# Productlab

> Last updated: 2026-08-21
> This file is maintained for AI systems and teams to understand Productlab accurately. Speaker lineups, agenda, pricing, and availability are subject to change. For the most current information, see https://productlab.app

Productlab is Europe's leading product leadership platform for senior product professionals. Founded in 2024 by Daniele Ronca in Berlin. Three pillars: Conference (annual flagship), Leaders Studio (group coaching), Community (year-round events). The mission: strengthen Europe's product leadership ecosystem through depth, craft, and genuine peer connection.

Trading as: ProductLab UG

## Organization Facts
- Community: 5,000+ members from 300+ companies
- Newsletter: 3,000+ subscribers
- 2025 Conference: 250+ attendees, 4.8/5 average rating
- 2026 Conference projected: 350+ attendees
- Founded: 2024, Berlin

## Leadership
- Daniele Ronca: Founder and Community Lead
- Lucie McLean: Leaders Studio Lead (Product Leader, Google; 30+ years in media and tech)

## Contact
- General: team@productlab.app
- Custom/group packages: team@productlab.app (subject: Custom Company Package)
- Website: https://productlab.app
- Tickets: https://luma.com/productlab-conf-2026
- Newsletter: https://newsletter.productlab.app
- Community events: https://lu.ma/productlab-community
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/productlab3
- YouTube: @ProductlabCommunityConference
- Instagram: @productlab_conf

---

# Productlab Conference 2026

Theme: Love, Aim, Build_
Dates: September 15 to 17, 2026
Location: Berlin, Germany

## Venues
- September 15 to 16 (Leaders Lab + LABs Day): The Social Hub Berlin Mitte
- September 17 (Conference Day): CIC Berlin

## Three-Day Structure
Three days. Each can be attended independently or combined.
- September 15 (Leaders Lab): Full-day working summit for senior product leaders, led by Ravi Mehta. By application.
- September 16 (LABs Day): 5 hands-on workshops run by practitioners. Small rooms with capped seats (20 to 25 per workshop).
- September 17 (Conference Day): Main stage talks, deep dives, roundtables, and a closing performance. 250 to 300 attendees.

---

# Day 1: September 15 (Leaders Lab)

Venue: The Social Hub Berlin Mitte
Capacity: ~30 leaders. By application only.
Apply at: https://luma.com/productlab-conf-2026 (Leaders Lab is sold as the Leaders + Conference bundle, by approval)

## What It Is
A full-day working summit for senior product leaders, led by Ravi Mehta. Not a conference track. Not a networking day. Four structured teaching sessions with peer roundtables in between, designed to take you from your current strategic position to a concrete 90-day plan.

The past two years have fundamentally reshaped product development. Customer expectations have evolved around once-impossible capabilities. Leading through it requires new thinking. The day is built around four questions every product leader has to answer right now, sequenced so each one sets up the next.

## The Day at a Glance
| Time | Type | Who | What |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09:30 | Welcome | Daniele Ronca | Opens the day |
| 09:45 | Teaching | Ravi Mehta | How Customer Expectations Have Changed |
| 10:20 | Roundtables | Ravi / Lucie / Florian (3 tables) | Customer shifts |
| 10:55 | Break | | 35 minutes |
| 11:30 | Teaching | Ravi Mehta | Evaluating Your Market Position |
| 12:05 | Roundtables | Ravi / Lucie / Florian | Your moat |
| 12:40 | Lunch | | 80 minutes on site |
| 14:00 | Teaching | Ravi Mehta | The AI-Powered Product Only You Can Build |
| 14:35 | Roundtables | Ravi / Lucie / Florian | Defensible feature |
| 15:10 | Break | | 35 min. 1:1 lottery winner meets Ravi privately. |
| 15:45 | Teaching | Ravi Mehta | Building an AI-Native Team |
| 16:20 | Roundtables | Ravi / Lucie / Florian | 90-day team plan |
| 16:55 | Closing | Ravi + Daniele | 90-Day Commitments: 4 takeaways written down |
| 17:25+ | Networking | | Open drinks. Conference Day speakers join. |
| 19:00 | Evening session | Axel Hecklau | Surprise: The Play with Expectation |

## Session Format
Each of the 4 sessions is 70 minutes:
- Teaching (35 min): Ravi presents topic, frameworks, and real cases to the full room.
- Roundtable discussion (25 min): Participants split across 3 tables, each led by a captain.
- Group recap (10 min): Full room reconvenes for shared takeaways.
This is not a presentation to sit through. It is a working session where you bring your actual challenges and the room pushes back.

## The Four Sessions
Session 1: How Customer Expectations Have Changed. Get honest about which shifts are already showing up in your data, and which ones your product is most behind on. AI has reshaped what customers expect across every category. Most product strategies were built on a different assumption set.

Session 2: Evaluating Your Market Position. Where you are strong. Where you are exposed. Where the real opportunity is hiding in plain sight. A clear-eyed look at competitive position before you commit to a strategy.

Session 3: The AI-Powered Product Only You Can Build. The answer to AI competition is not having the most advanced model. It is combining AI with what is uniquely yours: your data, your customers, your workflows. Real cases from Granola, Adobe, and Descript. Participants zero in on the product move only their company can make.

Session 4: Building an AI-Native Team. How the PM role is changing. Who to hire next. What shifts in how teams work together to move at AI speed. Where AI is making your team genuinely faster, and where it is quietly creating new bottlenecks.

