coach. 16 focused questions, one at a time, about your goal, the people who influence it, and where you’re visible (or not).

What to expect A 10–15 minute conversation. Claude listens, pushes back if answers are vague, and builds context as you go.

What you get at the end A written strategy: your audience mapped by relationship stage, your brand signal, specific touchpoints, and a 30/60/90 day action plan.

Get .MD

#86: Building in the Age of AI Agents: Insights from Techspace Berlin

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 07:02:54 GMT

Berlin, Spring Days, and the Truth About AI Agents

Last Wednesday, Berlin had one of those perfect spring days. The kind where you feel guilty being indoors. And we had 40+ people pack into Techspace for a conversation about user test validation and AI agents.

Ronja Quester took us behind the curtain of building a menopause app in the corporate world.

Bayer Canesmeno App Ai User Research Ronja Quester

2.82MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Her team used synthetic users in their research, and she was refreshingly candid about both sides of that:

✅ yes, they can reflect real audience needs almost immediately.

❗ But they can also miss the outliers. The edge cases. The experiences that are so specific and so human that no algorithm would think to surface them.

Then Csaba Tamas got up and said the quiet part loud: most AI projects just don’t deliver. We’re talking 5–15% success rates. And yet nearly half of enterprise AI users made at least one major business decision in 2024 based on information that turned out to be hallucinated. While trust in AI output still remains high.

Succeeding With Ai Agents Cssaba Tamas

2.39MB ∙ PDF file

Download

We’re at this weird inflection point where the technology moves faster than our ability to be appropriately skeptical of it.

That’s not a reason to stop. It’s a reason to get smarter about how we build and validate.

Big thanks to our sponsors UserTesting and Techspace for providing the food and space, and the whole Productlab team.

Grateful to everyone who showed up, asked hard questions, and kept the conversation real. That’s the only kind worth having.

See you at the next one. 🙌👇

PMM Pub Special Edition
with Vladimir Liashenko

🗓️ 7th of May
📍 Berlin

See You in Berlin

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

The Art of Not Using AI (And Using It Better)!
We’ve moved past the initial AI hype. In 2026, the real “flex” isn’t just plugging in an LLM; it’s knowing exactly when to step back and rely on core product principles. These three articles have been on my mind because they challenge the “AI-first” status quo in all the right ways:

Decision Surfaces: The Fine Line Between Helpful and Bossy
Priyank Sharma hits on Mind The Product, on a feeling many of us have had: why do AI features often feel “off” even when they work? He argues that because LLMs always speak with unearned confidence (even when they’re hallucinating), we have to design “Decision Surfaces.” It’s about deciding where the system should be an authority (giving an answer) versus where it should be an assistant (just showing options).
The Peril of Laziness Lost: Why “More Code” is a Trap
Is shipping 37,000 lines of code in a day actually a win? Probably not. In this piece, Bryan Cantrill defend the “virtuous laziness”, the human instinct to find the simplest, cleanest solution to avoid future headaches. In an age where AI can churn out infinite, messy code for free, our job is to be the friction. We need to make sure we aren’t just building “layer cakes of garbage” just because the AI makes it easy to do so.
The Build: Why Math Still Beats GPT-4 for Recommendations
Jay Stansell shares on Product Coalition why he literally hit “delete” on a perfectly good GPT-4 prompt and went back to classic math for his product’s recommendation engine. Why? Because in a coaching product, users deserve a “why.” They need to know that a suggestion is based on their specific skill gaps, not a black-box “vibe.” It’s a great reminder that if a problem can be solved with a transparent algorithm, that’s usually the smarter bet.

💪 Open Roles

Brought to you weekly by Alessia Marchi

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

From our DJ Marco D’Avila

#85: Last 10 Tickets for UserTesting event on how to validate fast and Parloa's secret sauce on building scalable agents + Milan event [with slides]

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 07:01:11 GMT

🎫 See you this week!

Whether you work in health tech, want to find out how to prototype fast and validate even faster, or want to learn what it means to build infrastructure for teams at scale — this event is for you.

Thanks to Astrid for making this event possible, and thanks to our speakers for joining us! Ronja Quester (PM at Bayer) and Csaba Tamas (CTPO at Parloa)

Come for the insights, stay for the people.

🗓️ 22nd of April
📍 Berlin

See you in Berlin

🇮🇹 Milan event was a blast, here is why

I am an expat. Like many of you, product was my second life — a career I moved into, not grew up in.

That’s why I’ve always built Productlab as a crossroads. Think of a train station like the Hauptbahnhof: dozens of stories passing through, intersecting for a minute or an hour, each one shaping the others before moving on.

Milan at WeRoad was exactly that.

Three speakers. Three very different journeys:

Matteo Risso — the senior PM stepping into leadership, showing us how to prototype fast and validate even faster.

Show & Tell Weroad Defshare

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Giovanni Ravone — the expat who left the US and came back home to lead a payments company, now rebuilding his org around flat hierarchies and speed.

Luca Mastella — the founder disrupting his own learning platform, taking cues from companies like Intercom and Netflix to rethink how learning works at scale.

Luca Mastella

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We had the slides. But slides are never the point.

The point was the room. The Italian community showed up with warmth, energy, and curiosity that no deck can capture. And none of it would have been possible without the incredible support of Product Heroes, who hosted the event alongside us.

This is what the crossroads looks like. See you at the next one.

See you in a few months or so, Matteo Risso is joining the team to organize once a quarter in Milan <3

Organizational note! We implemented live Speaker’s feedback and is amazing how a room of PM’s are so active to share and support the hard work of the people on stage! Well done Ahmed!

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

This week, we explored a set of new AI tools that are quietly changing how product teams actually work.

Claude Code – Content audit as a real workflow
Using Anthropic’s Claude Code, a full content audit (keywords, SEO gaps, rankings, new topics) can be done in minutes. The key insight: with the right context (files, APIs, structured inputs), AI moves beyond chat and becomes a true research operator that can analyze and recommend at depth.
By Teresa Torres
Gemini ; Turning ideas into visual models
Google Gemini can now turn complex product concepts into interactive visualizations directly in chat. From pricing models and cohort retention to roadmap dependencies, you can simulate and iterate in real time. It shifts communication from explaining to showing, making it much easier to align stakeholders on complex ideas.
Claude Code ; Simulating high-stakes meetings
With Claude Code, you can simulate meetings before they happen. Define participants, agenda, and context, and run a realistic scenario. It helps surface objections, weak arguments, and blind spots, turning stakeholder management into something you can actually rehearse.
By Rich Holmes
Internal AI tools ; The new product advantage
More teams are building their own AI tools instead of relying on SaaS. From memory systems to automation and internal “skills,” companies like Ramp are creating custom workflows tailored to how they operate. Internal tooling is no longer secondary, it’s becoming a real competitive advantage in the AI era.
Read more on Department Of Product

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#84: Next Stop; AI-Driven Insights & Scalable Agents in Berlin

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:02:33 GMT

🎫 Join us on April 22nd, UserTesting: From Fast Validation to Autopilots

Save the date for our next meetup in Berlin. We’re bringing together the product community for an evening of cutting-edge insights and networking.

We are thrilled to host two incredible speakers:

Ronja Quester (PM at Bayer) on AI-driven user insights.
Csaba Tamas (CTPO at Parloa) on building scalable agents.

