#65: A year later, Nov Event & "Son of Anton" Agent
PM news, expert insights, Community and Conference updates, open roles, and events to help you grow your career and network.
🚀 A Year of Growth: Reflecting on Our Journey
This November marks a special milestone for us. Exactly one year ago, we hosted Marty Cagan at Google’s office in partnership with Delivery Hero—a moment that proved something we’d long suspected: Berlin’s tech community was hungry for world-class speakers and properly organized events.
The year has flown by faster than we ever imagined. What started as validation has evolved into valuable lessons about building a sustainable community. We’ve become more conscious about our approach to paid events, learned the intricacies of distribution channels, explored new collaborations, while sharpening our positioning.
One insight from Cagan has stayed with me throughout this journey: “Become more business oriented.” A year of entrepreneurship has reinforced this lesson more than ever, teaching me to constantly evaluate ROI and make strategic bets about where to focus our energy.
The landscape has shifted dramatically—AI has become far more dominant, we’ve expanded into many more topics—but the community remains as vibrant as ever. In this issue, we’ll dive deeper into the learnings from that pivotal event and share where we’re headed next.
🎫 HeyJobs event on the 25th
Becoming an AI-Native PM: How to Build, Lead, and Stand Out
Hosted by Elena, this session is for PMs who want to lead in the AI era.
Daniel Zherenkov & Fulvio Minichini will cover the essentials: How do you build AI products that actually work? What makes an AI-native PM different? And how do you stand out when everyone’s adding AI to their roadmap?
Limited to 50 people for real conversations and connections. Grab your ticket now, or wait for free tickets 10 days before (if available).
🎤 Conference Recap & More to come!
How to build un-AI-able skills (and why "I don't know" is your superpower)
Six months of research. 100+ slides. Dozens of books, podcasts, and expert conversations. And Francesca Cortesi stood on stage at ProductLab Conference 2025 and said the three words no keynote speaker is supposed to say:
How SumUp saved 1,700 engineering hours by promoting a customer support agent
TL;DR: Liza Mello, Product Lead at SumUp, faced a common problem: her engineering team was drowning in bug reports (many of which weren’t actually bugs). Instead of hiring another PM or engineer, she promoted a senior customer support agent to a new role—part-time. The result? 1,700 engineering hours saved over three years, fewer bugs, and a scalable sy…
When 90% of AI Agents Fail: What Zendesk’s Team Learned Building the Real Thing
At ProductLab Conference 2025, Mirza Beširović, AI Product Leader at Zendesk, shared what their team has learned building and scaling AI agents in real production environments — where systems need to withstand high interaction volumes, unpredictable customer behavior, and real business stakes.
📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom
Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri
Pipedrive does (reportedly) $200M ARR competing against Salesforce and HubSpot. A key growth driver has always been Search. Jessica and I spent 10h+ analyzing their SEO & AI Search strategy, so you don’t have to… Niklas Buschner
Lenny recaps on Melanie Perkins (CEO of Canva). Here is my favorite:
Most people plan by looking at what they have now and asking what they can build with it. Melanie calls this “column A” thinking. Instead, start with “column B”: imagine the perfect future you want to create, then work backward to find the steps that get you there. When she started Canva as a university student with no experience, column A thinking would have led nowhere. Column B thinking—envisioning what design tools should look like in the future—created a $42B company. Full post.When your agents go wild: “Son of Anton” was built to manage tasks — instead, it wiped the entire codebase. Funny in hindsight — especially since Silicon Valley’s finale wrapped up in 2019, long before AI agents were even on the radar.
But here we are: I asked ChatGPT to help me calculate drinks for an event… and somehow ended up ordering drinks for 750 people instead of 250.
It’s hilarious now — but back then? Let’s just say there were a lot of moving parts… and even more bad moods. 😅 Daniele Ronca
💪 Open Roles
Brought to you weekly by Alessia Marchi
🎶 Song of the Newsletter
From our DJ Marco D’Avila