Product Leadership 2026

Building got easy. AI writes the specs in seconds, ships features in days, triages and fixes bugs while you sleep. For a generation of product leaders who built careers on managing that complexity — wrangling backlogs, aligning stakeholders, translating messy business goals into something engineering could actually ship — that shift raises an uncomfortable question: what exactly is left for us to do?

Sam Chan has spent the last eighteen months living inside that question. As a product leader at a 50-person start-up that moves a billion dollars in product specs a year, he has had a front-row seat to what happens when the cost of building collapses. The answer he arrived at surprised him — and it is not the one most conferences are selling.

It is not about becoming an AI orchestrator. It is not about layering smarter tooling on top of the same ways of working. And it is definitely not about rebranding the role before someone else does it for you.

What Sam found — through real failures as much as real wins — is that the product leader's job is shifting away from managing the machinery of delivery and towards providing the human judgement that no model can replicate. Less process, more agency. Less workflow, more conviction. Less artefacts, more accountability for the calls that actually matter.

In this session, Sam unpacks what that looks like day to day. He shares how his team stopped treating AI as a productivity layer bolted onto existing habits, and started using it to fundamentally rethink where a product leader's time and attention should go. He is honest about the frameworks that turned out to be dead weight once build cost dropped, the rituals that were harder to shed than expected, and the new muscle the role genuinely demands.

He also takes on the question that rarely gets asked out loud: what happens to the product manager pipeline when junior work gets automated? Who develops the next generation of product leaders if the entry-level reps disappear? Sam does not have a tidy answer. But he has a point of view — and he will share it.

This is a session for senior product leaders who are past the hype cycle. Come for the real receipts, the unvarnished failures, and an honest answer to the question every senior product leader is quietly asking in 2026.

Join in on our panel session, Can of worms, where we'll discuss three tricky topics.

Sixteen years. Six employers. Banks, telcos, retail, a startup, and one very famous banana. Raggie Tandon has worn a lot of product hats, and watched a lot of fads come and go along the way.

Lean. Agile. Design thinking. Growth hacking. And now AI. Each wave arrives with its own language, its own frameworks, and its own promise that this time, product management will be transformed for good. And each time, the same thing happens: the fundamentals quietly get forgotten. Not because people stop caring about them, but because the noise of the new makes it easy to look past what already works.

The biggest thing sixteen years has taught him is how resilient the basics are — and how easy it is to neglect them, no matter how big the company gets or how many new tools fill the toolbox.

In this talk, Raggie shares five lessons from his time in startups that made him a better product leader at scale. They are lessons about listening before building — properly listening, not just gathering requirements. About getting the right people in the room before decisions get made. About prioritising in a way that works for the whole organisation, not just the loudest voices. About co-designing with users and colleagues instead of arriving with a polished answer. And about leading through communication, because clarity is a product skill too.

None of it is new. No proprietary framework, no buzzword, no revelation. That is exactly the point. When you strip away the methodology of the moment, what is left is what has always mattered — and what will still matter long after the next wave arrives.