Come for the insights, stay for the networking with our resident DJ Marco d’Avila and amazing food by Crosta Berlin.

🗓️ 22nd of April
📍 Berlin

See you in Berlin

🎫 Don’t forget to join tomorrow’s online session with Iglika! We’re going beyond basic prototyping and learning how to use Lovable professionally: connecting to databases, integrating your own design system, structuring inputs, and building the right context for production-ready apps.

We’ll walk through advanced techniques for system integration and creating scalable prototypes that feel like real products.

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

User Testing in the Wild! Sony is currently beta-testing a UI update for the PS5 to fix a long-standing navigation issue. It’s a perfect example of how continuous user testing helps even.
Is User Feedback the New Code? According to a recent piece by Bits&Chips, GenAI is transforming user insights into something executable, versioned, and continuous, just like software code. By using Virtual Users to simulate real-world interactions, teams can now get feedback on every design iteration without waiting for weeks of manual testing.
In the era of rapid iteration, Trenhunter introduces the Feedback Widget. This new breed of feedback widgets opens directly within the browser, capturing insights without forcing users to leave the page. By reducing navigation friction, products get higher response rates and contextual data, showing that the best feedback comes from where the user experience happens.

💪 Open Roles

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#83: Easter eggs from Productlab

Daniele Ronca — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:00:55 GMT

📍 🎫 Milan. First time. Sold out. But…

Next week we’re bringing Productlab to Milan for the very first time, in collaboration with Product Heroes. It’s been a long time coming and I can’t wait to finally meet the Italian product community in person.

If you want to double up: the day after, Matteo Risso (host at WeRoad) and I are organising a Lenny meetup at an amazing “Fischladen“ in the city. 25 spots only, and it’s going to be intimate and real.

🗓️ 15th of April
📍 Milan

Join Lenny Milan

🎫 UserTesting: From Fast Validation to Autopilots

We come back to Berlin stronger. We have a special evening sponsored by UserTesting and Techspace, and it wouldn’t have happened without Astrid Pocklington and Deniz Sebik making it possible. Genuinely grateful.

Two speakers worth clearing your calendar for: Ronja Quester (PM at Bayer) on AI-driven user insights, and Csaba Tamas (CTPO at Parloa) on building scalable agents. That's already a great night. But honestly, what makes these events is our planned networking around it.

Marco d’Avila, our resident DJ, will be there for the networking. We’re going full yummy with Crosta Berlin (their founder Luca Pignatelli was Senior PM at Delivery Hero, so yes, the food will be excellent and he knows exactly what we need). And Aleksandra Kononchenko will be capturing the moments on video.

🗓️ 22nd of April
📍 Berlin

See you in Berlin

👀 The PM role isn’t dying. It’s splitting.

We published something last week that hit a nerve: the product manager role isn’t disappearing, it’s diverging into three distinct profiles depending on how you’re actually using AI. The Operator, the Product Builder, the Specialist. The skills that got you promoted two years ago, writing detailed requirements, translating business to engineering, managing the backlog, are no longer what separates you. What does? Judgment. Domain depth. Commercial thinking. The ability to build and evaluate AI systems that work in production, not just in demos.

And speaking of the PM role changing...

We dropped the first names for our Conference on September 17th.
Julius Danek (Head of Product DACH at Stripe) on machine payments and the headless economy.
Jana Waldschmidt (Director of Product at GetYourGuide) on leading teams through AI transformation.
Malte Landwehr (CPO at Peec AI) on how LLMs are reshaping product discovery.
And Csaba Tamas (CTPO at Parloa) on building agentic products at production scale. More names coming.

Full Lineup

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

From Empathy to AI: Mastering Product Sense this week

We often call it a ‘gut feeling,’ but Product Sense is actually a muscle built from deep empathy and strategic insight. In 2026, as AI automates routines, your ability to discern the ‘why’ behind user behavior is what distinguishes you from a machine. Without understanding what truly drives users, even the best Agile methodologies won’t save your product.

Diana Stepner breaks down Product Sense as a learnable skill blending deep empathy with creative conviction. She argues that true “sense” comes from prioritizing user needs over rigid methodologies. To keep your Product Sense fresh, you must embrace “scrappy” prototyping and dare to pursue ideas that others might call “crazy.”
In the age of LLMs, Product Sense must evolve. Lenny’s Newsletter reveals how modern PMs need “AI intuition“, understanding how probabilistic models think. By practicing “Vibe Coding“ and hands-on prototyping, PMs can transform unpredictable AI capabilities into deterministic, high-value user experiences that feel intuitive.
Leah Tharin delivers a vital warning: AI cannot simulate human irrationality. While “Synthetic Personas” are tempting shortcuts, true Product Sense is forged through direct human observation. To build authentic trust, PMs must resist the urge to automate empathy and stay grounded in the messy, unpredictable reality of actual users.

💪 Open Roles

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The product manager role isn't dying. It's splitting into three.

Daniele Ronca — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:27:58 GMT

The job title is stable. The job description is not.

I’ve been running Productlab for two years, talking to senior product people every week across Leaders Circles, the community, and the conference circuit. And something I keep seeing doesn’t have a clean name yet. The people in the room are all called product managers. But they’re not doing the same job anymore. They don’t want the same things from their career. They don’t need the same skills. And the gap between them is growing.

Let me try to put a frame on it.

How we got here

Two years ago, the dominant question was “what is AI and should I care.” That wave produced credentials, explainers, bootcamps. Most of it was behind where the actual work was already happening.

Last year the question changed. Teams started shipping real AI features and hit the same production walls across every industry. How do you evaluate a system whose outputs are never identical twice? How do you design an agent that isn’t just an expensive autocomplete? How do you build something users trust enough to act on? The teams that moved fastest weren’t the ones with the best tools. They were small, cross-functional, and led by people with specific domain knowledge that the model couldn’t replicate on its own.

Now we’re in a third shift, and it’s the hardest one. The question is no longer technical. It’s organizational. When everyone can build, what is actually yours? When building speed is no longer the differentiator, what is?

That question is reshaping what product management actually means. And it’s producing three distinct profiles.

The three product managers

The first is what I’d call the Operator. They use AI to do the existing PM job faster and better. PRDs in twenty minutes. Research synthesis in two hours instead of two days. Meeting prep automated. Customer interviews summarized before the call ends. This is genuinely valuable. The work is real and the efficiency gains are measurable. But the playbook is visible to everyone, and so is the tool being used to run it. The efficiency is not a moat.

The second is the Product Builder. This person has shipped something real with AI. They know what evaluation systems are because they’ve needed them, not because they read about them. They’ve hit the production wall where a feature that works perfectly in a demo produces garbage in the wild. They’ve had to redesign a workflow from scratch because the architecture they chose was impossible to debug when it failed. They think about prompt engineering at the production level, not the conversational level. They’re T-shaped: enough technical fluency to make real architectural decisions, enough product craft to stay focused on the user problem. This is the direction individual product contribution is heading. It’s smaller than it looks. A lot of people believe they’re here when they’re still in the first group.