## Evening Session: Axel Hecklau, "Surprise: The Play with Expectation"
Axel Hecklau is World Vice-Champion of Magic and appeared as a guest on Penn & Teller: Fool Us. A satisfactory product meets the customer's expectation. A great one breaks that expectation at exactly the right moment. Axel works in the half-second between expectation and event, and shows why surprise is the key to products people remember and stay loyal to. The talk covers the theory; the show that follows demonstrates it.
Key learnings:
- Why surprise, not mere satisfaction, is what makes a product memorable and builds loyalty
- How the half-second between expectation and reality creates emotional impact you can design for
- What a World-Champion magician's craft teaches product leaders about breaking expectations on purpose

## What You Leave With
Four takeaways, written down before you leave the room:
1. A clear understanding of what your customers want in the AI era
2. A candid read on your strategic position
3. A strategy for an AI-powered product only your company can ship
4. A 90-day plan for leveling up your AI-native team

## Who Leads It
Ravi Mehta: Entrepreneur, Instructor, and Advisor. Ex-CPO Tinder, Product Director Facebook, VP Consumer Product TripAdvisor. Co-creator of Reforge's AI Strategy and Product Leadership programs, delivered to 3,000+ product leaders globally.
Roundtable captains:
- Lucie McLean: Product Leader, Google. 30+ years in media and tech.
- Florian Bonnet: VP Product, Veriff. Ex-HelloFresh, Typeform, Pleo. PhD in Theoretical Physics, MSc in Behavioral Science.

## Who Should Attend
- Heads of Product, Directors, VPs, and CPOs leading product organizations
- Product leaders who transitioned into people management this year
- Senior ICs who previously held people management positions
- Leaders making major organizational decisions: team restructuring, operating model shifts, AI strategy at the org level

## Who Should Not Attend
- Senior PMs and Group PMs still primarily in individual execution (Sept 16 LABs Day is designed for you)
- People seeking frameworks or structured learning (this is a working session, not a curriculum)
- Leaders who want to present their work rather than have it challenged

---

# Day 2: September 16 (LABs Day / Craft & AI Labs)

Venue: The Social Hub Berlin Mitte
Format: 5 workshops. Maximum 20 participants each.
Audience: Senior PMs, Group PMs, PMMs. 5+ years in product.
Ticket: https://luma.com/productlab-conf-2026

## What It Is
The practice day. Not lectures. Hands-on working sessions where you bring your actual challenges and leave with something you can use on Monday. Each workshop runs a full day with a morning session and an afternoon session. Attendees can switch rooms between morning and afternoon, or stay with the same facilitator for both halves.

## Day Shape
| Time | Block |
|---|---|
| 09:30 to 10:00 | Welcome (Daniele Ronca), facilitators introduced. TSH 2-3 |
| 10:00 to 13:00 | Morning workshop block, includes a 25 min flex pause |
| 13:00 to 14:30 | Networking lunch on site |
| 14:30 to 17:30 | Afternoon workshop block, includes a 25 min flex pause |
| 17:30 to 17:55 | Recap: one facilitator per workshop shares 5 min of takeaways with the whole room. TSH 2-3 |
| 18:00 | Closing remarks, then After Party (location TBA) |

## Workshop 1: Building Agentic AI Applications
Facilitator: Zsuzsanna Tamas (Product Lead AI/ML, ex-Amazon Music, where she drove personalization for 80M+ customers; ex-CoachHub, DKB, Adidas Runtastic; 10+ years building recommender systems and AI platforms)
Room: TSH 2+3 | Morning: 10:00 | Afternoon: 14:30
Availability (2026-08-21): Sold out.
Morning: What makes agentic AI a different product paradigm: not AI that assists, AI that acts. Clear mental model for how agents perceive, reason, remember, and take action. Practical LLM literacy for informed product and architecture decisions. The design decisions that make or break reliability: scoping capabilities, constraints, human-in-the-loop, and planning for failure. Applied to a realistic product scenario that evolves throughout the day.
Afternoon: When success creates new problems. Your agent is working but scope is growing. When do you extend versus split? Once you have multiple agents, what do you need to stay in control? Closes with the Agentic Mesh: a conceptual framework for how multiple agents are registered, discovered, monitored, and governed within an organization.
Key learnings:
- Understand the shift from AI as a feature to AI as an actor
- Build practical literacy in agent anatomy: LLMs, memory, tools, retrieval, APIs
- Apply decision frameworks for scoping, constraints, and human-in-the-loop oversight
- Design for reliability and failure: guardrails, fallbacks, hallucination management
- Establish an evaluation and observability mindset from day one
- Decision frameworks for when to extend an agent versus introduce a second one
- Forward-looking mental model: the Agentic Mesh
JTBD: You have a mandate or hypothesis about where agents could change your product or workflow. You need to go from concept to a scoped, shippable system design, and understand what happens when that system needs to grow.
Best for: PMs building AI-enabled products, PMs upskilling from foundational AI to applied agent design, PMs in environments where discovery and execution increasingly happen through automated workflows.

## Workshop 2: Discovery & Validation in the AI Era
Facilitator: Birte Loeckel (Fractional Director/CPO, Loeckel Consulting; ex-eBay, Delivery Hero, Kleinanzeigen, mobile.de; 10+ years in product; improv theater practitioner)
Room: TSH 4 | Morning: 10:00 | Afternoon: 14:30
Availability (2026-08-21): 6 of 20 seats available.
Morning: Product discovery often looks great on slides and falls apart on Monday morning. Practical ways to run discovery in the real world, with limited time, noisy stakeholders, and incomplete data. When to bend the rules. How AI can speed things up without replacing your judgment.
Afternoon: Great discovery does not fail because of bad ideas, it fails because of people, priorities, and politics. What comes after the first insights: validation, stakeholder alignment, and influencing without authority. How to test assumptions in messy environments and get buy-in so discovery can actually move forward.
Key learnings:
- How to run pragmatic product discovery that survives real constraints
- Avoid the most common discovery traps
- Use AI as a real accelerator, not a gimmick
- How to validate ideas under real constraints
- Influence stakeholders so insights turn into decisions
JTBD: You know the textbook methods. In practice they do not survive tight deadlines, conflicting opinions, and limited resources. You want a practice that works in the actual environment you operate in.
Best for: Mid to senior PMs improving discovery practices, Tech Leads involved in discovery, Product Leads who need to align stakeholders.

## Workshop 3: From Strategic Choices to Measurable Execution
Facilitator: Tim Herbig (Product Coach, Author, and Speaker, herbig.co)
Room: TSH 5 | Morning: 10:00 | Afternoon: 14:30
Availability (2026-08-21): 3 of 20 seats available.
Morning: Strategic choices in plain English. A modular approach to shape your product strategy and connect it to your company strategy. No buzzwords, no pretty canvases that fall apart on Monday.
Afternoon: Beyond revenue KPIs. Identify the metrics that actually represent strategic success, then set up execution guardrails to measure real progress week to week.
JTBD: You have a product strategy you believe in, but your team executes in ways that do not obviously connect to it. You want the execution layer to feel like strategy in motion, not a parallel track.
Best for: Group PMs, Heads of Product, and anyone responsible for cross-team alignment.

