Pittsburgh TechFest 2026

The product leader's job doesn't get harder because of scale; it gets harder because the job changes. And now AI has quietly rewritten the job description and forgotten to tell anyone.
When anyone can generate a 20-page strategy doc in five minutes, knowledge stops being the moat — beautiful, fluffy documents nobody reads, and a creeping anxiety that "anybody can do this job now." The tool commoditized knowing. It didn't commoditize judgment.
In this talk, I'll make the case that the modern product leader is three people at once: a strategist who knows where to point the tool, a systems builder who designs how the system decides and moves, and a customer whisperer who spends the time AI gives back getting closer to the people the dashboards can't see. Drawing on how we've upleveled our operating muscle at k-ID — where all our management and operational tools are wired together, 40% of the team has built their own agents, and our CEO shipped an end-to-end customer product in 20 minutes with one click — I'll show what each of those three roles looks like when speed is abundant and judgment is the scarce resource.
Speed is the vehicle. Judgment is the driver.