The third is the Specialist. This person has gone narrow and deep, combining AI capability with domain expertise that’s genuinely hard to replicate. A former teacher who writes her own evaluation code specifically because she knows what good pedagogy looks like and a generic model doesn’t. A product leader who spent years working with local government who knows that “this is a really big problem” is positive sentiment in civic technology, not a complaint, and that no off-the-shelf model will catch that distinction. Their competitive advantage isn’t the tools they’re using. It’s what they already know that the tools can’t. This is the rarest profile, and the gap between them and everyone else is widening, not closing.

How skills are actually changing

The skills that are losing value are, uncomfortably, some of the skills that got people promoted in the last decade. Writing detailed requirements that get handed to an engineering team. Being the translator between business and technology. Managing a backlog as the central organizing activity of the job. These aren’t gone. But they’re no longer the differentiator.

What’s becoming more important, not less: taste and judgment, because when anyone can build anything quickly, the decision about what’s worth building becomes the job. Domain expertise, because AI amplifies what you already know and can’t substitute for it. Commercial thinking, because the best product people now think about positioning, pricing, and go-to-market as product decisions, not someone else’s problem. And communication, which sounds obvious until you realize that as AI handles more of the execution layer, the human ability to facilitate alignment, challenge assumptions in a room, and build trust under pressure becomes the actual leverage.

The genuinely new skills are real but learnable: designing AI systems that degrade gracefully rather than confidently wrong, building evaluation infrastructure that isn’t just a spreadsheet of thumbs-up ratings, understanding how context windows fill and degrade so you design workflows that account for it. The most honest thing I’ve read about this is that you can’t predict how long it will take to get to good. Getting to good takes a lot of iteration. The knowledge lives in the failures already made, not in the frameworks describing them.

Why we designed three days

The conference structure is a direct response to these three profiles and the organizational layer that sits above all of them.

Day one is for the leaders trying to navigate from the top. The question is: given that the rules are changing faster than any planning cycle can accommodate, how do I make directional decisions without waiting for clarity that won’t come? We called the best person we know to lead that conversation: Ravi Mehta, who has spent the last two years building the most widely used framework for executive AI strategy and building AI-first teams. Not a lecture. A working session with people who have the same problem.

Day two is a full operating system for the Builders and Specialists. Six workshops, maximum twenty people each, at The Social Hub. Not lectures, practice. The new execution layer: agentic system design, building a personal Product AI OS, discovery and validation at AI speed. The judgment layer that hasn’t changed: stakeholder communication, strategy-to-execution, go-to-market thinking.

The people running the rooms: Zsuzsanna Tamas (Amazon Music) on agentic AI architecture. Tamer El-Hawari (Productbench) on building your Product AI OS. Birte Loecked on discovery and validation under pressure. Rich Mironov on ROI and managing business demands. Tim Herbig on connecting strategy to measurable execution. Rory Woodbridge on product marketing and go-to-market. Six practitioners, six rooms, maximum twenty people in each. One day to upgrade both sides of the equation.

Day three is the room where all three profiles are in conversation. Morning: companies and practitioners showing what the new terrain actually looks like when you’re operating inside it. Afternoon: the practitioners who went first, with the real stories. What the AI-native playbook doesn’t tell you. What it takes to build 0-to-1 agentic products inside a large organization. What happens when complexity is your moat and your end user isn’t your buyer. Then we close with something that isn’t a talk at all, a live robotic music performance exploring what happens when human intent meets algorithmic agency and neither is fully in control. It’s the honest description of where we all are right now.

Not three days of content. Three days designed for the three conversations that actually move people.

Which profile are you building toward?

Check Lineup

With love from Berlin,
Daniele

#82: Wrap-up: Logistics Innovation Night at Beam Berlin

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 07:01:44 GMT

✨ Logistics Innovation Night: From Rapid AI Workflows to Research-Driven Sustainability

Last week, we gathered at Beam Berlin, the venture builder for the BEUMER Group, to dive into the gritty reality of logistics innovation. As a hub that connects industrial giants with the startup world, Beam provided the perfect backdrop for a night focused on solving the hard logistics problems!

Our first speaker, Abhishekkumar Savita Rai (Founder & CTO of Aerolead.ai), who is currently building his platform with Beam’s support, shared how he managed to launch a complex aviation product in just nine months. His core message was a wake-up call for the AI era: the days of “feature-driven” products are over; the future belongs to “workflow-based” mindsets. Abhi demonstrated how deep domain expertise, not just AI itself, is the true differentiator. By moving from isolated features to connected workflows, his platform integrates everyone from airlines to ground handlers into a single intelligence layer. Using real-world examples like smart baggage tracking and fraud prevention, he showed how solving complex, “broken” industrial processes requires shipping fast, learning faster, and prioritizing end-to-end solutions over simple tools.

Next, Daniel Quiter (Founder of Kiezbote) took us on a very different journey, moving from 2.5 years of academic research to a functioning business. He was refreshingly honest about the “solo founder” struggle and the gap between theory and reality. Using the “Mayring Method” to decode customer needs, Daniel’s biggest lesson was that what people say they’ll pay in a survey is rarely what they actually pay. He shared how Kiezbot pivoted from B2C to a sustainable B2B model, carving out a niche with CO₂-neutral cargo bikes. By offering hyper-flexible delivery windows and last-minute address changes, Daniel proved that green logistics can actually be more customer-centric and is now on the verge of hitting profitability.

It was a night that reminded us all: whether you’re moving fast with AI or taking the long road through research, the goal is the same; stop building backlogs and start solving real-world friction.

Check all the Moments

💡🎫 Product Lab Online; Build & Ship with Lovable: Advanced Techniques.

Welcome to our new series bringing industry-relevant topics to PMs across the EU.

In our first workshop, we’re going beyond basic prototyping. Learn how to use Lovable professionally: connecting to databases, integrating your own design system, structuring inputs, and building the right context for production-ready apps. We’ll walk through advanced techniques for system integration and creating scalable prototypes that feel like real products.

Join us using the link below and keep an eye on Luma for the exact event date.

P.S. The workshop will be happen either on the April 2nd or the week after -> we’ll keep you posted!

Request to Join

📍 🎫 We’re heading to Milan!

In collaboration with WeRoad and Product Heroes, we’re hosting an exclusive session covering the essentials of scaling in the AI era, from rapid prototyping and building AI teams to the growth strategies behind Learnn. We’re booked, thank you for your trust!

🗓️ 14th of April
📍 Milan

See you in Milan!

📍 🎫 Next up: Berlin!

On April 22nd, we’re gathering at Techspace Eiswerk to explore the journey from “Fast Validation to Autopilots.” We’ll be joined by Ronja Quester (Bayer) to talk about AI-driven user insights and Csaba Tamas (Parloa) on building scalable agents. Registration opens April 13th, don’t miss out!

