#73: Sold out Jan event, but...
PM news, expert insights, Community and Conference updates, open roles, and events to help you grow your career and network.
🎫 See you this week: From Prototyping to Reality
Sold Out! Last 10 Tickets for Community Supporters
We’re starting 2026 with the conversation every product person needs: how AI is actually changing how we build products.
What You’ll Learn:
Validate with AI Prototypes – Firat Gömi (sPM @ Lightspeed Commerce)
Test assumptions before committing engineering resources.
AI Quality & Trust – C. Serkan Baydin (AI Product Leader @ Statista)
Build user trust when AI does the heavy lifting.
From Hype to Impact – Guannan Li (Director of Product Growth (AI) @ Ablefy)
Real lessons from a 6-month AI transformation: what worked, what flopped, what drove business impact.
📍 F.hain Berlin
📅 29.01.2026
✨ 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.
The session will bring together a curated group of leaders for an evening, which will:
Enable a deep exploration and discussion of key challenges facing product leaders today in a focused 90-minute session.
Offer participants the opportunity to reflect on their learnings and takeaways, and set goals to put them into action.
Create time and space for personal connection and relaxation by sharing a meal together after the session.
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?
💜 Community we love here in Berlin
If you are considering starting the year with new insights, here are some interesting communities we follow:
Turkish Product People in Berlin – If you’re Turkish-born, or you just moved here looking for your people, this is your community. Warm, real, yours. (Monthly meetup)
Ampli Berlin – Weekly AI recap + open roles. We’re testing it out together—let’s see if we swipe right on this one. 😉 (Weekly newsletter)
Berlin Product Designers – Hardcore quality. Always sold out. These folks inspired us to build Productlab. Enough said. (Monthly meetup)
Talent Crunch Berlin (sorry Andreea, silver medal 🥈) – The energy of the founder radiates through every edition. (Monthly meetup)
Handpicked Berlin by Igor Ranc – The best one. Thoughtful, curated overview of Berlin & German tech scene: salary reports, economic trends, best culinary spots, you name it. Igor just gets it. (Every Monday at 8AM Newsletter)
Extra
Data Berlin, if you are into Data Products, with the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious energy of Francesco Mucio!
📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom
Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri
Product teams often lose budget discussions not because their work lacks value, but because they don’t speak the language of money. This piece shows how to translate product metrics into CFO-grade impact using simple ratios, linking changes in activation, retention, or conversion directly to revenue. A sharp, practical take on treating Product as a revenue function and turning roadmaps into real capital allocation conversations.
Most product teams aren’t “early” or “mature”, they’re stuck in the uncomfortable middle. OKRs exist, delivery still dominates, and value models are discussed but not yet trusted. In this essay, John Cutler puts words to that exact phase many teams are living through but rarely see described clearly. Not a maturity model, but a narrative that helps you recognize where you are, and why the tension you feel is real.
As AI agents start shopping on our behalf, the real question isn’t who recommends the product, it’s who controls the transaction. In this piece, Linas Beliūnas shows how Mastercard is positioning itself to become the toll road of AI-driven commerce, quietly embedding into Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI’s checkout layers. It’s a sharp look at how value shifts when machines, not humans, become the buyer, and why payments infrastructure may matter more than AI itself.
💪 Open Roles
Brought to you weekly by Alessia Marchi
From our community member Salvador Restelli. Check LINK
🎶 Song of the Newsletter
From our DJ Marco D’Avila