Chicago,
you brought it.

Back from Mind the Product 2026 conference with a full notebook and one big takeaway: AI makes building easy. Deciding what's worth building is still the job. Three ideas I'm putting into practice: → Customers don't buy AI. They buy the end of a pain point. → Evals are the new acceptance criteria. Ask "should we?" before "can we?" → Ideas can be copied. Your context about users, systems and your industry can't. Thank you to Daniel Delano for investing in my learning and sending me. It means a lot to work somewhere that treats growth as part of the job. 🙏 Two years into product, I'm eager to keep learning from others. If you're a PM in Chicago, let's connect; I'd love to compare notes over coffee!

What a vibe! Today at Mind the Product Chicago was amazing! It was so good to see different products, Meet people in the industry, And be inspired! Ending the day with Ted Lasso inspo! #BeCuriousNotJudgmental #ProductTankPittsburgh #buildinpublic #PM Thanks Betsy Irizarry for the inspo to gon Learned from April Dunford Alexis Zheng Kathy Pham @alicia dixon @emily andrews

“Intelligence is the commodity. Tokens are the currency.” That line today from Alexis Zheng’s talk at Mind the Product hit a very practical nerve for me. We spend a lot of time talking about what AI can do. I’m getting more interested in a slightly different question: How do we make it need less? Less re-explaining. Less rebuilding context. Less token burn just to get an agent back to what the team already knows. That’s also why her point about trust landed so well. Because efficiency on its own isn’t enough. You can make something cheaper and faster, but if people don’t trust the output, it still won’t get adopted. That’s where this connected back to what we’re doing at Rezoomex. If the goals, outcomes, acceptance criteria, guardrails and context already travel with the work, every agent doesn’t have to start from scratch. And that can mean fewer wasted tokens, less repeated reasoning, and a much clearer path to an outcome people can actually trust. Which made one of our own lines feel especially relevant: Stop paying for time and tokens. Start paying for outcomes. Really enjoyed this one!

Some conference takeaways make you think differently about the work in front of you. Others make you pause and reframe your career journey. Day 2 at Mind the Product Chicago gave me plenty of both. All of the topics and speakers were top-notch… these resonated most deeply with me personally: April Dunford , author of Obviously Awesome, shared a refreshingly simple and powerful approach to product positioning. I really enjoyed her perspective on what changes in an AI world… and what doesn’t, how to think about what you’re actually positioning against when the competitive landscape is shifting so quickly, and some creative ways to tap into customer input and insights. Sneha Raghavan from Pendo talked about Reskilling as a Product Leader, and this one really stuck with me. She shared words of wisdom that someone had given her years ago: identify and focus on solving interesting, meaningful and impactful problems… and career growth will follow. That landed. Especially the idea that we don’t need to put pressure on ourselves to learn all the tools, talk to all the people and read all the books 🤯 just to keep up. Instead, start with the problems worth solving. Then ask: What do I need to learn, understand or get better at to help solve those problems? ✨💫✨ Growth becomes something that happens along the way… not something you have to chase for its own sake. Alicia Dixon from Marriott International talked about Product Management Has Never Stood Still, and I really enjoyed her perspective on how much the discipline has evolved and expanded. I’ve been in formal product management for the past 10–11 years. But listening to Alicia made me stop and look at my own journey a little differently. Because really, I’ve been doing “product” in one form or another throughout my entire 30+ year career in travel. Different roles. Different titles. Different interesting problems to solve. But a pretty consistent thread. Alicia also shared a practical playbook for holding and protecting our ground under pressure, identifying the strength that has carried us through career shifts, and thoughtful questions to ask when exploring a new product opportunity. And then there was Brendan Hunt, co-creator and executive producer of Ted Lasso. 🔥 His fireside chat centered around “Be curious, not judgmental.” And somehow, after a full day of product strategy and career conversations, that felt like a pretty perfect way to wrap things up. Curiosity. Collaboration. Risk-taking. Flexibility. The power of “Yes, and…” And underneath all of it: trust. I’m heading home with plenty of new ideas to bring back to the work… but also with a fresh appreciation for the path that got me here. Maybe that’s one of my favorite takeaways from these two days: keep finding meaningful problems worth solving, stay curious about what it takes to solve them, and let the journey keep unfolding from there. A pretty wonderful Mind the Product experience. ❤️

It was a blast attending my first Mind the Product conference in Chicago this week with Susan Lim. Can’t wait for the next one! My key takeaways: 1. In this age of AI, don’t just “add AI” to your product; review your assumptions throughout the Decision Stack, i.e. Vision, Strategy, Objective, Opportunity, Principle. (Martin Eriksson) 2. Design the trust layer that makes your product the “intelligent system you build around the [AI model]”. No trust, no product adoption. (Alexis Zheng) 3. Get your product team to a place where we all think “there’s something there”, a compelling opportunity to solve a customer problem, like Ted Lasso. (Brendan Hunt) Also wonderful to see Liping (Lela) Zhou Khulan Munkh-Erdene Erik Krag Rajat Trehan and meet new folks! What sparked new ideas for you?

