What the event was

Eight speakers across one day. Eric Ries (Lean Startup, Incorruptible) opened. Then Jefferson Rabb (CPO, Business Insider), Carlos Gonzalez (founder, Product School), Penny Szeto (Head of GenAI, Amazon Games), Vinod Suresh (VP Product, GoDaddy), Mathias Davidsen (VP Prototyping, Miro), Meaghan Choi (Head of Design, Anthropic), and Fonda Jam (PM, Intuit).

The stated theme was AI in product. The actual theme, once you stepped back from individual talks, was more uncomfortable: what breaks in a product org when AI works.

Not if it works. When.

Where the market actually is

Vinod Suresh from GoDaddy said it plainly at the start of his talk:

“AI has definitely taken away a product manager’s favorite excuse: limited engineering bandwidth.”

He framed the structural shift this way: the whole product development lifecycle was built on one assumption, that engineering bandwidth is the most expensive and most limited resource in any company. Supply and demand governed the roadmap. That assumption is no longer true.

The data backs this up, but with an important asterisk. CircleCI’s 2026 State of Software Delivery tracked 28 million CI workflows. Overall activity is up 59% year-over-year. The top 5% of teams nearly doubled their throughput. But the median team improved by only 4%. And on the main branch, the code that actually reaches production, throughput fell by 7%. Main branch success rates are at 70.8%, the lowest in five years.

Fewer than 1 in 20 teams have figured out how to ship at AI speed.

The same gap shows up organizationally. An NBER study of 6,000 executives across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia found that 80% of firms report zero measurable productivity gains from AI. Goldman Sachs puts median productivity improvement in software development at 30%. The gap is not between AI and no-AI. It is between the 5% who restructured for it and the 95% who added tools to an org built for a different era.

Carlos Gonzalez from Product School named this the false summit. Individual productivity rises fast. Team and business outcomes stay flat. Most product orgs are stuck there right now.

Three things that stuck

1. AI is making individuals more confident and organizations less coherent at the same time.

Mathias Davidsen from Miro gave the sharpest diagnosis of the day:

“AI has massively raised the floor. One person and their agents has become the most powerful creative unit that has ever existed. But when we zoom out from the individual to the wide organization, we don’t really see the results follow. Company output hasn’t 10xed. Strategic clarity hasn’t 10xed.”

The mechanism: when someone is pointed in a slightly wrong direction, AI amplifies that by moving fast and constantly agreeing. His framing of the result:

“Six people, six AI co-pilots, six confident, polished, and completely divergent strategies.”

“We’re no longer potentially building one wrong thing slowly. We’re potentially building a hundred wrong things very quickly and we’re not even aware of it.”

“The bottleneck moved from ‘can we build it?’ to ‘are we choosing the right thing to build?’ And when you’re planning, your competitor is shipping.”

The old buffer was the planning cycle. The forced alignment moments. Those are gone. What replaces them is not a tool. It is a leadership function.

2. For customer-facing AI, the model is the least important decision you will make.

Penny Szeto from Amazon Games built a generative party game with Snoop Dogg as an AI celebrity judge. Entirely new court cases, live dialogue, new visuals every session in real time. In building it, she ran into something that should make every PM uncomfortable: reducing latency was hurting the experience. Snoop was responding so fast the jokes didn’t have time to land.

She referenced the Eliza Effect, a 1966 MIT chatbot that had no intelligence at all and yet people fell in love with it. Her point: the human instinct to anthropomorphize AI has gotten stronger with more capable models, not weaker. Your customers will form a relationship with your AI whether you design it intentionally or not.

Her framework for what actually determines customer AI experience, none of which is the model: Identity (who is your AI and what character does it have), Context (what does it know, what does it remember), Judgment (your guardrails, your values, your policy), and Interaction (pacing, tone, emotional calibration).

The model is table stakes. The product is everything built around it.

3. Only 16% of the world has actually used generative AI.

Fonda Jam from Intuit said something that cuts through the noise:

“As of late 2025, only about 16% of the world has used generative AI at all. One in six people out of six billion people who are online, fewer than 1.1 billion have tried it. You are at a ProductCon conference watching a recording about Claude Code. You are not behind. You are early.”