🗓️ 22th of April
📍 Berlin

See you in Berlin

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

If you missed our deep dive into Logistics Innovation at Beam, or if you’re just looking to stay ahead of the curve, we’ve curated three essential reads for Product Managers navigating the future of supply chains and AI.
How do you build a product where “safety“ isn’t just a requirement, but the core value proposition? Chinmay Jain (Director of PM at Waymo) shares on the LogRocket blog how they moved beyond “vanity metrics” to focus on human trust. For PMs in autonomous logistics, this is a masterclass in using massive simulations to solve edge cases and why the world’s safest driver isn’t human.
Integrating Generative AI into logistics isn’t just about picking an LLM; it’s about navigating “hallucinations” in shipping IDs and protecting sensitive trade data. Cleveroad explores the high-stakes trade-offs PMs face when adopting GenAI. From automating customs documentation to intelligent customer support, learn where the tech provides real ROI and where the risks of data leakage are too high to ignore.
The “Last Mile” accounts for a staggering 53% of total shipping costs. In this strategic deep-dive by DHL Discover, explore how data-driven innovations, like micro-fulfillment centers and crowd-sourced delivery, are reshaping urban logistics. This is a roadmap for optimizing unit economics through tech, proving that the future of delivery is as much about smart algorithms as it is about electric cargo bikes & drones.

💪 Open Roles

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#81: Productlab on Tour: Berlin, Barcelona, Milan! We are coming!

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:02:57 GMT

Hey community 👋,

We’re experimenting with visiting new tech hubs and getting to know other communities. For our conference, people joined from all around Europe, and we thought, why not meet them in person and see how conversations and challenges are evolving?

📍 Berlin, 🎫 We are coming back to Beam!

We’re bringing together around 40 people from the community for a focused evening on one of the hardest things in product: the 0 to 1 journey. If you’re a builder — someone working on early-stage ideas, running experiments, or trying to figure out what’s actually worth building — this one is for you. The goal isn’t to hear polished success stories. It’s to sit in a room with people who’ve been through it and get honest about what worked, what didn’t, and why. The reasoning behind the decisions matters just as much as the outcomes, and that’s exactly the kind of conversation we want to create space for.

🗓️ 26th of March
📍BEAM Berlin

Join Us

📍 BCN, Lenny Meetup

Our Founder Daniele will host with Marc Bisbal Arias a Lenny’s Meetup. Be ready to mingle about product, and tasty food!

🗓️ 26th of March
📍 Barcelona

Join Lenny Meetup

📍 🎫 Built in Milan

In collaboration with WeRoad & Product Heroes, we’re hosting a special event that spans topics from fast prototyping and scaling AI teams to AI-driven growth at Learnn.

Thanks to Simone Basso for hosting us, and to our speakers—Matteo Risso (sPm at WeRoad), Giovanni Ravone (CPO at Satispay), and Luca Mastella (Co-founder / Growth at Learnn).

🗓️ 14th of April
📍 Milan

See you in Milan!

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

FinTech 2026: Prompt Optimization & the Death of Transaction Stress

In FinTech, minor AI hallucinations create major liabilities. This deep dive from Product Faculty explores how Prompt Optimization, shifting from vague instructions to strict “Output Contracts”, eliminated 100% of formatting drift. By treating prompts as cognitive architecture, teams can stabilize complex financial workflows, ensuring the deterministic accuracy required for modern FinTech systems.

Melissa Douros (CPO at Green Dot) argues FinTech must move beyond transactions to optimize for human emotion. In this standout episode of the Launchpod, she introduces the “Cortisol UI”, a framework for building FinTech experiences that actively fix empathy problems and reduce user anxiety before a transaction occurs.
In this edition of FinTech Pulse, Lina Lim explores how Pay-by-Bank and AI-driven checkout optimization are disrupting traditional card networks. As merchants seek to slash fees, the shift toward direct, intelligence-led account-to-account (A2A) payments is becoming the new gold standard for high-conversion FinTech platforms in 2026.

💪 Open Roles

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🎶 Song of the Newsletter

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#80: March event at Beam. See you there!

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:02:56 GMT

🎫 We are coming back to Beam!

Hey community 👋

Next up, we’re heading to Beam for an evening of building, sharing, and connecting and we’d love to have you there.

What is Beam?

Beam GmbH is a venture builder that partners with founders to create and grow new companies from the ground up. Every year, the team identifies and validates dozens of real business problems and turns the most promising ones — mainly in B2B and logistics — into startup opportunities. Founders get early access to customers, funding, and a strong expert network to test ideas and build MVPs fast. If you’re curious, check them out at Beamberlin.

Our speakers

🎤 Abhishekkumar Savita Rai is a technology and product leader with international experience across Southeast Asia and Germany. He specializes in building and scaling tech-driven products across cloud, fintech, e-commerce, and health-tech — he’ll bring a sharp perspective on what it takes to move fast in complex environments.

🎤 Daniel Quiter is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Kiezbote, a sustainable city logistics provider combining digital solutions with fair working conditions. Daniel will share how he applies structured, evidence-based methods to test assumptions and build practical, socially responsible solutions in an early-stage environment.

🗓️ 26th of March

📍BEAM Berlin

🎟️ Join us https://luma.com/r9wjsp2g

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

The AI-Native Shift: Reimagining Product Teams and Operations

In Growth Unhinged, Justin Norris challenges the traditional “operator” role, arguing that AI-native individuals must move beyond manual “glue work.” The unique takeaway is treating AI not as a tool, but as a team-level Chief of Staff. He illustrates how a modern product team can offload operational complexity to machines, allowing members to reclaim their headspace for high-level strategic judgment and organizational alignment.

Also, Kyle Poyar highlights a radical shift in team performance, detailing how an AI-native growth team managed 514 experiments in a single year. This isn’t just about faster tools; it’s about a structural redesign where engineers act as AI operators. The article reveals how shifting the operational burden to AI agents allows teams to break human-scale limitations, turning monthly learning cycles into daily ones.

Brian Balfour argues that since AI makes code “cheap,” the traditional large product team is becoming a liability. He advocates for a shift toward smaller, data-centric team structures. The standout insight: a team’s competitive moat is no longer its output, but its proprietary data. He explains why AI-native teams must pivot from “building features” to “managing learning flows” to stay relevant in an automated world.

💪 Open Roles

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From our DJ Marco D’Avila

AI Moves Things Faster. But in Which Direction?

Daniele Ronca — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 08:25:21 GMT

I went for a walk this week with Salvador Restelli, Director at Mobile.de and Productlab Conference board member. We ended up talking about agency. Not the buzzword version. The real one: how people, teams, and companies take strategic bets, build authority, and push organizations in a direction that matters.

Salvador reflected on his own career and the moments where agency was missing. Not because the skills weren’t there. Because the conviction to push wasn’t. Waiting for the organisation to align itself. Time passed, People moved on, Initiatives (the expensive ones) became an un-read Google Drive file.

Dara Khosrowshahi said it plainly on Diary of a CEO.

He took over Uber when the company was losing $3 billion a year. The turnaround didn’t start with a new strategy deck or a product vision. It started with saying the uncomfortable truth before anyone asked for it. Proactively. Not softened, not over-contextualised, not buried in a 40-slide narrative. Just: here is what’s actually happening.

He described pinging people on Saturday. And if needed, on Sunday. Not to micromanage. To get to reality. To make sure the organisation was operating on truth, not on the version of truth that’s comfortable enough to present upward.

That’s agency. And it took Uber from $3 billion in losses to $9 billion in free cash flow.

The thing that struck me isn’t the scale. It’s that the mechanism is so simple and so rare.

Most product leaders I observe do the opposite. They soften findings. They hedge. They add so much context to bad news that it loses its weight. They wait for the quarterly review to surface what they knew in week two.