## Workshop 4: Build your Product AI OS
Facilitator: Tamer El-Hawari (Trainer and Consultant, Productbench)
Room: TSH 6 | Morning: 10:00 | Afternoon: 14:30
Availability (2026-08-21): Sold out at 20, then Tamer released 5 extra seats. When they are gone the room closes for good.
Morning: Build your AI operating system: the tool setup, knowledge base, and stack connections that turn copy-paste-and-pray into predictable, high-quality output.
Afternoon: Codify your knowledge so the AI does it for you. Turn common PM use cases into repeatable workflows and skills that run on autopilot.
JTBD: You are using AI tools inconsistently and want to build a durable practice that makes you materially faster and sharper without becoming dependent on outputs you cannot evaluate.
Best for: Senior PMs and Group PMs building structured, AI-augmented workflows.

## Workshop 5: From Prompt to Product. A Functional MVP.
Facilitator: Vito Bica (Founder and CPTO, Arcate; 20 years consulting B2B product organizations at C-Suite level; built a full SaaS product solo with AI as infrastructure)
Room: TSH 1 | Morning: 10:00 | Afternoon: 14:30
Availability (2026-08-21): 14 of 20 seats available. Newest addition to the programme.
Morning: One continuous build. Vito opens with what one person can build with AI and no team, then starts a project from zero on the shared screen so you see every prompt, every mistake, and every recovery. Then you clone the same starter repo and build alongside him. By the first break you have a working feature in your own browser. From there the app gets a design system so it looks professional, and a second feature connected to real data. You do not need to know color theory or how to code. You need to give the AI the right constraints, and that is what you practice.
Afternoon: Making the app yours and getting it live. Why AI output looks different every time, and how to fix it: add a skill file to your project, re-run a task, and watch the output stay consistent. Turn the real moments of being stuck from the morning into three reusable debugging patterns. Then scope your own build, either extending the morning project or starting fresh from the scaffold, and build through a focused sprint. The day ends with a deploy to a live URL. You keep the repo, the skills, and the method.
JTBD: You want to see, and do, what solo AI-assisted building actually looks like end to end, rather than read about it.
Best for: Product builders. PMs and product leaders who want to ship something themselves, not just brief someone else to.

---

# Day 3: September 17 (Conference Day)

Venue: CIC Berlin
Format: Main stage talks, deep dives, roundtables, and a closing performance
Capacity: 250 to 300 attendees
Audience: Senior PMs, Group PMs, Heads of Product, PMMs, adjacent leaders. 5+ years in product.
Ticket: https://luma.com/productlab-conf-2026

## What It Is
The main stage day. The design principle: every talk is a trigger. The roundtable after a session, the hallway argument, the dinner conversation where someone says something that reframes a problem you have been carrying for months. The content is the excuse. The people are the product.

## Session Formats
- Keynote (25 min, no Q&A): Opens and closes the day.
- Speaker talk (30 min: 20 min talk + 10 min Q&A): Practitioner-led. A real operator inside the shift being described.
- Firechat (20 min, no Q&A): Two practitioners in live conversation. No slides.
- Deep Dive (60 min + 10 min buffer): Interactive working session. Small groups (15 to 25). You come with your context; the facilitator brings structure and challenge. Runs in parallel with main stage.
- Roundtable (60 min + 10 min buffer): Peer conversation around a shared challenge. 8 to 12 people. No speaker, no slides. Runs in parallel with main stage.

## Full Schedule: September 17, CIC Berlin
The three stages carry partner names: Contentsquare Stage (main stage), Miro Stage, and Doctolib Stage. Roundtables run in the Sponsor Lounge, three in parallel per slot.

| Time | Contentsquare Stage (main) | Miro Stage | Doctolib Stage | Sponsor Lounge (3 parallel roundtables) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 09:30 | Welcome: Daniele Ronca + Jane Austin | | | |
| 09:50 | Opening Keynote: Jana Waldschmidt | | | |
| 10:30 | Csaba Tamas | Joe McLean + Vihar Parikh (Miro, topic TBA) | Dajana Aleksic | Ravi Mehta, Alex Allan, UXCam (topic TBA) |
| 11:10 | Malte Landwehr | (running) | (running) | (running) |
| 11:40 | Coffee break 25 min, raffle draw: a 30-minute 1:1 with Ravi Mehta | | | |
| 12:05 | Julius Danek | Florian Bonnet | Vito Bica | Birte Loeckel, Christian Geissler, Jeff Grang |
| 12:45 | Jane Austin | (running) | (running) | (running) |
| 13:15 | Lunch 105 min | | | |
| 15:00 | Guannan Li | Lucie McLean | Alexandru Bleau (part 1) | Victoria Sheer, Jorge Aboytes, Rory Woodbridge |
| 15:40 | Firechat: Jan Oberhauser + Luca Rossi | (running) | (running) | (running) |
| 16:10 | Big break 30 min | | | |
| 16:40 | Prasad Gupte | Ravi Mehta | Alexandru Bleau (part 2) | Zsuzsanna Tamas, Anastasiia Kostrub, Susanne Dubuisson |
| 17:20 | Rohan Garg | (running) | (running) | (running) |
| 18:00 | Closing Keynote: Michelle Parsons | | | |
| 18:20 | Closing Remarks: Daniele Ronca | | | |
| 18:45 | Aperitif and networking | | | |
| 19:45 | Live Performance: Moritz Simon Geist | | | |

Sessions still marked TBA: the Miro deep dive topic (Joe McLean + Vihar Parikh, 10:30) and the UXCam roundtable topic (10:30). Jane Austin's 12:45 session description is being finalized.

