Wed, Aug 26 · 6:15 PM CEST
AI-Native Product Building and Growth
🍹🌴 ProductTank Vienna is back with our Summer Edition — and we're tackling the question at the heart of every product conversation right now: in a world where AI has made building faster and cheaper than ever, what actually moves the needle?
Join Vincent Jong (ex CPO Leadfeeder x Dealfront) and Mario Deubler (ex CPO Passion.io and 120 Ventures) — two product leaders who've been living this shift from the inside — for a candid, opinionated evening on AI-native building, how roles and processes are being redrawn, and where the real value creation is moving. Expect honest takes, lively discussion, and room to push back.
Agenda
6:15 pm – Doors Open & Welcome
6:30 pm – Welcome by Markus Rothmüller & Journi
6:45 pm – The AI-First Playbook: Building and Growing a Business with AI – Vincent
7:15 pm – What AI-Native Means for Product Roles and Leadership – Mario
7:45 pm – Open Discussion & Q&A with Markus Rothmüller
8:15 pm – Networking, Snacks and Free Drinks by Journi
10:00 pm – Closing Doors
Talk 1: The AI-First Playbook: Building and Growing a Business with AI (Vincent Jong)
Within 12 months, Vincent built four production-ready SaaS products with real paying customers — by himself. No team. No agency.
But here's what nobody talks about: as building got easier, growth got harder. The same forces that let one person ship in weeks have flooded the market with noise. Distribution is broken. Old PLG playbooks have shifted from top-of-funnel acquisition to a much harder game of qualification, conversion, and retention. And standing out when anyone can build anything has become the defining challenge of the AI era.
In this talk, Vincent pulls back the curtain on what building and growing actually looks like today: the stack, the constraints, the failures, and the strategies that do work — from designing for zero human intervention from day one, to why your product needs a sharp point of view rooted in real domain expertise, to why radical cost efficiency beats fundraising for most early-stage bets.
His advice to the product people: If you can build something in two weeks and put it in front of real users, you don't need a discovery interview. But if your ICP isn't genuinely excited — stop. Because finding customers has never been harder. And building has never been easier. That asymmetry is the only thing that matters right now.
Talk 2: What AI-Native Means for Product Roles and Leadership (Mario Deubler)
AI has quietly rewritten what a product person actually does, and the old assembly line of PM to designer to engineer is collapsing into something new: one person who can own a customer problem from first conversation to shipped product. Mario shares what that shift looked like from the inside of his own move to an AI-native way of working, and what it means for how product teams and orgs get built.
The shift everyone's missing isn't about tools — it's about the role. What a product person is is being redrawn: from one specialist in a handoff chain to one person who can own a customer problem end to end. And this changes how orgs are built, not just how individuals work. When leaders step back down into hands-on work, the team stops running on headcount and starts running on leverage, fed by shared context that reaches every person and every agent.
His advice to the product people: get closer to the building and get more business-fluent. The ones who thrive own the whole loop, not a slice of it.
About the Speakers
Mario Deubler started as a software engineer in 2006 and spent nearly two decades in and around product, co-founding the influencer-marketing platform exomatch, then holding Head of Product and CPO roles at BuzzBird, Passion.io, and Temedica, and most recently CPO at 120 Ventures. At Passion.io he helped scale the US-based business from 100k to 10 million ARR in 18 months with the help of Product-led-Growth. Today he works as a Principal Product Operator (High-IC), helping teams transition to a fully AI-native way of building, and building alongside them, hands-on, not from a slide deck.
Location & Networking 🌴
