#89: Berlin Is Building More!
PM news, expert insights, Community and Conference updates, open roles, and events to help you grow your career and network.
The week Berlin stopped being “also ran” in AI
I was scrolling LinkedIn on Thursday when I noticed something. Two names kept appearing in my feed, n8n and Parloa. Both Berlin. Both in the same announcement. Both suddenly worth a lot more than they were on Monday.
SAP had just walked off the stage at Sapphire in Orlando and dropped something quietly significant for anyone building products in Germany: strategic investments in both companies, framing them as cornerstones of its vision for the “autonomous company”, a future where AI agents handle entire business processes, not just assist with individual tasks.
n8n… one of those tools you adopt quietly, almost apologetically, “it’s just for internal stuff.” This week, that tool became one of the most valuable AI startups in Germany. SAP’s investment pushed n8n’s valuation to $5.2 billion, more than doubling it in under a year, with 1.7 million monthly active builders and over 1,400 enterprise customers already depending on it. It was never just internal stuff.
Parloa’s story is just as sharp. Their AI agents for customer service across digital channels and call centers will now connect directly to business data and processes in the SAP Service Cloud. Clients include Allianz, Booking.com, and IKEA. Half a billion raised. HQ: a 20-minute walk from Alexanderplatz.
Here’s the thing that stayed with me. SAP serves 99 of the world’s 100 biggest companies. That’s the distribution network two Berlin product teams just plugged into overnight. Not by relocating to San Francisco. Not by pivoting to whatever was trending. By building things people actually use, and staying put.
The “autonomous company” is now the product brief landing on enterprise roadmaps across Germany. The wave is here. The question is whether you’re positioned to help your company navigate it, or to build the next thing that rides it.
The best news? The people building those tools are your neighbours!
🎫 Join us in Milan on June 4th
Scaling Fintech: Product stories from Sibill and Qonto
Two fintech PMs who have been in the trenches, Sebastiano Pighi scaling a treasury product at Sibill, Alessandro Dadone managing onboarding across eight European markets at Qonto, walk you through what product work really looks like when money is on the line. Expect honest stories, sharp Q&A, and proper aperitivo networking afterwards.
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Worth Reading This Week:
The Product Context You Already Built Isn’t Driving Growth? Amy Mitchell on Product Management IRL argues that the bottleneck to growth often isn't missing features, it's that your context can't travel without you attached to it. Every answer gets rebuilt from scratch. You become the dependency.
SaaS Mag points out that the companies pulling ahead are layering sales-assisted motions, AI-driven onboarding, and usage-based expansion on top of self-serve foundations, making Product-Led Growth less a tactic and more a full operating system for growth. Cursor's $2B ARR trajectory is the case study.
Leah Tharin on ProducTea’s 2026 PM Career Guide - V1 argues that the PMs getting passed over right now aren't the ones who can't ship; they're the ones whose entire track record is shipping. The skill stack underneath that is exactly what AI commodified first. Sharp and uncomfortable.
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