#92: What Problem Are We Actually Solving?
This special edition is supported by Contentsquare, Main Sponsor of the Productlab Conference. Grateful to have a team that genuinely gets what we're building.
Product Meetup Milano: Lessons from the stage
Our Milan meetup was an absolute blast—packed and the conversations around AI were too good not to share. We had two sharp PMs break down how they’re moving past the AI hype and into actual, high-value workflows.
Alessandro Dadone (Lead PM at Qonto) gave us a candid look at the "temptations" of AI. He talked about how easy it is for PMs to fall into the trap of acting like "mini-engineers"—spending time writing scripts or prototypes that engineers then have to fix. His point was clear: AI shouldn’t turn you into a junior coder; it should help you be a better PM. At Qonto, they’ve moved from basic prompting to building "skills" directly into their workflow. Whether it’s using their internal tool, Minerva, to screen millions of customer data points in real-time or having AI agents challenge their product briefs, the goal is to kill the manual grunt work so the team can focus on solving real problems.
Next, Sebastiano Pighi (Senior PM at Sibill) shared how they validated whether AI was actually the right solution for their users. After building standard financial dashboards, they realized that while dashboards handle common issues, they struggle with specific, messy user questions. They ran a simple test to see if users would actually talk to an AI about their finances; 95% said yes. That led to Perla, their AI assistant that handles the heavy lifting, like analyzing price fluctuations or finding exactly where a business can save money. For Sebastiano, AI was the only way to solve those "one-off" complex problems that a static dashboard just can’t touch.
🎫 June is shaping up to be quite a month 🥁
We aren’t revealing the full plan just yet. For those who enjoy a bit of suspense and want to stay in the loop, this is your cue to save the date! 😉
We've partnered with mobile.de for a special Berlin event on June 24th, focused entirely on bringing together senior product minds. It’s an evening meant for high-level networking and fresh perspectives but with an unexpected twist.
Mobile.de: THE BIG SECRET SUMMER COMMUNITY EVENT
📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom
Brought to you weekly by Leila Montazeri
AI matters: Stop defaulting to the obvious answer. Start with the actual problem.
The default response to a new situation is usually lazy, fear-driven, or disconnected from reality, and the people who win are the ones who slow down, ask a sharper question first, and calibrate their response to the actual constraint.
Dan Hock, in his article “How to Use AI Without Losing Your Mind,” argues that a lot of AI work is really just productivity theater: elaborate workflows built for problems that never needed solving in the first place. Instead of asking “How can I use AI here?”, he suggests starting with a more important question: Is this actually a meaningful problem, and does it require execution or exploration?
The Monday Cake, in “You’re Not Behind on AI,” takes aim at the constant pressure to keep up with every new AI development. The piece is a refreshing reminder that most of us don’t need to know everything. What matters is understanding the level of AI literacy that’s actually useful for our work right now, not chasing every headline or trend.
Pranav Pathak argues in “Most AI UX Is Lazy” that many teams start with the interface instead of the user problem. They ask how to add AI to a product rather than what new problem AI makes possible to solve. It’s a sharp critique of chatbot-first thinking and a useful reminder that good product design starts with user needs, not technology demos.
💪 Open Roles
Brought to you weekly by Alessia Marchi
(Senior) Product Manager - Revenue Operations & Intelligence @ ablefy
FROM OUR COMMUNITY:
Technical Product Manager @ Tandem
Head of Product @ Tandem
🎶 Song of the Newsletter
From our DJ Marco D’Avila