She also said the thing that gives the PM role its clearest new shape:

“For the first time in the history of software, the person with the product information can produce working artifacts without waiting on engineering bandwidth. The product manager who can build does not replace their triad. They make their whole triad faster.”

The one job AI will never take

Vinod Suresh from GoDaddy ended his talk with this:

“That is one job that AI can never take away from any of us: aligning finance, sales, marketing, tech, product, and go-to-market. Because those are people. To bring those people together still takes a human.”

Eric Ries opened the day with a connected thought, using the story of Sol Price who founded FedMart in the 1950s with a lawyer’s logic: the customer is the client, I have a fiduciary duty to the client. Price built a company that made shareholders rich for 20 years, then got fired by them. The company went bankrupt within seven years. Sol went upstairs, started Price Club, which eventually merged to become Costco.

Costco is a $400 billion public company that has kept its commitment to customers for 40 years. Ries’s argument: it survives because it has both the ethos and what he calls structural integrity, a governance architecture that resists the pressure to deviate from the mission.

“If you have a mission statement but not a mission, then you are lying to your customers.”

He mentioned he played a role in setting up Anthropic’s governance structure. The connection to every other talk on AI was not coincidental.

My takeaways

The constraint moved. It was engineering bandwidth. It is not anymore.

Ries’s word for what Costco built is worth sitting with. Not a mission statement. A governance fortress: a structure designed to hold its direction even when financial pressure, a bad quarter, or a fast-moving competitor creates urgency to ship the wrong thing faster. For product teams, that is not abstract. It means the decision-making layer is designed to resist drift, not just respond to it.

Davidsen called the planning cycle a buffer. It is gone. What needs to replace it is a clarity infrastructure, a shared source of truth that keeps six people with six AI tools pointed at the same thing. Not another tool. A practice. Explicit, repeated alignment on what is actually being built and why, before the agents run.

The 1 in 20 teams that figured out how to ship at AI speed built both things. The governance layer that holds direction under pressure. The alignment layer that keeps the whole org pointed at the same thing as execution accelerates. A product org that can make good decisions faster, not just execute faster.

What that looks like in practice in scaleups like yours, Zalando or N26, a Series B company, nobody said clearly. Not at ProductCon. Not in the research I read after.

It is the question we structured our own conference around.

Leaders Day on September 15 is curated by Ravi Mehta for Heads of Product and CPOs planning AI strategy and building AI-native teams.

Craft & AI Lab on September 16 is a full day on building AI products, getting faster with AI tools, and the judgment and strategy the tools will not give you.

Conference Day on September 17 runs three layers in parallel: a main stage with opening and closing keynotes reflecting on where we are and how this year is different, deep dives for 30 to 50 people going properly into the hard topics, and roundtables for 12 for the deeper, more personal conversation about your professional journey.

We curated this around the people actually moving in this direction.

Daniele Ronca is the founder of Productlab: Europe’s product leadership platform. Productlab runs the annual flagship conference in Berlin, the Leaders Studio coaching program, and a year-round community of 3,000+ senior product professionals. With love from Berlin.

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

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?

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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!

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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

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…

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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…

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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

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

1. Make sure all the file are really organize by the tasks you want to do, otherwise things go messy. The small the best.

2. Build everything as a skill, so you can recall it

   

3. 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

But now that we’ve turned the calendar, how many of us have applied the same level of intention to our own growth strategies?

If that focus slipped through the cracks (or you’d simply welcome a sharper lens on your goals), these five steps will help you gain clarity on where you want to go this year and how to get there.

These are not quick prompts. They’re ambitious questions designed to surface what truly matters and guide what you should make time for in Q1 to set a strong trajectory for the rest of the year.

1. Block out time to do this work - now

Compound value matters here - the earlier you start, the longer you have to reap the benefits of your early actions and for their impact to multiply.

Realistically, you’re also not going to get any less busy in 2026.

So take 30 minutes this week to work through these questions.