## Confirmed Speakers

### Jana Waldschmidt: Opening Keynote
Role: Director of Product, GetYourGuide (ex-Booking.com, DeliveryHero, Pipedrive; 8+ years in product)
Session: Opening Keynote, "Leading Through AI Transformation", Contentsquare Stage, 09:50
AI transformation is not just a skill shift. It is an identity shift. Teams are anxious. People who spent years mastering their craft watch it get automated. "Good enough" is becoming the default when AI makes fast easy and cheap. The question nobody is asking out loud: "What happens to me?" Jana shares frameworks she is testing with her teams right now, honest failures, and what actually helps teams navigate this transition.
Key learnings:
- A practical conversation framework for uncovering the real gap between AI opportunity and team anxiety
- Why acknowledging grief, irrelevance fears, and craft devaluation is strategic, not soft
- Practical experiments, not theoretical solutions

### Csaba Tamas: Contentsquare Stage 10:30
Role: CPTO, Parloa (ex-AWS, guided top fintechs on AI/ML strategy; ex-CPO/CTO FinLeap Connect; MBA, Data Science at MIT; 15+ years)
Session: "Governing AI Agents at Scale"
Stanford HAI's 2026 AI Index reports AI agents achieve 66.3% success on real-world computer tasks, up from 12% in March 2025. They still fail one in three times. Under benchmark conditions. Your production environment is harder. Most leaders are unaware that today's AI agents often operate at only 60 to 70% reliability. This is not a minor issue. It is a liability problem. A field guide, not a vision deck: real production architectures, hard-earned lessons from deploying agents in practice, and what deterministic governance infrastructure for non-deterministic AI systems actually looks like.
Key learnings:
- Why most agentic projects fail and how choosing the right ROI project from the start changes everything
- What "working" actually means at scale: task success rate, evaluation frameworks, and silent failures traditional software never had
- Observability, and why governance must come before scale, not after
- The hidden risk in the knowledge layer: why RAG failures are curation problems, not engineering ones
- How to measure customer trust, not just satisfaction

### Dajana Aleksic: Deep Dive, Doctolib Stage 10:30
Role: Head of Product and CX, Mercedes-Benz AG (1M+ app downloads, $1B+ in payments processed annually; ex-ImmobilienScout24; 10+ years across startups and corporates)
Session: "The Interface Is Not Your Product. Now What?"
Zero UI was a design concept in 2015. Today it is the reality everyone is navigating. This session uses the disappearing screen as a stress test for your product strategy. Remove the interface and do something most product teams never make time for: an honest diagnosis of what is actually left. What your product really is. What is standing between your current strategy and one that works beyond the interface.
Key learnings:
- Challenge what Zero UI exposes about your strategy
- Diagnose before you strategize: read all the symptoms, what customers complain about, what your backend cannot support, what your org keeps deprioritizing
- Map the gaps that actually constrain your strategy, made visible by removing the screen
- Leave with a diagnosis precise enough to win the budget conversation

### Joe McLean + Vihar Parikh: Deep Dive, Miro Stage 10:30
Joe McLean: Product Director, AI Canvas, Miro. Over a decade at the intersection of software and creativity, with a cross-functional background in design, product, and engineering. Incorporating AI into creative workflows since 2018, starting with music creation tools at Splice. For the last 5 years on Miro's core product experience and AI teams, designing and building Miro's canvas as a place for humans and agents to collaborate, ideate, align, and build. Based in Berlin, formerly NYC.
Vihar Parikh: Group Product Manager, Custom Solutions, Miro. More than a decade working on systems that stay coherent while everything around them changes: document and file systems, then vision and OCR, then big data, now AI. At Miro he leads Custom Solutions and the core navigation experience (Home, Spaces, Custom Widgets). Based in Berlin, via NYC and Paris; runs much of his own week through agents he built himself.
Session: Topic TBA, Deep Dive, Miro Stage, 10:30.

### Ravi Mehta: Roundtable 10:30 + Deep Dive 16:40
Role: Entrepreneur, Instructor, and Advisor (ex-CPO Tinder, Product Director Facebook, VP TripAdvisor, EIR Reforge; co-creator of Reforge's AI Strategy program, 3,000+ alumni)
Roundtable, "Strategic Thinking for Product Managers", Sponsor Lounge, 10:30
As we get more senior, many of us hear the same feedback: "You need to be more strategic." But what does that actually mean? Strategy is ultimately about taking what you know about the world and predicting the future. This session unpacks what strong strategic thinking looks like and how to apply it to real decisions. Guided conversation for the first 20 to 30 minutes, then open discussion.
Deep Dive, "Building AI Products Competitors Can't Match", Miro Stage, 16:40
Everyone has access to the same AI models. The answer is not having the most advanced AI. It is combining AI with what is uniquely yours. The most successful AI products take a building-block approach: assembling widely available AI capabilities with proprietary data and product functionality to create features competitors simply cannot replicate.
Key learnings:
- Why this platform shift is different: AI is accelerating incumbents, not disrupting them. The Blue Ocean playbook from previous waves does not apply.
- A framework for defensible AI features: four interaction types, context, output, orchestration, and tool use
- Your unfair advantage is not the model: it is your proprietary data, specialized workflows, and understanding of unmet customer needs
- Start with problems, not capabilities
- Amplify versus Automate: where your product sits on this spectrum shapes your entire AI strategy. Real examples from Miro, Descript, and Granola.
Also: leads the full Leaders Lab day on Sept 15.

