PLC #45: 100; The Magic Number & see you this Thursday at Contentful!
PM news, expert insights, Community and Conference updates, and events to help you grow your career and network.
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🎫 Contentful event for 100 AI Enthusiasts
Expected a crowded scene this Thursday at Contentful. The first Serendipitous 100 is expecting around 100 participants, all eager to explore how to adopt discovery practices for AI products. An interesting observation: the presentations are being led by product designers — a sign, we believe, that product management is shifting toward product building. More than ever, the lines between roles are becoming increasingly blurred. PS: DM Daniele if you want to volunteer as Photographer!
🎟 We’ve got 99 amazing participants… will you be the 100th?
The ProductLab Conference is shaping up, and we can hardly believe that something born in a bar during the summer of 2023, from a Lenny’s Meetup, has become a strong community and will soon be our first Conference! We would love to feature the (next joiner) 100th participant in our newsletter and on social media with a cool interview, discussing how they view product evolution in a podcast-style format!
♥ ProductLab Mastermind: Building a Well-Oiled Product Team, LAST TICKET
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….
In this session, we’ll explore how product leaders build effective teams through rituals, tools, norms (both written and unwritten), and cultural habits. We’ll swap insights on how teams actually run week-to-week, how tough conversations happen, and what practices or systems make the biggest difference.
📅 Wednesday, 25th June
📍 Prenzlauer Berg
⌚ 18.30-21.30
📰 Product Leaders’ Wisdom
Brought you weekly by Leila Montazeri
Just because an AI “thinks” doesn’t mean it reasons.
This paper reveals that Large Reasoning Models like Claude Thinking and DeepSeek-R1 don’t actually reason; they rely on memorized patterns and collapse on truly novel or complex tasks. It’s a quiet reminder that overestimating AI’s reasoning capabilities can lead to misguided product assumptions and misplaced trust in “smart” systems.From The Illusion of Thinking, Apple Machine Learning Research
(by Parshin Shojaee et al.)The future of work isn’t about more AI, it’s about more humans. A design leader’s take on building teams, products, and companies where creativity still wins in an AI-heavy world.
Thoughtfully shared on Hiring Humans newsletter.How do AI coding agents actually work, and what will they mean for product teams? The Department of Product explains the mechanics behind this next wave of builders and why PMs should care.
💪 Open Roles
Brought you weekly by Alessia Marchi
Staff Product Manager @ Urban Sports Club