2. Define the career outcome that matters most

Key question to answer: What is the single most important career outcome I want by the end of 2026 and how will I measure it?

To get specific, ask yourself:

• What does success look like by December 2026, independent of title or company? What will I be doing, how will I feel, and what will my days look like?

• Which 1 - 3 long-term career bets am I actively making (e.g., CPO track, founder path, deep specialist)? Does my current role genuinely move me toward them?

• Which of my core values must be present in my work next year and where am I currently misaligned?

These questions help you move beyond vague aspirations like “grow in leadership” to something measurable, values-aligned, and motivating.

3. Map the leverage moves for Q1

Key question to answer: Which three moves in Q1 (conversations, initiatives, skills, or visibility plays) will most increase the odds of that outcome?

To refine these moves, explore:

• Which capabilities have become table stakes for senior product leaders in 2026 (AI literacy, portfolio thinking, storytelling, etc.)? Where is my biggest development gap?

• If someone took over my current role tomorrow, what would they improve within three months? What does that reveal about my development areas?

• How do you want my team to grow in 2026, and which shifts in my leadership behavior will enable that?

• What three words do I want other senior leaders to associate with me and what three would they actually use today?

• Where might I currently be “out of sight, out of mind” with people who can influence your success? How can I change that?

Prioritize actions which compound - ie those that increase your visibility, stretch your skills, and strengthen your professional narrative.

4. Build your personal board of directors

Key question to answer: Who do I need in my “personal board of directors” this year to strengthen your impact and what specific asks will I bring to them?

No ambitious product leader succeeds in isolation. Consider:

• Where could fresh influence, challenge, or inspiration make the biggest difference?

• Who offered the most constructive feedback last year and how will I re-engage them this year?

• Where am I missing people to provide the input I need and how could I find them?

• How will I ensure I actually act on the feedback I receive?

• Where can I support the growth of others by joining their “boards”?

Intention is what transforms your network into a source of real acceleration but it takes consistency and openness to challenge.

5. Turn reflection into action

Insight only creates impact if you turn it into deliberate next steps.

Here’s how to make your reflection tangible:

1. Document your key 2026 outcome, priority Q1 moves and next steps to strengthen your personal board.

2. Define leading actions. For each goal, list 1 or 2 weekly actions or habits that move you steadily toward it and get them into your calendar or task list.

3. Create your feedback loop. Share your goals with a mentor or peer. Ask them to hold you accountable for visible progress by March.

4. Review monthly. End each month by checking in: What did I move forward? What needs to shift next? Where am I finding this hard?

Treat this as a working document, not a one-time exercise to keep momentum.

We’d love to hear what you’re committing to in 2026 - what’s key for you in Q1?

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ProductLab’s community events are a great way to get inspired by the leadership of others, listen to compelling storytellers, and build your trusted network.

In 2026, ProductLab is launching the Leaders Studio, to support product leaders to define the future of product leadership in Europe and unlock personal growth through authentic connection, strategic focus and transformational impact.

Our flagship peer circles bring together curated groups of product leaders to define, explore, and achieve their career goals - supported by experienced executive coaches.

To register your interested in circles (the first one starts late January, with just one spot still available), submit your details below.

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Making time to regularly reflect on and update the foundations of your strategy is crucial to ensure you’re always making decisions with the best and latest information - and not just once a year.

But how do you actually carve out regular time to do this when your diary is packed and your attention span is fried?

BJ Fogg, author of Tiny Habits, identifies three steps to creating a habit:

Motivation - a clear understanding of why you want to build this habit
Ability - the habit needs to feel small, easy and compatible with our current routines
Prompt - a clear timely cue that tells you ‘do it now’

Based on this, I’m sharing a suggested recipe for developing and sustaining a strategic reflection habit to help you keep your strategy fresh and you armed with the latest insights for influencing your team, stakeholders and executives.

Like any recipe, there might also be ingredients that you might want to add more of less of to suit your palate and appetite for spice!

1. Schedule regular strategy time

Aim for just 25 minutes (the perfect ‘tiny’ slot) once or twice a week when your energy is high and you can block out distractions.