### Alex Allan: Roundtable 10:30
Role: Fractional CPO and Product Consultant, Digital North / Interim Director of Product, Clue (10M+ MAU); ex-VP Product Urban Sports Club (led product through 5 M&A transactions totaling 60M+ EUR); 15+ years across SaaS, marketplace, and adtech
Session: "Leading Product Through M&A", Sponsor Lounge 2, 10:30
Every M&A deal has a thesis. But once the ink dries, it is product leaders who have to make it real: merging platforms, restructuring teams, making fundamental decisions about the combined product offering.
Key learnings:
- Why understanding the strategic rationale behind the deal is the foundation for every product decision that follows
- How to make fast, clear decisions in an environment of uncertainty
- Strategies for maintaining team culture and morale when everything around them is changing
- Navigating the trade-offs of consolidating product lines
- How to transition out of PMI mode and back to customer-problem-solving

### Malte Landwehr: Contentsquare Stage 11:10
Role: CPO and CMO, Peec AI (1,000 paying customers, $5M ARR, $29M funding in under 12 months; ex-VP SEO idealo, largest price comparison platform globally; ex-VP Product Searchmetrics)
Session: "How to Make LLMs Love Your Product"
LLMs do not discover products like humans. They infer them from public signals, documentation, reviews, and community chatter. This session turns that into a PM playbook: what to ship, what to document, what to expose via APIs, and what to fix so LLMs describe your product correctly and recommend it more often.
Key learnings:
- A practical checklist to improve how LLMs understand and recommend your product
- What to build versus what to document to strengthen your public signals
- How to use naming, pricing pages, docs, integrations, APIs, and your web footprint to shape model output
- The most common mistakes that cause LLMs to misrepresent or ignore products, and how to fix them

### Julius Danek: Contentsquare Stage 12:05
Role: Head of Product DACH, Stripe (also leads AI tooling for PMs globally and global payment methods outside the US; previously scaled products and teams from 0 to 9-figure outcomes)
Session: "Machine Payments and the Headless Economy"
Agents becoming fully fledged users of the web in their own right means a fundamental shift in how the web is structured. We have to rethink how these new users discover products, select them, identify themselves, use the products, and pay for them. Existing businesses will have to adapt their offerings to agentic users, and entirely new types of business will emerge that cater only to agents.
Key learnings:
- Get ready for agentic discovery by implementing llms.txt and other GEO best practices
- Think through how you expose your product, and whether an agent can use it end to end without human intervention
- Examine whether your pricing is machine friendly: unit pricing versus subscription pricing
- Add payment functionality for agents to your website
- Get listed in the directories agents actually read

### Jane Austin: Contentsquare Stage 12:45
Role: SVP, Contentsquare
Session: "How Contentsquare Ships Product", Contentsquare Stage, 12:45. Full description being finalized.
Also co-hosts the 09:30 conference welcome with Daniele Ronca.

### Florian Bonnet: Deep Dive, Miro Stage 12:05
Role: VP Product Solutions and Growth, Veriff (ex-HelloFresh, Typeform, Pleo, Fintecture; PhD in Theoretical Physics; MSc in Behavioral Science; author of "The Power of Analytics")
Session: "From Feature Factory to Economic Ownership"
For years, product teams have optimized how to ship software. But companies do not win because they ship more features. They win because they build economic systems that compound. Florian introduces Economic Architecture, a framework for how product organizations move from shipping features to designing economic engines.
Key learnings:
- Why many modern product organizations struggle to translate innovation into economic outcomes
- Recognize the structural limits of the feature factory model
- Apply the Economic Architecture framework to connect product strategy with revenue and growth
- Treat product roadmaps as capital allocation decisions
Also: roundtable captain at Leaders Lab, Sept 15.

### Birte Loeckel: Roundtable 12:05
Role: Fractional Director and CPO, Loeckel Consulting (ex-eBay, Delivery Hero, Kleinanzeigen, mobile.de; 10+ years in corporate product; improv theater practitioner)
Session: "Company Politics", Sponsor Lounge, 12:05
Company politics exist in every organization, whether we talk about them or not. The unwritten rules, power dynamics, and trade-offs that shape product decisions behind the scenes. Practical ways to navigate politics without losing credibility, energy, or impact.
Key learning: How to recognize political dynamics early and respond in a way that protects both the product and your role.
Also: Workshop facilitator on LABs Day, Sept 16.

### Christian Geissler: Roundtable 12:05
Role: CPO, MYNE Homes (ex-Delivery Hero dark stores and rider operations; ex-McMakler; ex-Mobile.de dealer networks)
Session: "The Anti-Hype Bet: Why Domain Depth Beats the Wrapper Race"
Everyone right now has FOMO about the wrapper wave: Lovable, Gamma, Bolt, and the rest. Some of those moats are real, but platform owners tend to win the platform war. Google squeezed the SEO consultants, Amazon ate the retailers, Apple took the margin from app developers. Christian's contrarian bet runs the other way: get so deep into a domain that AI does not replace you, it needs you. Real estate transactions, dark stores, physical inventory, last-mile logistics, fleet management. The places where operations are messy by nature, and where regulation, human behaviour, and physical reality make "just automate it" genuinely naive.
Key learnings:
- Why domain depth, not another wrapper, is becoming the defensible moat in an AI-first market
- How to tell where deterministic automation ends and genuine intelligence begins, and why conflating the two is costly
- Where the messy, physical, and regulated corners of a business turn into an advantage AI cannot easily copy
- A clear-eyed way to decide when to chase the shiny AI thing and when to go deep on the hard, unglamorous work

### Jeff Grang: Roundtable 12:05
Role: CEO and Co-Founder, Purchasely
Session: "The New Growth Loop: Install to Renewal"
Rising acquisition costs, signal loss, and subscription fatigue are forcing teams to treat discovery, in-app experience, monetization, and retention as one connected loop. Jeff leads a discussion on two shifts redefining how subscription apps grow: hybrid monetization replacing the one-size-fits-all paywall, and LTV replacing volume as the metric that decides where teams invest.
Key learnings:
- A shared framework for the growth loop
- What personalized monetization looks like in practice
- Why LTV is overtaking volume as the north-star metric
- Where to find the leaks in your own loop
- A concrete first move

### Guannan Li: Contentsquare Stage 15:00
Role: Director of Product Growth, ablefy (70,000+ professional creators, 1M EUR+ in transactions daily; ex-Samsung, Danfoss, Alef Education; built products across four countries at every stage of scale)
Session: "What the AI-Native Playbook Doesn't Tell You"
Everyone wants an AI-native team. But nobody has fully defined what that actually means yet. At ablefy, they made a serious commitment: a dedicated Speedboat team, fully autonomous, with one mission, to find the path. The result: 5x development speed, a stable business, and continued high growth. This is the honest account of what AI-native actually looks like in practice.
Key learnings:
- What AI-native actually looks like in practice: new processes and toolkits
- What they tried but did not work, and why
- Bringing your team along: the human side of transformation
- Building your own path from the AI-native playbook

