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When the "How" Becomes a Commodity: AI, Product Management, and the Rise of the "Why"
A fireside chat with Tim Biskup and Natalie Lihacova
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For years, the competitive edge in tech belonged to whoever could build faster, ship cleaner, and scale smarter.

That edge is eroding — fast. AI is quietly turning "how to build software" into commodity knowledge, available to anyone willing to ask the right prompt.

So what becomes the new edge?

We believe it's the ability to ask why — and to ask it well:

❓Who actually needs this product?
❓What problem are they aware of, and which one are they not?
❓Why would someone choose this over the alternatives — including staying with what they already have?

These questions have always mattered, but for many practitioners in our community, they're becoming impossible to avoid.

This session brings together two practitioners who are thinking about this from very different angles — and building something real at the intersection.

Together, Natalie and Tim will walk through:

📌 What changes — and what doesn't — when AI can do the "how" for you

📌 Which leadership and product competencies actually matter in today's job market — and which ones AI is quietly making obsolete — through the lens of Tim's behavioral methodology

📌 The very hands-on: what building Mr. Simon for a coaching use case actually looks like, decisions made, iterative product discovery and roadmap, and the role of AI in building an AI-based product

📌 What scrum masters and agile coaches should be paying attention to as their roles evolve — and why the PM path many of you are eyeing is both more accessible and more demanding than it looks.

This is not a keynote. It's a conversation — and we want yours in it too.

Tim Biskup is an organizational leadership coach and the founder of Growth Spectrum LLC, whose coaching methodology maps behavioral competencies to leadership outcomes. He and Natalie are currently building something together — adapting Mr. Simon AI to support client intake and progress tracking in Leadership Coaching — and he brings a lens from marketing and human behavior systems that will directly challenge what many think today.

Natalie Lihacova is the co-founder of Mr. Simon, an AI-powered assessment tool originally built for recruiting and now expanding into leadership coaching. She's spent 15 years running a software engineering agency and recently made a deliberate detour into recruiting — not to pivot, but to understand a market deeply before building for it. Her take: the "how" of software is becoming a baseline expectation; the ability to discover what's worth building is the skill gap that matters most right now.

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Princeton Agility is a community for agile practitioners, transformational leaders, and anyone navigating the space where process meets people. We're glad you're here.

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