Put it in your diary as a regular block and call it something like ‘Important strategy session - do not move’ to show both you and others that this isn’t a slot to be messed with.

2. Set up your strategic radar and in-tray

In the course of your day, you likely come across information about product performance, user behaviour trends, competitor launches, and company strategy changes, which are all crucial to your product’s strategy.

When your strategy radar picks up something which could be useful, immediately put it in a single place - a document, notes tool, spreadsheet, task list or email folder - to make it easy to find a process when you have time.

3. Find a framework to organize your strategic insights

You may have a preferred strategic framework but if you don’t, a classic that I love is a SWOT analysis. Its four quadrants enable a holistic overview of the internal and external forces impacting your product:

Strengths - internal factors which give an organization or product/team an advantage (such as unique tech capabilities, people, skills, IP, brand reputation)

Weaknesses - internal factors which place the organization or product/team at a disadvantage (such as limited resources, lagging technology, declining user satisfaction)

Opportunities - external factors which could be catalysts for growth (such as emerging markets, favorable regulations, new technology trends)

Threats - external factors that could cause problems or decline (such as increased competition, economic downturn or changing customer preferences)

Image by Wepik on Freepik

By clearly separating internal capabilities from external conditions, you can make informed decisions about where to invest.

For example, you can see how to use a strength to capitalise on an opportunity, or how to mitigate a threat by addressing an internal weakness.

4. Actively use the framework

Create a document/slide/spreadsheet with your preferred strategy framework and map what’s powering your existing strategy.

Aim to have 3 to 5 topics in each section and rank them in priority order (with the top being the most impactful and likely).

Link to the sources for each statement to help you track where they came from.

Once you have a completed template, reflect on the following questions:

Insight freshness and completeness

• What new information have I learned since I created the strategy which I should add?

• Where might I have blind spots and should schedule some proactive research?

• Who could I talk to to get fresh perspectives and insights?

Insight significance

• Should the priorities in each section change?

• Is anything now more or less important?

• Should anything be completely removed now?

Insight impact

• What have I learned from doing this?

• How might this impact my current strategy?

• How might this impact current and future priorities?

• Is there anyone else who would benefit from knowing about this?

5. Power your strategic narrative with your learnings

Through this exercise, you’re building up a coherent, research-based narrative to underpin your strategy and prioritisation.

So think about where you can make use of it to give your decisions and direction more credibility .

Places to use it might include:

• Updates to the annual strategy

• Monthly and quarterly business reviews

• Onboarding new team members and stakeholders

• All team sessions

• 1:1s with team members

• Check ins with executives and skip leads

You might also decide to make the review and updating of the SWOT a team activity to regularly freshen up the shared understanding of your team’s why.

6. Identify and address the friction points

If you’re struggling to keep the habit, explore what’s getting in the way and how you could remove those blockers.

If you really struggle to focus, try setting a Pomodoro timer and aim to not check your emails, messages TikTok until the timed session is finished.

If you struggle with getting started then write down one goal to achieve in the session, Make it time-based (I will spend 25 minutes researching x), task-based (I will go through everything in my insights in-tray), or deliverable-based (I’ll use GenAI tool to create a list of online competitive insight sources).

Just like your strategy itself, building a habit around continuous strategic reflection can help you strengthen clarity and focus.

And by approaching your habit building with curiosity, compassion and a willingness to experiment, you’ll build sustainable habits that will have a lasting impact on your impact as a strategic leader.

More about us

ProductLab’s community events are a great way to get inspired by the leadership and learnings of others, listen to compelling storytellers, and build your trusted network.

In 2026, ProductLab will launch Leaders Studio, bringing together product leaders from corporates and scale-ups (in separate groups) to define, explore, and achieve their career goals with the guidance, challenge, and support of a trusted peer network.

LEARN MORE ABOUT LEADERS STUDIO

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”

Authenticity is an important facet of executive presence and it really makes a difference.

Authentic leaders boost team performance, creativity, and trust. (Duarte et al, 2021). It’s also good for the wellbeing of leaders themselves (Weiss et al, 2018). Living and working in a way that feels true to what you value and who you are builds confidence, self esteem and reduces stress.

