#79: First PMM meetup recap + HPBerlin Salary Trends + Builders WA Group
PM news, expert insights, Community and Conference updates, open roles, and events to help you grow your career and network.
🤑 Help HPB make the 2026 Salary Trends Survey the biggest one yet
Last year Handpicked Berlin 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.
💜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. 👋
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)
Drop into our WhatsApp group — tell us what you're building, what's clicking, and what's driving you mad.
📰 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
Brought to you weekly by Alessia Marchi
🎶 Song of the Newsletter
From our DJ Marco D’Avila