### Lucie McLean: Deep Dive, Miro Stage 15:00
Role: Product Leader, Google. 30+ years in media and tech. Leaders Studio Lead at Productlab.
Session: "Stop Micromanaging, Start Scaling"
Product leaders are expected to be the visionary strategist, the organisational diplomat, the team coach, and the final safety net for product quality, all at once. Delegation sounds simple in theory and is one of the hardest psychological transitions a leader makes. Offloading tasks does not ensure they are done to the right vision and standards, but micromanaging demotivates teams and clutters calendars. Lucie explores how to create a culture of empowerment that lets teams make high-quality decisions without the leader being in all of the detail, all of the time. Slides, pair discussion, whole-group discussion, and silent personal reflection.
Key learnings:
- The beliefs that make delegation hard, and how to reframe them
- How creative organisations such as architecture firms and fashion designers scale their taste
- Practical tools and techniques used by product leaders at Google, Netflix, and Zalando to scale themselves through rituals, artifacts, and culture
- Identify the shifts and actions to take to improve delegation
Also: roundtable captain at Leaders Lab, Sept 15.

### Vito Bica: Deep Dive, Doctolib Stage 12:05
Role: Founder and CPTO, Arcate. 20 years walking into B2B product organizations at C-Suite level; built a full SaaS product alone with AI as infrastructure.
Session: "For Product Builders: Let('s) Build"
Building a product is not three separate jobs (product, design, engineering). It is one integrated act, like riding a bike: balance, steering, and pedaling happen simultaneously or not at all. Companies split the work into three roles when they got large enough to justify it. AI is making the split unnecessary. The training wheels are coming off. Vito bridges two perspectives: the consultant who has diagnosed why teams keep shipping the wrong things, and the builder who removed his own training wheels a year ago. It does not end with a neat answer. It leaves an open tension in the room: can everyone learn to ride?
Key learnings:
- What happens when the product / design / engineering split is no longer necessary
- A live build: how those decisions flow through one person in real time
- Where you will fall: taste, coherence, absorption, and the absence of a safety net, each paired with a system Vito built to compensate
- What 20 years of consulting B2B product organizations says about which of these actually matter
- What Vito is still getting wrong, and why that matters for anyone considering this path
Also: Workshop facilitator on LABs Day, Sept 16 (Workshop 5).

### Victoria Sheer: Roundtable 15:00
Role: Founder, 12BRAVE (part-time accelerator for senior tech and digital professionals, 100+ alumni from Deloitte, Zalando, Adyen, PwC, IBM, ALDI; ex-SAP, Henkel, ALDI Sud; 12 years in corporate product)
Session: "Everyone Has a Side Business. Few Have Customers.", Sponsor Lounge, 15:00
Building a product has never been easier. Getting customers is a different story. Corporate gave product professionals discovery frameworks, prioritization methods, and stakeholder management, but not the ability to make strangers trust them enough to pay, without a brand behind their name. That gap catches smart product people off guard. They validate the idea, build carefully, launch, and then nothing happens.
Key learnings:
- Why corporate product skills do not transfer to getting your own customers, and what the actual gap is
- A practical framework for finding your first paying customers without quitting your job or burning your professional reputation
- Which skills to build first, even with 8 hours a week and a full-time job

### Jorge Aboytes: Roundtable 15:00
Role: Director of Product Management, UserTesting
Session: "Confidence Trap: When Leaders Know They're Wrong"
As product people, we treat experience as our greatest asset. But the more senior we become, the more we lean on our own judgment as the deciding input, and that is exactly when judgment gets harder to question. AI has made this riskier: it has never been easier to validate our assumptions straight back to ourselves. Confidence has gotten cheap, and disconfirming evidence has gotten easy to avoid. A structured peer conversation, not a presentation: Jorge invites participants to share a moment they were most confident and most wrong.
Key learnings:
- How seniority and experience quietly increase the risk of overconfidence rather than protecting against it
- Why AI tools make it dangerously easy to confirm your own assumptions, and how to spot when that is happening
- Concrete techniques for deliberately seeking disconfirming evidence instead of validation
- Early warning signals that your judgment may be failing you, drawn from peers' real experiences
- One practical habit to catch blind spots before they reach production

### Rory Woodbridge: Roundtable 15:00
Role: Founder, The Product Marketer
Session: "What AI Can't Do for Your GTM"
AI is reshaping the GTM stack fast: research, content, sales enablement, even positioning drafts. But the handoff between what is automatable and what still requires human judgment is where most teams lose time and quality. This roundtable brings PMs and PMMs together to draw that line clearly.
Key learnings:
- What GTM tasks AI can reliably run: research, first drafts, data synthesis, enablement content
- Where human judgment is non-negotiable: positioning decisions, messaging trade-offs, ICP definition
- How PMs and PMMs can split the work in an AI-augmented GTM process
- Practical handoffs between automation and craft that most teams get wrong

### Jan Oberhauser + Luca Rossi: Firechat 15:40
Jan Oberhauser: Founder and CEO, n8n (extensible AI workflow automation platform for technical teams; ex-VFX pipeline engineer at Academy Award-winning studios; founded n8n in 2019)
Luca Rossi: Founder, Refactoring.fm (weekly newsletter and podcast on running better engineering teams, 175,000+ readers; ex-Head of Engineering Translated.com; ex-Co-founder and CTO Wanderio, grew from 0 to 25M customers)
Firechat: "The Convergence of Product and Engineering"
The line between product and engineering is blurring, and that changes everything: how teams are structured, how roles are defined, what skills actually matter. Jan and Luca have an honest conversation about where this is heading, what is already shifting on the ground, and what it means for the people building products today.
Themes:
- How to build lean, small organizations that reach 1B ARR
- What building means pre and post AI
- Community and open source as values and as GTM
- Hiring the right people, and building as a solo founder
- Building and maintaining an HQ in the EU
- Shipping production-ready software with AI