You know where they stand with authentic leaders - they’re consistent and considered and they tackle the hard stuff in intentional ways.

But authentic leadership isn’t about just saying what you think, whenever you want.

‘Bringing your whole self to work’ without considering the impact of your words and actions can have negative repercussions - both for you and those around you.

Leading authentically requires doing it with purpose as well as on purpose.

Authentic leadership comes down to 7 behaviors.

Active listening - authentic leaders show genuine interest in others’ perspectives to make sure their responses are informed and respectful.

Reflection questions:

• How often do I actively listen?

• What gets in the way of me actively listening - for example sending messages during meetings?

• How often do I start thinking about my answers before others have finished speaking?

• How well do I pick up on non-verbal cues to ‘hear’ what’s not being said?
  

Thoughtful storytelling - authentic leaders strategically share relevant experiences that foster connection without oversharing.

Reflection questions:

• How well do I balance vulnerability and professionalism in what I share?

• What stories and information do I share with others and what connections do they foster?

• Who around me uses storytelling powerfully and what can I learn from them?
  

Cultural sensitivity - authentic leaders seek to understand cultural diversity and observe non-verbal cues to foster psychological safety across cultural lines.

Reflection questions:

• What cultural sensitivities do I need to consider in environments I’m in?

• Where does my culture influence how I think, behave and communicate?

• What knowledge would help me be more effective as a culturally sensitive leader?
  

Empathy - authentic leaders tailor their delivery to consider others’ emotions and viewpoints while staying true to their message.

Reflection questions:

• How well do I acknowledge the feelings, needs and perspectives of others?

• Are there situations which would benefit from me demonstrating more empathy?

• How am I creating a culture which values empathy - to each other and to users of our products?

Owning their mistakes - authentic leaders admit errors transparently but also communicate lessons learned and corrective actions to maintain credibility.

Reflection questions:

• Who has made me feel safe and appreciated when I’ve made a mistake? What did they do?

• What’s something I’ve changed based on my learnings from something I got wrong?

• What does my ability to learn from mistakes say about me?

Maintaining consistent values - authentic leaders know and keep their core values clear and visible to others.

Reflection questions:

• What are my core values and how do they show up?

• How do I know when I’m not acting/communicating in accordance with my values? What happens? How does it make me feel?

• How could I better live my values in and outside work?

Aligning actions and words: authentic leaders follow through on commitments to build integrity.

Reflection questions:

• How well do I follow through on my commitments?

• What steps do I take to make sure I deliver?

• How often do I overpromise? How do I manage these situations?

Yes these are a lot of questions so focus first on the areas which resonate the most.

Authentic leaders know they don’t get it right all of the time and they’re okay with that.

One more way to make time and space to develop your authentic leadership is through intentional personal development time with others.

This can include working with a mentor, a coach (one to one or as part of a group), or spending reflection time with trusted peers.

More about us

ProductLab’s community events are a great way to get inspired by the leadership of others, listen to compelling storytellers, and build your trusted network.

In 2026, ProductLabs will launch Leadership Circles, bringing together product leaders from corporates and scaleups (in separate groups) to define, explore, and achieve their career goals with the guidance, challenge, and support of a trusted peer network.

𝘍𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘑𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 Zalando & Miro 💛

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Your Coach

Lucie McLean is a product and people leader with 29 years of experience in the media and technology worlds, including 19 years of experience creating digital products for global brands and leading diverse, high-performing teams. She’s also a conference speaker, mentor, executive coach, podcast guest, and webinar host.

The session was electric. Marty didn’t pull punches. He came to tackle “the hard stuff”. The painful truths that separate companies that consistently innovate from those that merely ship features.

A year later, after spending many hours talking to product builders and leaders across companies, I keep coming back to Marty’s insights. And in the age of AI revolution, they’re more relevant than ever.

What you’ll take away:

• Why Europe’s addiction to process is becoming a competitive liability (especially now)

• The three dimensions of the Product Operating Model and what’s missing in most companies

• The hard truth about product management competencies in Europe

• What I’m seeing change and what’s stubbornly staying the same

Let’s dig in!

