
< Speaker / Facilitator >
Vito Bica
ratePay, Volkswagen, BMW/MINI, Deutsche Telekom, RedBull, Audi, Philips, Adidas, Mobile.de, COOP Suisse, Philip Morris, McDonald’s Germany

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Vito is a systems thinker disguised as a product guy, who started coding, designing and building in the late 80s. He is wired for evidence over ego: give him transcripts, logs, and usage data, and he'll give you a roadmap every stakeholder can defend in public. He has founded and fixed products from industrial SaaS to IoT mosquito traps.
< About >
Building a product isn't three separate jobs (product, design, engineering). It's 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 rides a PUKY kids' bike onto the stage to open the session, and rides off on it to close. The bike carries the metaphor throughout. When you learn to ride with training wheels, you never feel the balance problem. Remove them, and balance is all you think about. The balance problem was always there. The training wheels just hid it. The same is true for product teams: the triad structure has been quietly compensating for problems in taste, coherence, and integration that nobody named, because the team absorbed them at the seams.
This session bridges two perspectives. As a consultant, Vito has spent 20 years walking into B2B product organizations from the C-Suite level, diagnosing why teams keep shipping the wrong things. As a builder, he removed his own training wheels a year ago and built a full SaaS product alone with AI as infrastructure. The session is a field report from that road: what the team structure was hiding, what he built to compensate, and where he's still falling.
Most of the audience will be PMs and product leaders being pushed toward this model by market pressure, founder mandate, or organizational change. The session gives them an honest picture of what the work actually looks and feels like, so they can make an informed decision about whether and how to walk this path. It does not end with a neat answer. It leaves an open tension in the room: can everyone learn to ride?
< Key learnings >
The setup — Building a product alone isn't three jobs done by one person. It's one integrated thing that was split into three roles when companies got large enough to justify it. What happens when the split is no longer necessary?
A live build — A real demonstration of how product, design, and engineering decisions flow through one person in real time, and why the interesting part isn't how fast it goes.
Where you'll fall — Four things the team structure was compensating for: taste, coherence, absorption, and the absence of a safety net. Each paired with a system Vito built to compensate. Each system honestly imperfect.
What this means for your team — 20 years of consulting B2B product organizations surfaced the same patterns. Whether you go solo or stay in a triad, these are the things that actually matter, and AI is making them visible whether you're ready or not.
What Vito is still getting wrong — The honest part. Where the systems fail. Where he still falls. Why that matters for anyone considering this path.
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