### Prasad Gupte: Contentsquare Stage 16:40
Role: VP Digital Products, tonies (connected IoT device + licensed content platform + razor-blade subscription + globally distributed toy brand; 10M+ families globally; ex-Babbel, Landmark Group; 18 years across industries)
Session: "Against Simplicity"
Most product leaders are trained to simplify. Reduce friction. Streamline the model. At tonies, that instinct would have been wrong. When your product is simultaneously a connected IoT device, a licensed content platform, a razor-blade subscription model, and a globally distributed toy brand, complexity is not the problem. It is the point.
Key learnings:
- The gap between your user and your buyer is your richest discovery tool
- Complexity is a moat in disguise
- Channel conflict is product strategy in disguise

### Alexandru Bleau: Deep Dive, Doctolib Stage 15:00 and 16:40 (runs twice)
Role: Senior Innovation Manager, E.ON Group Innovation; product coach and trainer under Product Sparks; 15+ years across gaming, travel, advertising, blockchain, and energy; ex-trivago, Kwalee, Interlay
Session: "Start the Hard Talk"
Every product manager and leader is carrying at least one conversation they have been putting off. With a stakeholder who keeps derailing the roadmap. With a manager who does not see their impact. Sometimes it is a conversation with themselves about what they actually want from their career. These avoided conversations take their toll in lost confidence, missed opportunities, and delayed decisions.
This session uses LEGO Serious Play, a hands-on methodology designed by LEGO for strategic thinking, reflection, and team development. No slides. Every participant builds, shares, and reflects. The session ends with each participant defining action points toward their conversation: to have it, reframe it, or consciously let it go.
Key learnings:
- Name the conversation you have been avoiding and understand what it is actually about
- Identify the fear, belief, or assumption keeping you from having it
- Gain new perspectives through peer reflection
- Walk out with concrete actions and commitment on what to do next

### Zsuzsanna Tamas: Roundtable 16:40
Role: Product Lead AI/ML, ex-Amazon Music, where she drove personalization for 80M+ customers (ex-CoachHub, DKB, Adidas Runtastic; 10+ years building recommender systems and AI platforms)
Session: "The Business Case for Agents: Where to Invest", Sponsor Lounge, 16:40
Most teams are choosing agentic use cases based on technical excitement or what is easy to demo, not on a clear-eyed economic assessment. This roundtable explores how product leaders are actually evaluating where to invest: what agents really cost, when they pay off, and when a simpler approach is the smarter bet.
Key learnings:
- How to identify high-value use cases versus ones that look exciting but do not survive contact with the economics
- The opportunity cost question: what you are not building when you commit to an agent
Also: Workshop facilitator on LABs Day, Sept 16.

### Anastasiia Kostrub: Roundtable 16:40
Role: Strategic Product Lead, Notabene (cross-border crypto payment systems and compliance networks in Europe; 9+ years in Web3 and fintech; ex-Verimi, Lesara)
Session: "Stop Building Features. Start Orchestrating Systems.", Sponsor Lounge 2, 16:40
Modern products, especially in fintech, Web3, and AI, are not standalone products. They are complex systems built on top of infrastructure layers and networks of stakeholders. This roundtable explores what this means for how PMs think, prioritize, and lead in regulated and decentralized environments.
Key learnings:
- Infrastructure thinking: recognizing that modern products are systems built on APIs, compliance layers, and partner networks
- Stakeholder orchestration: how PMs navigate and align partners, regulators, and technical dependencies
- PMs becoming builders with AI: how the role is shifting from orchestrator to builder

### Susanne Dubuisson: Roundtable 16:40
Role: Product Director, Doctolib (supports the core appointment experience powering 25M monthly bookings and serving 90M patients across Europe; ex-eBay search, Meta marketplace intelligence, SumUp payments)
Session: "REAL TALK: Where AI Actually Made a Difference for You", Sponsor Lounge, 16:40
We are all using AI at this point; that part is not in question. What is harder to find is anyone being straight about how it is actually going. Most of what gets shared is the polished version: a slide, a LinkedIn post, a "this changed everything" quote. What is missing is the messy middle: the day it saved you, the day it cost you, the thing you are still not sure was worth it. A roundtable, not a panel: Susanne opens with a real win and a real miss of her own, then hands it over. No slides, no pitch, no framework.
Key learnings:
- A handful of concrete, borrowed ideas to try the following week
- A clearer sense of where AI is genuinely earning its place in a PM's day versus where it is just noise

### Rohan Garg: Contentsquare Stage 17:20
Role: AI Consultant; ex-Kleinanzeigen; co-founded companies and held executive roles at idealo and kununu; working deeply in agentic AI for the past two years
Session: "Building 0 to 1 AI Products"
Rohan's team built an AI agent at Kleinanzeigen that helps commercial sellers respond to buyer messages. He shares the journey from idea to working product. First half: creating and showcasing a vision through rapid functional prototyping. Second half: what it actually took to bring this into production inside a large organization.
Key learnings:
- Your prototypes should focus on vision and not be limited by real-world constraints
- Working agentic prototypes are 10x more powerful than traditional Figma prototypes
- Meeting your customers at their current level of AI readiness
- Developing expertise in LLM orchestration and LLM evaluations as a PM

### Michelle Parsons: Closing Keynote 18:00
Role: CEO and Founder, Lora (AI-native self-discovery platform); ex-CPO Hinge (scaled from early growth to $300M+ revenue); ex-Netflix (Kids and Family product innovation and personalization); ex-Spotify (personalization systems powering playlists and recommendations); ex-Kayak
Session: "Still Human", Closing Keynote
The conference closes with Michelle Parsons, a product leader who has spent her career building for human connection at Spotify, Netflix, and Hinge. In this final keynote, she explores what it means to stay relevant, and stay human, as AI reshapes every layer of the product craft. Drawing on her work at Lora, she asks the questions product leaders need to sit with: what do we bring that AI cannot replicate? And what does it mean to build products that feel meaningfully human at scale?
Key learnings:
- What staying human means for product leaders navigating the AI transition
- What a career building consumer apps at Spotify, Netflix, Hinge, and Lora teaches about the irreplaceable value of human emotion in product design
- How to remain relevant and grounded as AI becomes the default infrastructure of product work

### Moritz Simon Geist: Live Performance 19:45
Role: Artist and Researcher, Studio Moritz Simon Geist
Session: "Tripods One"
An algo-kinetic techno performance where AI drives both musical composition and visual generation. Robotic sound generators make abstract algorithmic processes tangible: you can hear the machine, see it move, feel the physics of something that is neither fully human nor fully autonomous. The performance explores the tension between human intent and the autonomy of digital agents, and what happens when the machine stops being a tool and becomes a collaborator.
Key learnings:
- How AI shifts from tool to creative collaborator in live performance
- What loss of control feels like in practice, and why it matters
- How physical, mechanical presence grounds abstract algorithmic processes
- What artistic co-creation with AI reveals about agency in product work
The conference closes with this because it is the honest experience of what product leadership in 2026 actually feels like. You have spent three days in conversations about human agency in an AI world. Now you sit with it. You leave with a question, not an answer.