Saying the hard thing before being asked is not a personality trait. It’s a strategic choice. And the leaders who make it consistently are the ones people stay loyal to.

Diana Stepner wrote about the career lattice this week, and it reinforced the same point from a different angle.

The PMs who reach Head of Product aren’t the ones who waited for promotion. They’re the ones who made moves. Sideways, diagonal, sometimes deliberately down. They mentored someone before it was their job. Led the project nobody owned. Built a track record in the open, before anyone gave them permission.

That’s agency again. Not career optimisation. The willingness to act before the conditions are perfect.

People-First Leadership

Navigating the Product Management Rollercoaster: From IC to Leader

Are you a Product Manager at a crossroads - stay or go? Feeling pressure to climb the ladder but wondering if it's the right move? Or maybe you're a seasoned leader missing the hands-on nature of an individual contributor (IC) role…

a year ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Diana Stepner

The Group PM player/coach trap is another version of the same story.

Most first-time Group PMs play too much and coach too little. The ratio should be 60-70% coaching, 30-40% hands-on. Almost everyone inverts it.

Why? Because doing the work yourself feels like agency. It feels productive. But it’s actually the opposite. It’s avoiding the harder move: letting go of the thing that made you successful and trusting that developing other people is how you create more impact than you could alone.

Real agency at the leadership level isn’t doing more. It’s deciding what matters, saying it clearly, and building the conditions for other people to move.

Florian Bonnet wrote something on his account this week that tied all of this together for me.

Product judgement is probably the #1 skill for Product Leaders going foreward.

AI moves things faster. But in which direction?

That question is the one I keep coming back to. Because speed without conviction is just drift. You write faster, iterate faster, test faster. But if nobody in the room has the agency to say “we’re building the wrong thing” or “this strategy isn’t working” or “we need to make a different bet”.
Or simpli we are just getting busier on iterate and vibe coding, without real business outcomes?
Then all that speed just means you arrive at the wrong place sooner.

The AI shift is exposing something that was always true but easier to hide: the gap between leaders who have judgment and leaders who have process. When execution was the bottleneck, you could build a career on being reliable, organised, and good at managing the backlog. That’s not enough anymore. The bottleneck has moved to the decision layer. And the decision layer runs on agency: the willingness to take a position, push for it, and be accountable when it’s wrong.

The Monday Cake

The AI documentation Paradox

More words. Less thinking. And nobody is noticing…

2 months ago · 2 likes · Florian bonnet

What I’m paying attention to.

I keep noticing the same pattern across conversations for potential conference’s speakers, community events, and the things I read on LinkedIn. The leaders who are building real credibility in the AI space aren’t the ones with the best frameworks or the most polished communication style. They’re the ones who act. Who push to reality instead of waiting for it. Who say what they see before anyone asks. And move organizations that are too slowly adopting AI.

That’s the direction that matters. Not faster. Not more efficient. More honest. More convicted. More willing to be wrong in the open.

AI gives us speed. Agency gives us direction.

I think a lot of product leaders in Europe are about to discover which one they actually have.

With love from Berlin
Daniele

Photo by Serj Sakharovskiy on Unsplash

#79: First PMM meetup recap + HPBerlin Salary Trends + Builders WA Group

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 08:02:02 GMT

🤑 Help HPB make the 2026 Salary Trends Survey the biggest one yet

Last year hit 1,845 responses and we’d love to improve that with them 💚

The annual Berlin Salary Trends survey is open again for its 4th edition. Last year 1,845 professionals participated, making it the biggest independent salary benchmark in the city. This year includes new questions on benefits, remote work, AI, and salary negotiation. It's anonymous, takes a few minutes, and the full report will be published for free. The more people participate, the more accurate it gets.

Let's hit 3K responses

💜PMM_IRL #1 — what we heard, and what it made us think

Last week we ran the first PMM in Real Life meetup with a room full of product marketers talking honestly about how AI is changing their work. No slides, no panels — just a real conversation. The energy was great, and so were the takes.

The consensus across the room: AI isn’t replacing PMM thinking. It’s accelerating it. People are using it to structure messy ideas faster, explore positioning angles before committing to one, and stress-test messaging by simulating multiple personas in parallel. The tools coming up most — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Clay, Whisper, Manus.

But the most interesting thread wasn’t about tools. It was about what’s getting easier — and what isn’t.

Building has never been cheaper or faster. Getting customers is still the hard part. Competition? Fierce.

Spinning up an agent, a workflow, a campaign, a landing page — that’s table stakes now. Almost anyone can ship. The real challenge is distribution, trust, and making your product legible to the right buyers at the right moment. And that challenge is getting harder, not easier — partly because there’s more noise, and partly because the buyer itself is changing. B2B companies are increasingly facing scenarios where an AI agent is the first thing evaluating their product. That’s a new frontier for PMMs, and nobody has fully cracked it yet.

We also talked about how roles are shifting. Narrow content and research functions are shrinking. GTM generalists who can connect messaging, research, and execution are gaining ground. And technical writing — the kind that actually explains how something works — remains underrated and hard to replace.

One hot take that landed well: content production is getting easier, which means content strategy matters more than ever.

This is exactly why conversations like this one matter. The craft is moving fast, and the best thinking isn’t in blog posts or LinkedIn carousels — it’s happening in rooms like the one we had last week.

PMM_IRL #2 is coming. Stay close. 👋

— Daniele & Vladimir

P.S. Join the PMM_IRL WhatsApp community to stay in the loop and hear about the next one first.

🏗 Build is on. Join us to share what's working (and what really isn't)

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📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

This week, we’re dissecting the “How” of scaling. Is scaling about raising massive capital to build a vertical infrastructure, or is it about staying lean to keep your speed?

In 2026, scaling isn’t just about software; it’s about owning the entire supply chain. Erik Torenberg argues that the new guard of winners, like OpenAI and Anduril, are capital-intensive infrastructure companies. To scale these “Goliaths,” venture firms must also scale into massive, vertically integrated platforms that can provide not just cash, but GPUs, chip supply chains, and government relations.
Scaling too fast with technology creates “expensive weaving looms” that break easily. The CPO Club uses the history of the 1880s automation to show that scaling through AI alone often leads to zero output during retooling. He argues that true scaling requires “Center-Court” balance: using AI to increase volume while keeping human experts at the core to maintain the systems that technology can’t self-repair.
We can scale our AUM to billions without ever scaling our headcount. Henry Shi reveals the playbook of Oren Zeev, who proves that “Solo-GP” scaling is the ultimate counter-strategy to partnership politics. By eliminating investment committees and associates, Zeev scales through pure speed and founder referrals, proving that a single decision-maker can manage a $2.5B portfolio more efficiently than a 300-person firm.

💪 Open Roles

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🎶 Song of the Newsletter

From our DJ Marco D’Avila

Building Productlab FM to cut down market research and content creation workflow. Here’s what actually happened.

Daniele Ronca — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 08:13:58 GMT

Let me start with the honest version.

It started last year. I was drowning in content. LinkedIn was making my life a little miserable. Not in a dramatic way. In the slow, background-hum way where you check it too many times a day, absorb a lot of noise, and never quite feel like you have a real picture of what’s happening. The FOMO was low-grade but constant. I’d read something interesting and immediately lose it in the feed. I’d have a conversation with a community member about a trend and realize I had no system for capturing any of it.