The Setup: What Marty Covered

Marty centered his talk on the Product Operating Model — a shift from shipping features to achieving outcomes. It breaks down into three core dimensions:

1. How do you decide which problems to work on?

2. How do you solve those problems?

3. How do you build, test, and deploy solutions?

Marty also spent significant time on the critical competencies of product managers and product leaders

Before diving into the challenges, Marty gave some love to Berlin:

But then he pivoted to the hard truths. And that’s where things got interesting.

1. Europe’s Addiction to Process

Marty called it out directly: Europe has a real addiction to process. And while he noted it’s “a global thing,” it’s especially prevalent in Germany.

The danger is that companies use the process “as a substitute for thinking.” This manifests as:

• Prioritizing predictability over outcomes and innovation

• Slowing down speed and agility to deliver value to customers

What I’ve observed over the last year:

Process continues to dominate how many companies work in Germany, with predictability and tight control treated as virtues. Many companies claim they’ve “transformed” because they:

• Introduced some sort of Agile framework and have Project Managers labeled as Product Managers

• Call their detailed work-tracking sheets “OKRs”

• Name their teams after the Spotify model or a similar naming convention

But the core behavior remains top-down, output-driven processes:

• Big-bang planning cycles with a function or executive in charge of strategy, deciding what needs to be built

• Feature teams are asked to provide delivery plans with time estimates for prescribed solutions

Here’s the kicker: These are the same companies now trying to “sprinkle AI” on top of this culture and expecting massive efficiency gains and disruption.

If it was critical before for companies to understand the principles of the product model, with the rise of AI, the importance just grew exponentially.

The AI revolution should be a wake-up call. It’s an opportunity for European companies to use this moment as a change agent—to think deeply about what needs to fundamentally shift in how they work.

Europe has the talent and is well-positioned to do something extraordinary. It’s up to leaders and communities like ours to do our part to drive that change.

2. Deciding Which Problems to Work On: Product Vision and Strategy

Marty emphasized that deciding what to work on is both the hardest and most impactful dimension of the Product Operating Model.

The role of Product Leaders is critical here. They need to step up and:

1. Tackle real Product Vision and Product strategy

2. Take responsibility for coaching and developing their people

What I’ve observed over the last year:

In this area, I’m cautiously optimistic. I’ve seen strong positive signals over the past year.

Whether it’s:

• The downsizing of big product companies

• The rise of smaller AI startups

• Increased capital availability

• More experienced leaders moving to Europe from strong tech hubs in the US

There’s momentum. I’m seeing more experienced product leaders taking on leadership roles and pushing their organizations to get serious about Product Strategy and Product Vision.

3. How You Solve Problems: Discovery

Marty was crystal clear about the problem with most companies:

“In most companies, the stakeholders drive a roadmap, which is a prioritized list of projects and features. The thing about those projects and features is most of the time—like 90-plus percent of the time—they are solutions, potential solutions. The product team is not there to solve the problem; they are there to implement that solution.”

What I’ve observed over the last year:

Many companies have resisted product discovery because exploring options is perceived as:

• Too expensive

• Too slow

• Unnecessary (because “someone already knows the solution”)

But AI is changing that perception in interesting ways, as many people outside tech see how easy it is now to build working prototypes.

Yes, there’s a risk that people now think building is easy and skip discovery altogether. But used properly, AI can help product teams bring optionality back into the conversation and demonstrate the power of discovery. Teams can now:

• Build prototypes faster than ever

• Iterate in real-time at lightning speed and minimal cost

• Show (not tell) stakeholders the value of exploring alternatives before committing to a single path

• This lowers both the perceived and real cost of discovery and makes it easier to advocate for the right way of working.

The key is using AI as a tool for learning and validation, not just faster execution of untested ideas.

4. How You Build

Marty didn’t mince words:

“We should have passed this one by now, except that the process people took over and some companies are still working with monthly or even quarterly releases. Teams should release at least every 2 weeks. The goal should be continuous deployment”

What I’ve observed over the last year:

Companies are quite advanced now and releasing continuously or every 1-2 weeks. It seems like SAFe lost its traction; it’s hard to hear about it anymore.