What a great day for Chicago's product community! 🙌 Yesterday marked the first-ever Mind the Product Chicago conference, and it was such a great experience! One of my favorite things about these events is getting to reconnect with familiar faces, catch up with old friends, and meet new people who share a passion for building great products. The conversations and connections are always a highlight. A huge shoutout to all the sponsors who helped make the event possible, especially Pendo.io! I had the chance to meet so many wonderful people from their team, including Eric Boduch. And a special thank you to David Jesse for helping bring the product community together and making the event more accessible through a special discount code. It's people like you who help make this community so special! Of course, we made time to enjoy Chicago, too! Between conference activities, we stopped by Cloud Gate (The Bean), enjoyed the views at Cindy's Rooftop, and ended the night at Untitled. 🍸 And one highly anticipated guest? Brendan Hunt from Ted Lasso was there! As someone who absolutely loves the show, that was pretty cool! ⚽️❤️ Great conversations, new connections, familiar faces, and a little Chicago adventure. What more could you ask for? Looking forward to seeing this community continue to grow and hopefully welcoming more Mind the Product events to Chicago!

Last week I attended Mind the Product Chicago! Lots of keynotes, including one from Brendan Hunt, co-creator of Ted Lasso, on the importance of being curious rather than judgmental. Pretty fitting for a product expo! Its always good to connect with the product community. At the end of the day, at Develative we build software to solve real business and product problems. As with most events AI was the main topic, particularly how to leverage it to build the right things, especially as building software gets easier and cheaper. Its a trap we see often. Companies jump into building features without spending enough time understanding the business problem they're trying to solve or whether they're approaching it the right way. And I think thats where the value of an engineering partner lies. Not just in providing the engineers to execute, but in bringing people who understand the business, challenge assumptions and think about which initiatives will actually move the needle for the company. Had a great time and looking forward to participating even more in the Chicago tech/product ecosystems. On to the next one!

Mind the Product Chicago last week was a blast in every way! Incredible energy, top-notch speakers, a not-to-miss after-party, and the chance to meet product folks from across the country and catch up with fellow PMs from Chicago. Priceless! Every speaker shared great insights and lessons from their product journey, along with ideas on how to navigate the evolving AI landscape and the role of PMs. So many takeaways, but a few really stuck with me: 🔹 April Dunford : Positioning is more important than ever. Have a market point of view, and sell against today's competitors while preparing for tomorrow's. 🔹 Martin Eriksson : Check your assumptions at every level of the stack, from features and opportunities all the way up to product strategy and vision. The stories of how IKEA and Intercom (Fin) worked through every level of their decision stack to reimagine their business models with AI really resonated with me. Don't look at AI just as a cost lever. Start asking what demand is locked up today that AI could unlock, and what we can build now that was impossible before. This is the question I'm taking back to my own work. And a bonus, getting my book signed by Martin! 🔹Alexis Zheng : Loved her product journey and her take on the evolving role of the PM, from data to compute to token economics, with trust as the last layer of AI adoption. Her example of self-driving cars as agentic systems in the real world couldn't have been more apt. The new PM job is to build a system that writes the roadmap, and to design the learning loop so that system keeps improving at scale. 🔹 Brendan Hunt: What a delightful treat to hear Brendan “Coach Beard” co-creator of Ted Lasso, talk about the grit and long journey that took them to Amsterdam, a love of football (Total Football, no less!), and the spark that became Ted Lasso. And the show's mantra, "Be curious, not judgmental," couldn't be a better guide for us as PMs. Thank you to the Mind the Product team and all the speakers for such an inspiring day. And a thank you to ProductTank Chicago , Chicago Product Alliance for helping bring it to Chicago. Already looking forward to next year! #MindTheProduct #ProductManagement #AI #BeCuriousNotJudgmental