This year it got worse before it got better.

I also tried to build a voice agent last year. The idea was to collect the needs of potential mentors and speakers: what topics they cared about, where they wanted to go, what conversations would be worth having. It didn’t work. The timing was off, the tooling wasn’t ready, and honestly I was trying to build a product when what I needed was a workflow.

This year is different. I made a deliberate decision to stop building new things and focus on scaling what we have. The conference in September, the Leaders Studio, the community. That means saving budget for an extra person to help with operations. It means being honest that I can’t do everything myself and getting serious about what I actually need systems for.

That shift in framing is what made Productlab FM possible.

Finding a partner in crime

I didn’t build Productlab FM on my own. I want to be clear about that because the “founder teaches themselves to code” narrative is usually polished nonsense.

, who has been helping me with technical work, spent a weekend building something for himself: a skills management setup, a dashboard, a folder structure for organizing Claude’s outputs. He built it because it solved his problem. I looked at it and realized it could solve mine too, with some adaptation.

That’s the real version of “vibe coding” as a non-technical founder. You find someone who has already solved an adjacent problem, you understand what they built, and you shape it to your actual workflow. The hardest part wasn’t the technology. It was finding the headspace to actually do the work. Training myself on something new, figuring out what I actually needed versus what I thought I needed, and resisting the urge to keep testing and re-testing instead of committing to a direction and moving forward. I have spent more hours than I want to admit cycling through iterations that didn’t go anywhere because I hadn’t been honest enough with myself about the real problem.

The AHA moment that fit my workflow.

It wasn’t some breakthrough feature. It was the dashboard fetching all my newsletters without breaking. Just: it worked, it kept going, it didn’t need me to intervene. That’s it. After months of information management being a manual, scattered, slightly chaotic process, something ran on autopilot and I felt the weight of it lift.

I also want to mention the Claude thing that nobody talks about: 20 euros a month is not enough credit for two hours of serious work. I burned through it faster than I expected. I switched to the 90-euro plan. That’s the real cost of using this properly, and I’d rather say it out loud than let someone else discover it the hard way.

Important Step to follow

Make sure all the file are really organize by the tasks you want to do, otherwise things go messy. The small the best.
Build everything as a skill, so you can recall it
Some of the new Skills :)
Deduplication Strategy for Content Systems

What Productlab FM actually does for me has almost nothing to do with time.

I thought it was going to save me hours. Maybe it does, somewhere. But the real value is mental capacity. I have a system that scans the market every day, curates what’s actually signal versus noise, and gives me a structured view of what’s happening without me having to go looking for it.

That means I stay off LinkedIn more. That means I have a safer, quieter work environment. That means I can think.

It also sharpens the questions I ask potential speakers and community members. When you have context on what’s moving in the field, you stop asking generic questions and start asking real ones. That matters a lot when you’re trying to build a speaker lineup of practitioners, not performers.

The other thing it does: it helps me get my own thinking out.

When I write something down and work through it in conversation with Claude, it asks me questions that push me further than I’d go alone. The output that comes from that process is more honest than what I’d produce if I just sat down to write content. And when honest writing goes out into the newsletter or on LinkedIn, something happens. People respond. Not with likes, with actual messages. Conversations that continue at events, on WhatsApp, in the community. People who feel like there’s a builder out there dealing with the same things they deal with.

That’s the loop I was trying to build. Not a content machine. A system that helps me stay close to what matters, think more clearly, and share enough of the real experience that the people in this community recognize themselves in it.

The foundation is there, it’s working, and I’m about to start using it properly. The newsletter you’re reading right now is the first output of that system running as designed.

I’ll keep reporting back on what works and what doesn’t. That’s the deal.

With love from Berlin & Amsterdam
Daniele and Pranav

#78: Launching WhatsApp group (and Why). PMM? See you this week

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:01:12 GMT

➕ The PM role is changing. Most job descriptions haven't caught up yet. [Why the need for a WhatsApp group]

Dear Community,

Something I’m noticing more and more: hiring managers reaching out looking for a PM profile that doesn’t really have a name yet.

Last week a fintech asked me about someone who knows the space deeply and can move at AI speed. A Series A founder is looking for a person that’s 50% PM, 50% SAP/ERP integration lead. And the “Founder Associate” role keeps popping up — which in practice means a PM who can operate across product, marketing, and ops without needing much structure around them.

These aren’t outliers. The market is shifting, and the people hiring know what they need. The candidates don’t always know how to position themselves for it yet.

So what does this new PM actually look like?

Not someone who adds “AI” to their LinkedIn. Someone who uses AI tools daily to move faster — research, synthesis, prototyping, writing specs. Someone who can go from idea to working demo without waiting for a dev sprint. Who understands enough about how LLMs work to know what to build, what to buy, and what to avoid. Who can define what good looks like for an AI feature and actually test it. Who treats automation as a personal productivity layer, not a future roadmap item.

Basically: less process, more output. Less handoff, more ownership.

Most PMs are somewhere in the middle right now — curious, experimenting, but without a clear picture of what the full transition looks like. And there isn’t one obvious place to figure it out, because everyone is figuring it out at the same time.

That’s why we want to build this group. A place to share what’s working, what’s not, what tools are actually useful, what skills are worth investing in. Not a course, not a newsletter. Just practitioners talking to each other so we all catch up faster on a curated WhatsApp group.

With love,
Daniele - Founder of Productlab

Stay on the Loop

🍺 PMM in the Age of Agentic AI: Get Early or Get Left Behind?

Thanks Vladimir Liashenko for the brilliant idea, we are around 15 joiners for this Thursday.

Join US!

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

The biggest problem with AI isn’t that it’s not smart; it’s that it’s unpredictable and has a short memory. To fix this, we need to stop treating AI like a magic chatbot and start giving it some structure.

Giving an AI access to your files is like handing your house keys to a stranger. Aman Khan explains in this guide to OpenClaw how to “sandbox” your agent so it stays secure and how to script a personality that actually helps instead of annoying you. Think of it as setting ground rules for a new intern: define what they can touch and how they should talk to you.
Give Your Projects a “Brain” Stop wasting time re-explaining goals to your AI every Monday. Elezea’s blog introduces the “Project Brain”, a structured folder for context and decisions. By maintaining a central “living memory,” you eliminate context fragmentation. It ensures your AI (and you) can jump back into complex initiatives instantly, making your collaborative workflow predictable, organized, and much more efficient.
AI is moving beyond simple FAQs to handle high-stakes business logic. Intercom’s latest updates to Procedures and Simulations show how companies can now combine natural language with deterministic controls. Teams can draft workflows with AI, extract data from PDFs/images, and use Simulations to stress-test every edge case. It’s a major step toward making autonomous agents reliable and transparent at scale.

💪 Open Roles

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🎶 Song of the Newsletter

From our DJ Marco D’Avila

#77: Call for Speaker reflections & PMM Meetup

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 08:02:33 GMT

🎤 The talks are coming in — and they’re all over the place

Speaker applications are open and we’re already seeing the full spectrum. Proposals on how AI is reshaping the product role, what it means to ship fast in a startup vs. navigate a corporate org, where the PM ends and the engineer begins.