Companies are becoming more efficient at delivering features. After years of operating with the feature and delivery model, they’ve gotten good at execution. But the real challenge lies in deciding which problems to work on and conducting proper product discovery.

This is the fundamental issue—because a highly efficient feature factory, no matter how well-oiled, is not what the product operating model is about.

5. Product Managers and Product Leaders

What Marty Said

On Product Managers:

“On a feature team, a Product Manager is definitely not responsible for value and viability. The job is to gather the requirements, usually from the stakeholders, get them to the designer, get them to the engineers at sprint planning, make sure the thing gets built, tested, and deployed. That’s called project management”

“In an empowered product team the Product Manager is a shaper, is a maker”

On Product Leaders:

“Product leaders need to step up if they want to move to the product model. Part of stepping up is tackling real Product vision and Product strategy. Another part is taking real responsibility for coaching and developing their people.”

What I’ve observed over the last year:

On Product Managers:

The “delivery and feature team” model is still pervasive in Germany. Many “Product Managers” act as facilitators focused on requirement gathering and sprint coordination, and are not responsible for value and viability.

Most of the product managers are aware of this situation and are working hard on upskilling themselves to become true product managers. They are trying to do what’s within their power to change how their companies work. There’s a lot of appetite and willingness to improve, but we still have a way to go.

On Product Leaders:

As previously mentioned, this is an area where things seem to be showing good early signs, with strong product leaders entering the market in Germany and Europe (and other strong product managers growing into the role).

However, there are still many companies with Product Leaders who have never done true Product Management and are simply not capable of coaching their people effectively and driving the change their companies need (e.g., Product Strategy, Product vision, etc.)

Your Turn: What Are You Seeing?

I’d love to hear from you:

• What challenges are you seeing in your organization? Is it process addiction? Lack of discovery? Competency gaps?

• What positive changes are you noticing? Are you seeing product leaders step up? Teams embracing discovery? New ways of working?

• How is AI changing the equation for you? Is it making things better or worse?

Drop a comment below or connect with me on LinkedIn. Let’s learn from each other!

On a personal note, I want to thank for introducing me to Daniele and for helping to plan this event across ProductLab, DeliveryHero, and Google. Wafaey is a true example of a great Product Leader and someone who gives so much to the product community.

One of the key levers that enables strong companies to do this is strategic context—the understanding that product teams need to make good decisions. It encompasses the company’s mission, scorecard and objectives, product vision, principles, and strategy.

Reference: Marty Cagan, “Coaching: Strategic Context”

Providing this context and evangelizing it have always been core responsibilities for product leaders. With the rise of AI, this responsibility is evolving.

Product teams are increasingly turning to AI tools for research, problem framing, ideation, solution design, and prioritization. The challenge is no longer just ensuring that team members have context—it’s also ensuring that the AI systems influencing their decisions do too.

This is why strategic context is more important than ever. When done right, AI can be transformative in helping companies develop better products. Done wrong, it creates real risks—pushing teams in multiple directions at once and creating speed without coherence.

This article explores both sides:

• The risks of Lack of Context²—how misalignment compounds when teams and AI operate without solid strategic context

• The opportunity to use AI as a Context Copilot—a force multiplier for alignment, autonomy, and clarity across your organization

The Challenge: What Lack of Context² Looks Like

Imagine a company with a dozen product teams. These teams lack a strong grasp of strategic context—and now each is using AI tools as sparring partners throughout the product development process.

Over time, teams increasingly rely on the answers these tools provide. They’re available 24/7, quick, and articulate. Getting insights from AI feels easier than digging into company documents or engaging in strategic discussions—especially if product leaders haven’t made that context easily accessible.

What might have once been a small knowledge gap—something a team could close with research or an internal chat—now grows into a larger problem. Teams move fast, trust the AI’s convincing answers, and start prototyping and shipping at lightning speed. They feel productive, using cutting-edge tools and generating more output than ever.

But without context, speed becomes drift

This is Lack of Context² in action: a team without context, guided by an AI without context. Misalignment squared.

