Productside

10/14/2026

Join Live: Proto to Proven
A live working session on validating your personas

Most product teams build personas like this: A name. ✅ A stock photo. ✅ Goals, pain points, and a backstory AI wrote in 90 seconds. ✅ A roadmap built on top of it. ✅ Actual customers behind it? ...Not one. 🦗 That’s not a persona problem. That’s a validation problem, and it’s quietly...

10/14/2026

We go live in an hour. 🔨

Open a persona your team currently uses. The one sitting in a PRD right now, quietly deciding what gets built.

That’s what we’re testing.

Tom Evans and Rina Alexin run it live: start with an AI-generated persona, break it against real customer data, then run the same workflow on yours.

🕐 1PM ET | 10AM PT
💻 Live and hands-on.

Still time to join. 👇
https://hubs.li/Q04B7_nc0

10/13/2026

Your AI agent built you an app in one afternoon.
Cool. Who's maintaining it in six months? 🤔

Elena Avramenko, founder of Modaal.dev, keeps asking builders that question. Most beginner vibe coders skip it.

On this episode of Productside Stories, Elena tells Rina Alexin why cheap code isn't the same as good code, and what product people should do about it.

What stuck with us:

🧪 Validate before you vibe code. Treat your 10 spare hours a week like an investment. Most builders in Elena's community kill five to seven ideas before one sticks.
🧑‍💻 Treat your agent like a junior dev. Question every decision, even when it comes from the best model.
🎨 Craft becomes the moat. When anyone can ship an app, human-crafted design earns the revenue.
📣 Leaders go first. Want your team building with AI? Build something yourself and show them.

Elena also walks through how her three-person team splits the work into vision, taste, debug, and delight. Her engineer spends about 5% of his time on it. Product managers, that's your cue.

🎧 Listen to the full episode: https://hubs.li/Q04B11R70

10/12/2026

We’re giving away a handful of tickets to ProductFest in Richmond, Virginia, on Thursday, October 22, where Productside trainer Dean Peters is taking the stage.

Dean’s talk is called “Getting Past the AI Chaos, Confusion, and Crapola.” If AI has come up in a roadmap meeting this year and nobody could say what it was for, you already know why we love that title.

Here’s how to enter:

🎟️ Join Productside Connect, our alumni community on Slack: https://hubs.ly/Q04zX9sN0
💬 Comment on the giveaway post with one question you want Dean to answer on stage
📅 Get your entry in by Thursday, October 15, at 11 p.m. EST

We’ll announce the winners on Friday, October 16.

Bring your best AI question, because Dean has already heard the easy ones.

10/09/2026

There's a product in your portfolio that should've died years ago. 🧟

You know the one. Revenue flatlined ages ago, but a few customers swear they can't live without it. So it shambles into every sprint planning and eats more engineering time.

Nobody wants to pull the plug. So it keeps walking.

The scariest part? AI budgets more than doubled this year while IT budgets grew about 8%. Every hour on the undead is an hour your next big bet doesn't get. 🎃

This Halloween, our Dean Peters is handing you the shovel. Learn how to make the kill call with data, then bury the product without your customers running to a competitor.

🦇 Post Launch Success Series (Part 1): How to Kill Zombie Products
📅 Wednesday, October 28

Reserve your spot before the zombie eats another sprint 👉 https://hubs.li/Q04zPQjF0

10/07/2026

Your PMs finished their training in March. By April, they were working exactly the way they did before. 🫠

You're not alone. CEB (now Gartner) estimated that people never apply about 45% of the training they sit through.
Part of the problem is how most companies buy it. They compare syllabi and per-seat prices, even though AI has made decent curriculum almost free to produce.

Whether training sticks comes down to what happens after the last session. Do managers expect people to use the new skills? Is anyone measuring the change? Most vendor proposals don't say.

We put everything we know about buying PM training into a free guide for product and L&D leaders. It includes the RFP questions and the vendor scorecard to help you pick well, and it'll even tell you when to build in-house and skip us entirely. 😅

📘 Read the guide: https://hubs.li/Q04zsX-Q0

10/06/2026

Your designer isn't your decorator. 🎨

If design first hears about a feature at the "make it pretty" stage, you've already signed up for the rework.

On the latest Productside Stories, Snehal Ghag (Design Manager for AI Products at ServiceNow) tells Rina Alexin how her team keeps PMs in the problem space longer. Their secret weapon: AI personas built from real user research, then sent after every design as the most frustrated user you'll never have to meet in person. 😤

Her best advice for PMs?

"These days, you should keep one empty chair for your AI partner." 🪑

🎧 Full episode here: https://hubs.li/Q04zh-wj0

10/05/2026

Productside Connect is open, and it's built for what happens after the course ends.
Training gives you the frameworks. Then Monday brings back the same stakeholders and roadmap fights, and nobody nearby speaks the language you just learned.

Connect is our private alumni community, and it lives in Slack, so you don't need a new app or another login.

Inside, you can:
💬 Ask the question you'd rather not post in your team channel
🎯 Get a gut check on a prioritization call before it reaches leadership
🔁 Swap notes with PMs who use the same frameworks you do

Every member has been through Productside training, so you'll be talking to people who already get it.

Come say hi 👋 https://hubs.li/Q04zczW80

10/05/2026

Your persona was generated in 90 seconds. 👤

Your roadmap is built on it.

AI gives you a polished, confident, completely unverified customer. It looks identical to one built from 30 interviews.

Then it goes straight into the PRD.

On October 14, Tom Evans runs a live session with Roger Snyder where you break an AI-generated persona against real customer data, then run the same workflow on your own.

Bring a persona you already use. Register here to join👇
https://hubs.li/Q04zbpXb0

10/02/2026

Who owns the backlog? If your team just pointed at three different people, we should talk. 👀

When roles get fuzzy, Agile turns into theater: plenty of standups, hardly anyone standing behind a decision.
Kristin Weir put her team through our Agile training. She came away with something rarer than a tidy sprint board: a team that knows whose call it is.

We build every corporate program around the work your team already does, so the frameworks still get used after the training ends.

Get your team on the same page 👉 https://hubs.li/Q04z2JQL0