Jobs to Be Done (by Agents): Confessions of a One-Person Product Team
Details
Hello,
We are looking forward to having you for our upcoming June Meetup. It promises to be a fantastic evening with a brilliant talk and live demo by our speaker.
The event details are as follows:
Date: Wednesday, June 24th, 2026.
Time: 6:30PM-8:30PM
Venue: Sir Bobby Robson Suite
NUCASTLE
Diana Street,
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE4 6BQ
Title: Jobs to Be Done (by Agents): Confessions of a One-Person Product Team
Every product team has a PM, a designer, a few engineers, a QA lead, and someone who keeps the backlog from catching fire.
I’m all of them. Same person, every job.
This is the honest (and slightly ridiculous) story of building thredspan, a full B2B SaaS product, as one founder who handed the org chart to AI. The product craft doesn’t vanish when there’s only one human in the room. Jobs to Be Done still frames the problem. An Opportunity Solution Tree still maps the bets. Discovery, prioritisation and shipping all still happen, only now the legwork runs through AI agents that draft specs, file tickets, fix bugs and review their own code while I sleep.
Expect a live demo, a fair amount of “I can’t quite believe this works”, and an honest look at the bits that don’t. You’ll come away knowing what AI can genuinely take off your plate, what stubbornly still needs a human, and a couple of things worth trying the moment you get home.
Key Audience takeaways
- A working picture of how AI runs across the whole product lifecycle, from discovery through to QA, not just “write me some code”.
- How JTBD, the Opportunity Solution Tree and continuous discovery hold up once AI does the legwork, and where they fall apart.
- A straight answer on what AI can own and what still needs human product judgement.
Sarat's Bio
Sarat Pediredla spent 19 years running hedgehog lab, the digital product consultancy he co-founded in Newcastle in 2007 and grew from two people with borrowed furniture into a global firm, with three private equity deals, a couple of bruising turnarounds and an exit along the way. He stepped down as CEO at the end of 2025.
Then he went back to where he started: writing code. He now builds thredspan on his own, an intelligence product for the consultancy and agency leaders he spent two decades being one of.
He’s the PM, the designer, the engineer and the QA, with a crew of AI agents doing most of the actual work: the specs, the tickets, the code, the bug fixes that land while he’s asleep.
After years of running a whole org, he’s rebuilding one inside a single laptop, and he isn’t sure whether that makes him a product manager, an engineering manager, or just the one person who reliably turns up to standup.
When he isn’t building, he chairs and advises digital health businesses and sits on the board of an NHS trust, all from Tyneside.
Agenda:
18:30 – Arrival, Food (Pizza and Drinks) & Networking
19:15 – Talk
19:45 – Discussion/Q & A
20: 15– Announcements
20:30 – Closing
We look forward to seeing you all there. If you have any questions, or want to suggest speakers for future events, please reach out to: tolukolawole.io@gmail.com
