Vito Bica

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?