And then there are the others. The copy-paste decks. The talks that feel like they were written for a different conference three years ago. We’re not naming names.

We’re not here to judge. Every community gets this mix, and honestly it tells you something about where the conversation is right now: everyone has something to say about AI and product, but not everyone has earned the story yet.

What we do want to call out: the applications that came with a video. Unscripted, honest, a bit rough around the edges. You told us what you learned, what failed, what you’d do differently. That’s exactly what we built Productlab for.

Applications are open until end of March. We’ve barely scratched the surface and it already feels like something worth showing up for.

Speaker proposal Best Practices

4.85MB ∙ PDF file

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Ticket / Submit Proposal

🍺 PMM in the Age of Agentic AI: Get Early or Get Left Behind?

Thanks Vladimir Liashenko for the brilliant idea, and help us out, a new Produclab Community Builder? 👀

Join US!

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

Agency is the new UI. The winners won't be those who write the best prompts, but those who know how to delegate cognition to the right systems. Buckle up, it’s getting autonomous in here.

We’re moving past “prompting” and entering the era of “agency.” In this episode of HBR IdeaCast, Don Tapscott explains how AI is shifting from a content generator to a proactive force, what he calls Agentic AI. It’s no longer about asking the right questions; it’s about delegating complex decision-making to autonomous agents that act on your behalf. This isn’t sci-fi, it’s the new architecture of the firm.
Designing the UI is now the last step, not the first. Google’s new “Ideate Agent” in Stitch is kicking off the era of Deep Design, where AI agents handle the heavy lifting of competitive research and UX exploration before you even touch Figma. From turning messy user interview transcripts into polished prototypes to analyzing real-time 2026 SaaS trends, this is how product teams are moving from “How might we?” to tangible assets in minutes. Read the full article on Department Of Product
Agentic AI is easy to demo, but notoriously hard to ship. Product Talk goes behind the scenes with 9 product teams to reveal the “unsexy” side of building autonomous agents, like why structured code often beats trendy AI tools and how to handle agents that refuse to admit they’re lost. If you’re moving beyond simple chatbots and building multi-agent workflows, these hard-earned lessons on evaluation and “domain-driven” agency are essential reading.

💪 Open Roles

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✨ Something we want to support!

From our friend and Community member, Richard Pölderl. We are so excited to see an event with 11 Labs and the potential to get some of their PM here in Berlin to share how they build. 💚

Get Ticket

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

From our DJ Marco D’Avila

#76: Validating Berlin PMM appetite, see you next week at Banxware & Conference Call for Speakers!

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 08:01:54 GMT

This week was intense. Conference launch, call for speakers opening, your questions flooding in. The workshop lineup is live on the site - full conference details rolling out all week.

We rebuilt a lot this year. Branding refresh, WordPress to Framer migration, clearer day structure. The big shift: Experience & Craft are now our north star - not just topics we cover, but what defines how we build ProductLab itself.
What’s different in 2026: workshops for senior PMMs, a leaders track with Ravi Mehta, central Berlin venue, upgraded everything from catering to photo quality to designed conference moments you’ll actually remember. Same bundle prices as last year (conference tickets slightly up - fixed costs hit us too).
Two raffles for 1:1 coaching with Ravi Mehta. Merch included with workshops. And yes, we got GotBag to make us custom bags.

We’re pushing hard to make Berlin a serious tech hub. Join us?

LET’S GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Ticket / Submit Proposal

Coming up Community Events!

🎫 Finding (and Re-finding) Product-Market Fit

With João Colaco de Freitas, 𝘊𝘗𝘖 𝘢𝘵 Banxware

Lighting session for 30 people, to get the most of the Speaker and the Community.

Last 20 Free Tickets

🍺 PMM in the Age of Agentic AI: Get Early or Get Left Behind?

Thanks Vladimir Liashenko for the brilliant idea, and help us out, a new Produclab Community Builder? 👀

Join US!

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

The 2026 Pivot: From Efficiency to Ingenuity

John Cutler breaks down the 10 “Forever Problems” of organizational friction. Discover how AI acts as a “translation layer” for inconsistent workflows. Learn to navigate the “Promise and the Trap” of scaling AI without losing nuance. A masterclass on balancing team autonomy with organizational clarity.
Rani Johnson reveals we’re paying a hidden “AI Tax,” where 40% of
Productivity gains are silently lost to fixing “hollow,” context-free AI work. She argues that the 2026 winner isn’t the fastest team, but the one that swaps raw speed for “Net Value” and judgment-based strategy. To win, stop treating high-paid talent like expensive fact-checkers and start reinvesting efficiency gains back into human ingenuity rather than just more tools.
Is your AI strategy a ‘liability disguised as innovation’? LogRocket breaks down why the “Full Stack PM” is replacing the coordinator, and why your next user might not even be a human.

💪 Open Roles

Brought to you weekly by Alessia Marchi

✨ Something we want to support!

Because what 🥙Abdo (Abdelrahman) Wahba built in Berlin is unique and much of the cool things happened to Productlab is thanks to him!

Get Early Bird

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

From our DJ Marco D’Avila

#75: RSVP for Banxware event + check out fresh job openings

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 08:16:48 GMT

🎫 Finding (and Re-finding) Product-Market Fit

With João Colaco de Freitas (JCF), 𝘊𝘗𝘖 𝘢𝘵 Banxware

Product-market fit isn’t a one-time achievement. It’s a moving target.

You might find the right product for your ICP, only to realize the economics don’t hold. You could build a profitable business in one market but struggle to scale it. The biggest opportunities often emerge in the most unlikely moments.

João is sharing the messy, non-linear reality of building an enduring business—including:

Real challenges navigating PMF shifts
How Banxware evolved through multiple iterations
What it takes to keep finding fit in changing conditions

This is a 𝗱𝗲𝗲𝗽-𝗱𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻, 𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝟯𝟬 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲. No slides, no corporate talk—just honest discussion about what really happens when you’re building something that lasts.

Pre-book your Spot

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

Ditch the “vibe coding” and build real technical intuition with this interactive guide from Lenny’s Newsletter, to AI product sense. By creating your own AI operating system, you’ll master the high-stakes trade-offs of RAG and context engineering that define production-grade apps. Learn to anticipate what’s actually feasible rather than just chasing the latest AI hype cycle. It’s time to see AI like an engineer, without needing to be one.

Silicon Valley Product Group argues that AI is no longer just a productivity boost for product teams; it’s becoming a personal product coach. The essay makes a sharp shift: when real human coaching is unavailable, foundation models can help PMs build product sense, escape “product theater,” and level up faster than traditional 1:1s ever allowed.

Ben McAllister (CPTO of CrossFit) joins the Launchpod Podcast to reveal the secret to community-led growth: Attention. Dive into the “Info-vore” mindset, using diverse insights to build product salience. Learn why PMs must own distribution and how CrossFit turns leaderboard data into a global sport. It’s a masterclass in product-led attention.

💪 Open Roles

Brought to you weekly by Alessia Marchi

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

From our DJ Marco D’Avila

#74: Lightspeed Community event Recap [Bonus Slides]

Daniele Ronca — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 08:00:52 GMT

👩‍🚀 A New Mission for Productlab

Three years ago, Productlab started from a simple observation: Berlin’s product community needed a place to connect. Not networking for the sake of networking, but genuine space to learn from each other and grow together.