The risk multiplies in larger organizations. Imagine 30+ teams, each using AI independently, all moving fast—but in different directions. Each team generates ideas, builds features, and ships at velocity, yet without a shared foundation.

The result?

A fragmented product. A diluted strategy. A collective loss of focus on solving the most meaningful customer problems.

The Opportunity: AI as a Context Copilot

Now flip the scenario.

Imagine an organization where teams deeply understand the mission, vision, strategy, principles, and objectives. They also use AI—but their AI systems are equipped with that same context.

The models are trained on strategy documents, product vision and principles, company OKRs, and the latest business and customer insights. When teams use these systems to explore new ideas, analyze problems, or evaluate trade-offs, the AI reinforces the company’s strategic intent—shedding light on the right direction and guiding teams toward aligned outcomes.

This is the essence of Context Engineering: intentionally designing systems and workflows so both humans and AI operate from the same strategic foundation

Done well, AI becomes a Context Copilot:

• Proposing ideas that align with strategy and are grounded in insight

• Flagging solutions that contradict principles or values

• Helping evaluate ideas through the right business and customer lens

• Stress-testing decisions against objectives

Instead of eroding strategy, AI reinforces it.

For leaders, this creates a scalable extension of their influence—a way to bring strategic context into the everyday work of every team. In this setup, AI drives alignment, safeguards focus, and strengthens the culture of empowered product teams.

The Benefits of Using AI to Amplify Strategic Context

This isn’t just about mitigating risk—it’s about unlocking enormous upside.

Leaders can use AI as an ally to scale context across large or fast-growing organizations, making strategic alignment part of how teams operate every day.

With the right setup, AI can:

• Funnel attention toward what matters most, providing guardrails that keep teams focused on the right problems

• Highlight misalignment by flagging when ideas or actions contradict principles or strategy

• Illuminate better paths by reinforcing product values and strategic goals

• Amplify consistency across teams, ensuring that decisions made in different rooms—or even countries—flow from the same foundation

• Support autonomy by helping teams make sound decisions even when leaders aren’t in the room

AI becomes a multiplier for leadership impact. It allows context to scale beyond conversations or documents, actively shaping the decisions made by every team, every day.

Used well, it ensures that speed translates into progress—not chaos. Used poorly, it creates the very condition we want to avoid: Lack of Context².

Why Product Leaders Must Act Now

The responsibility of providing strategic context has doubled. Leaders now have two audiences for context:

1. The product teams

2. The AI systems influencing their thinking

If either lacks context, decisions drift. If both lack it, they drift faster—and the illusion of progress grows stronger.

With AI, companies can easily fall into a trap: “moving fast” by producing more output than ever while actually losing strategic coherence and focus. The result? A company that’s busy building but not truly progressing.

But when both teams and AI share the same context, human creativity and machine intelligence row in the same direction. The speed and insights of AI combine with human judgment and empathy, unlocking tremendous value

This is the next competitive advantage: companies that learn to use AI as a lever for context will move faster and smarter than those that don’t.

What Leaders Need to Do

It’s time for product leaders to ensure that strategic context is embedded not only in how teams operate but also in how they collaborate with AI.

Think of AI as part of your workforce and take deliberate steps to guide and govern it.

Here’s how to start:

1. Assess the AI tool ecosystem and define which tools to use and how to use them

2. Train teams to understand how to use AI effectively and safely—create room for experimentation and learning

3. Onboard AI tools with context so they can make relevant, high-quality suggestions

4. Design frameworks to keep context current as strategies and insights evolve

5. Integrate AI tools thoughtfully with existing systems and processes

6. Continuously evaluate how well AI tools reinforce, not distort, the strategic context

The Path Forward

These are exciting times. AI can enable product teams to do things once unimaginable—but only if used thoughtfully.

For product leaders, the mission is clear: use AI as a context amplifier, a force multiplier for alignment, and a strategic ally that helps teams build better products, faster, and with greater clarity than ever before.

In future posts, I’ll share practical tactics and frameworks for product leaders who want to apply these ideas inside their own organizations.