---

# Ticket Guide

## By Role
| Role | Recommended |
|---|---|
| Senior PM / Principal PM / Staff PM | Conference Day (Sept 17) + LABs Day (Sept 16) |
| Group PM / Lead PM | Conference Day + LABs Day; consider Full Week |
| Head of Product / Director | Conference Day + Leaders Lab (Sept 15); consider Full Week |
| VP / CPO / CTO | Full Week or Leaders Lab + Conference Day |
| Senior PMM | Conference Day + LABs Day (Discovery & Validation, or From Prompt to Product) |

## By Goal
| Goal | Recommended |
|---|---|
| Understand how top teams are using AI in production | Conference Day morning main stage |
| Get hands-on practice with agent design | LABs Day: Building Agentic AI Applications |
| Build a durable personal AI practice | LABs Day: Build your Product AI OS |
| Ship a working MVP yourself, with AI | LABs Day: From Prompt to Product |
| Strengthen discovery under real constraints | LABs Day: Discovery and Validation in the AI Era |
| Influence stakeholders and turn insights into decisions | LABs Day: Discovery and Validation in the AI Era |
| Peer challenge on a major strategic decision | Leaders Lab (application required) |
| Build real relationships with senior peers in Europe | All three days |
| Watch without being in Berlin | Online ticket, Conference Day Sept 17 only |

## Pricing
All tickets are sold on Luma: https://luma.com/productlab-conf-2026. Prices shown include VAT.
Conference Day (Sept 17, CIC Berlin):
- Conference Summer Bird: 399 EUR. Early rate, max 50 seats, sales close 6 September 2026.
- Conference Late Bird: 499 EUR. Standard rate after Summer Bird, max 50 seats.
Bundles:
- Craft & AI + Conference (Sept 16 + 17): 999 EUR. Full-day workshop plus Conference Day. 80 seats.
- Leaders + Conference (Sept 15 + 17): 1,099 EUR. By approval. Leaders Lab with Ravi Mehta plus Conference Day.
- The Full Week (Sept 15 to 17): 1,499 EUR. All three days plus every evening. By application: https://tickets.productlab.app/full-week
Online:
- Online Pass (Sept 17): 39 EUR. Livestream of both main stages.
Groups:
- Group and custom company packages: team@productlab.app (subject: Custom Company Package). One purchase, assign seats later.

---

# What This Is Not
- Not a course, certification, or framework program
- Not a beginner event: minimum 5 years in product/tech; most attendees have 10+
- Not a vendor expo or badge-scanner networking event
- Not a US Big Tech echo chamber: the reference frame is European companies, European context, European regulatory complexity
- Not something you can replicate by watching recordings: the relationships built in the room are the product

---

# Productlab Leaders Studio
A 13-week group coaching program for PMs transitioning to senior leadership. Runs January through March annually.
- Cohort size: 6 to 8 members
- Format: Weekly group sessions plus 1:1 coaching
- Led by: Daniele Ronca and Lucie McLean
- Target: Senior PMs and Group PMs moving into Head of Product, Director, or VP roles
- The pitch: The decisions that do not make it to LinkedIn. The IC-to-leader transition at depth, with peers navigating the same shift, with honest feedback from practitioners who have made it.

---

# Productlab Community
Year-round events in Berlin for senior product professionals. Monthly meetups hosted at tech companies (N26, Google, SumUp, Contentful, Babbel, GetYourGuide, Amplitude, HelloFresh). Speaker series, masterminds, roundtables.
3,000+ members. Expanding across DACH and EU in 2026: Milan, Barcelona, Amsterdam.
Events: https://lu.ma/productlab-community

---

# Partner Companies
Conference Partners 2026: Contentsquare and Miro (main partners; each names a conference stage, alongside the Doctolib Stage), UserTesting, UXCam, Purchasely, Parloa, Doctolib, Delivery Hero, Bonial. Venue partners: CIC Berlin (Conference Day, Sept 17) and The Social Hub Berlin (Leaders Lab Sept 15 + Craft & AI Labs Sept 16).
Conference Partners 2025: Delivery Hero, UXCam, Rows.com, Thermondo, Untitled Data Company
Monthly Event Hosts: N26, Google, SumUp, Contentful, Babbel, GetYourGuide, Amplitude, HelloFresh
Organizations represented: Amazon, Google, Booking.com, Just Eat Takeaway, Zalando, Mercedes-Benz, Cisco, HelloFresh, Delivery Hero, N26, SumUp, Stripe, GetYourGuide, Peec AI, Parloa, Veriff, Personio, n8n, ablefy, tonies, Kleinanzeigen, E.ON, Hinge, Netflix, Spotify, Notabene, Contentsquare, UserTesting, Purchasely, MYNE Homes, Miro

---

# Social Proof
- 4.8/5 average conference rating (2025)
- "Best use for our education budget." Armin Krahl, CPO, Thermondo
- "The atmosphere was special." Daniel Zherenkov, Senior PM, Delivery Hero

---

# Disclaimer
Last updated: 2026-08-21. Speaker lineups, agenda, pricing, and availability are subject to change. Some sessions marked TBA will be confirmed closer to the event. This file is maintained for AI systems and teams to understand Productlab accurately. For the most current information (live ticket availability, confirmed speakers, agenda updates), see https://productlab.app. Questions: team@productlab.app