Last year, we watched the event landscape transform. Luma made organizing easier. AI made us all crave human connection more than ever. Marketers discovered events as the last frontier for attention. GTM roles exploded. Suddenly, everyone was hosting something.

In the middle of all this noise, we sat down and asked ourselves: What’s our actual purpose?

The answer came clearer than we expected: Sharing Craft.

It’s the thread connecting everything we do—our monthly meetups, the conference, Leaders Studio. It’s about product people helping each other get better at what we do, openly and honestly.

This year, we’re making a shift. You’ll see fewer polished presentations and more real practitioners on stage. Because we’ve realized something: our speakers aren’t professional public speakers, they’re product leaders sharing what they’ve learned. And that’s exactly the point.

Communication—giving and receiving feedback, articulating your thinking, standing up and sharing your craft—these are some of the most critical skills we build as product people. When someone steps on our stage, we want it to be about their growth, not their personal brand. About learning in public, not selling.

We’re building something different here. Not just another event series, but a community that actually makes us better at our jobs.

Thanks for being part of it.

— Daniele

✨First Event of 2026: What the Community Learned About AI & Speed

Maybe it was coming back from vacation. Maybe the fresh energy of a new year. Or maybe Julia and the Lightspeed team just created the perfect space for honest conversations—but last week’s session delivered.

Thanks to Veronika for capturing what mattered:

Speed beats perfection Fırat Gömi built an AI prototype in days that solved real onboarding bottlenecks. The shift: “Should we build this?” now costs more time than just building it and learning.

Tons of curiosity, that we are thinking to have workshops from building to production.

Trust, but verify C. Serkan Baydin reminded us why blind faith in AI outputs leads to hallucinations and production failures. Human-in-the-loop isn’t optional—it’s the difference between shipping fast and shipping broken.

Kudos for you engaging presentation with gamification, which made us implementing new things for next event.

Ai Quality, Trust & Human In The Loop 2

2.84MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Culture crushes code Guannan Li’s insight cut through the hype: AI integration is 20% tech, 80% people. The hardest part isn’t the tools—it’s driving adoption across your entire organization.

Really engaging presentation and real case scenario, Participant

Pdf Ai Hype To Product Impact A Transformation Case Study

3.48MB ∙ PDF file

Download

The pattern: All three speakers confirmed the same uncomfortable truth. AI didn’t just speed up development—it fundamentally changed what product people need to be good at. Vision, structure, and judgment matter more than ever. Coordination and documentation matter less.

Check all the Moments

✨ Masterminds for Leaders

This is a peer sounding-board session for a group of 6-8 product leaders, partnering with an executive coach, to explore a key challenge currently facing product leaders.

FIRST MASTERMIND TOPIC: The Psychology of “No”

What is the most expensive or high-profile product or feature you’ve ever killed or said no to, and how did you manage the political fallout?

📅 19.02.26
⌚ 6.30-10 PM
📍 Plenzi

Join other leaders

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri

AI isn’t SaaS; it’s a brutal economic game. In this deep dive, OpenAI’s Miqdad Jaffer explains why “AI wrappers” die and how token costs can crush your margins as you scale. Learn the 4D Framework to move beyond flashy demos and build a defensible, decade-defining product. If you don’t design your unit economics from day one, your growth might actually be your downfall.
Master the AI survival map: Building AI as a System
Stop hiding behind RICE scores. Mike Goitein’s latest piece exposes why prioritization frameworks are often just “Band-Aids” for a lack of real strategy. If you’re tired of shipping high-scoring features that move zero metrics, it’s time to stop playing the feature-bloat game. Check out how to bridge the strategy gap and start making choices that actually matter.
From Product Strategy Decoded
In this 2026 update, Product School’s CEO explains why rigid roadmaps are dead and “Outcome-Based” principles are the new standard. Learn how top teams are using AI to prototype in days, not months, to turn learning speed into their biggest competitive advantage. If you’re still shipping outputs instead of outcomes, you’re already behind.

💪 Open Roles

Brought to you weekly by Alessia Marchi

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

From our DJ Marco D’Avila

Productlab Newsletter

#88: The Future of PMM; AI Discovery, Outcome-Based Pricing, and the New GTM Playbook

Navigating GTM Ownership and AI-Driven Discovery

🛠️ Let’s Build Together: ProductLab Hackathon

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

💪 Open Roles

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

The Product Builder Is Showing Up in Berlin. Here's What We Know — and What We Don't.

What we already know

What this means if you’re hiring

What six months of preparation actually looks like

What this means if you’re looking for a job

Speed was never the problem

What I do not know yet

Sources

#87: PM in 2026; More Pressure, More Opportunity

Product Builder: The New Market Reality in the Age of AI

🎫 Join our PMM Pub Special Edition on May 7th

🗓️ 7th of May📍 Berlin

💎 Unlock Your Team’s Power: How to Audit Your Invisible Culture Signals

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

💪 Open Roles

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

Why your leadership career success might be an advertising problem [+.md file to start now]

1. Defining the ‘audience’

2. Mapping the ‘media placements’

3. Defining the problem to solve

4. Auditing your current exposure frequency

👀 Interactions 1 to 3: First impressions 👀

👀 Interactions 3 to 6 : Building familiarity 👀

👀 Interactions 7+ : Top-of-mind awareness 👀

5. Iterating your campaign impact

Consistency is key

Bonus .md Claude file to start Now!

#86: Building in the Age of AI Agents: Insights from Techspace Berlin

Berlin, Spring Days, and the Truth About AI Agents

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

💪 Open Roles

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

#85: Last 10 Tickets for UserTesting event on how to validate fast and Parloa's secret sauce on building scalable agents + Milan event [with slides]

🎫 See you this week!

🇮🇹 Milan event was a blast, here is why

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

💪 Open Roles

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

#84: Next Stop; AI-Driven Insights & Scalable Agents in Berlin

🎫 Join us on April 22nd, UserTesting: From Fast Validation to Autopilots

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

💪 Open Roles

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

#83: Easter eggs from Productlab

📍 🎫 Milan. First time. Sold out. But…

🎫 UserTesting: From Fast Validation to Autopilots

👀 The PM role isn’t dying. It’s splitting.

And speaking of the PM role changing...

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

💪 Open Roles

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

The product manager role isn't dying. It's splitting into three.

How we got here

The three product managers

How skills are actually changing

Why we designed three days

#82: Wrap-up: Logistics Innovation Night at Beam Berlin

✨ Logistics Innovation Night: From Rapid AI Workflows to Research-Driven Sustainability

💡🎫 Product Lab Online; Build & Ship with Lovable: Advanced Techniques.

📍 🎫 We’re heading to Milan!

📍 🎫 Next up: Berlin!

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

💪 Open Roles

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

#81: Productlab on Tour: Berlin, Barcelona, Milan! We are coming!

📍 Berlin, 🎫 We are coming back to Beam!

📍 BCN, Lenny Meetup

📍 🎫 Built in Milan

📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom

💪 Open Roles

🎶 Song of the Newsletter

#80: March event at Beam. See you there!

🎫 We are coming back to Beam!

🗓️ 7th of May
📍 Berlin