#72: Jan 29 Lightspeed AI Event, Parloa's 350M Raise & Open Roles
PM news, expert insights, Community and Conference updates, open roles, and events to help you grow your career and network.
🎫 Opening 2026: From Prototyping to Reality
We’re kicking off the year with the conversation every product person needs to have: how AI is actually changing the way we build products.
What You’ll Learn:
Validate the needs with AI Prototypes – Firat Gömi (sPM @ Lightspeed Commerce)
Use AI prototyping to test assumptions before committing engineering resources.
AI Quality, Trust & Human-in-the-Loop – C. Serkan Baydin (AI Product Leader @ Statista) Maintain quality and build user trust when AI is doing the heavy lifting.
From AI Hype to Impact: Leading a 6-Month AI Transformation – Guannan Li (Director of Product Growth (AI) @ Ablefy) Real lessons from leading an AI transformation: what worked, what flopped, and how to drive business impact.
📍 F.hain Berlin
📅 29.01.2026
🚀 Kudos to Parloa PMs 🎉
Huge congratulations to Csaba Tamas, Tural Nabizade, and Filippo Pirri—and to Stefan Ostwald (co-founder and CAIO), who kicked off our conference last year—on Parloa’s massive $350M Series D at a $3B valuation.
It’s been a rollercoaster, but what we admire most is watching them actually ship agentic AI that works in production at Fortune 500 companies. One of Berlin’s most interesting hyper-growth scaleups, proving the tech with less hype, more substance.
We’re putting it on our agenda to learn from them—how they build product, earn enterprise trust, and execute at this scale. Stay Tuned!
📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom
Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri
In Not By The Book, Francesca Cortesi walks through real moments: killing a “priority #1” in five days, proving discovery before buy-in existed, and scaling it without turning it into process theater. No frameworks-first thinking just how discovery earned its place by driving decisions, growth, and alignment all the way to IPO.
In a world full of AI-driven, lookalike products, many teams struggle to truly stand out. This case study looks at Mangomint, a vertical SaaS for salons and spas, and how they reached $25M ARR in a crowded market through deliberate product choices, not hype. No cold calls, no AI in customer support, no traditional customer success team. Instead, Mangomint relies on product-led growth: free trials for every customer, onboarding before payment, and in-product expansion. A clear example of how product craft and growth can work together, even in the age of AI.
By Kyle Poyar on the Growth Unhinged blogLLMs are starting to sit between customers and marketplaces, and that changes the economics fast. In this essay, Dan Hockenmaier breaks down which marketplaces are actually at risk, which ones are surprisingly defensible, and why factors like supply complexity, how “managed” the marketplace is, and usage frequency matter more than hype. A clear framework for product and marketplace leaders thinking about AI, distribution, and long-term defensibility.
💪 Open Roles
Brought to you weekly by Alessia Marchi
🎶 Song of the Newsletter
From our DJ Marco D’Avila