Produktland

Users do not need a lot of things. They need a solution to their one problem.

Peter Gregersen has done UX design for almost 20 years and calls himself a grumpy old designer. We talked about what AI actually changes in the design craft, and what stubbornly stays the same. His point is easy to miss in the AI hype: users do not need a lot of things. They need a solution to their one problem. The tools get faster and cheaper, but that does not make design skill less important. It makes it more important, because now everyone can build, and someone still has to answer what the purpose is.

Among the things we get into

• Why the discipline does not change, but the way of working clearly does
• The bank bot that gives you a sourdough recipe while you check your account: meaningless use of AI
• AI slop: what it is, why it happens, and why you should stop making it
• From pushing pixels in Figma to vibe-coding in the production pipeline at Vipps MobilePay
• The chat interface as a friend who does not understand much: you have to over-explain everything from scratch
• From roles to responsibility: when AI produces the artifacts, who does the quality assurance?
• Why research cannot be replaced by a three-line AI summary, the empathy goes out the window

When time is the only barrier, value goes to zero.

I first met Bo Møller 15 years ago, back when he ran the web agency HTML24. Since then he has built and bought SaaS companies for 20 years: resOS, Alunta, idguard, Boligforeningsweb. He hosts SaaS Købmænd and chairs the board of Morningscore. His point is uncomfortable for anyone who makes a living selling software: execution is becoming a commodity. What remains is the banal and the hard part, solving a real problem for someone willing to pay for it.

Among the things we get into

• Why the value of anything everyone can build goes to zero
• How Boligforeningsweb outcompetes players who have owned the market for years
• Bo's setup: ten agents in Conductor, where Codex and Opus review each other
• Tonny: the agent that lives in Slack with its own email and works while everyone else sleeps
• "Stop sharpening the axe, go fell some trees instead"
• What large organizations get wrong that a small operator gets to skip
• Traceability: everyone should be able to trace their work to a paying customer

It is the sewer contractors who have the best products.

Troels Abrahamsen found major success as the frontman of Veto, right as the music industry went from physical distribution to streaming. He has built software all along the way, today among other things Yap, an open source context layer you own and host yourself. His thesis: what hit music first, when distribution became free and the market drowned in content, is hitting software now.

Among the things we get into

• The music industry as the product world's canary: what happens when distribution becomes free
• The DDoS effect on the distribution layer when everyone can generate 40,000 songs in a day
• Technical promise vs marketing promise: "show me the engine room where the empowerment happens"
• Scaling as the problem itself: when products stop getting people in and start keeping people in
• Yap: a self-hosted, open source context layer that breaks with vendor lock-in via MCP
• Chat as a new kind of browser, and what that means for how you build products

When you can build everything, you should not build everything.

Christian Pedersen is Head of Product at WasteHero, an Aarhus scale-up of about 40 people building software for the waste industry. Most product leaders speculate about AI transformation. Christian is in the middle of one. His vision is concrete: one day, to sit with a customer, hear what hurts, and have a loop running that builds the solution and ships it to production while the conversation is still going. And his honesty is just as concrete: we do not quite know what we are doing. We explore the whole chain and find out where it breaks.

Among the things we get into

• Why this is a transformation project, not a tool project, and why you cannot hire your way out of it
• The first place the chain breaks: product documentation, and how WasteHero solved it with markdown in GitHub
• Why he ships greenfield apps straight to production, and still kills 9 out of 10
• The prototype is dead: what is a functional prototype for, if the receiver is an engineer and not a user?
• The product engineer type with a foot in each camp, and why product people need to understand GitHub, branches and pull requests
• Why you should take tasks away from people instead of stacking AI on top of everything they already do

The technology is the easy part. The rest is organization.

Benjamin has worked with AI for over 30 years and has served as CIO and CDO at some of Denmark's largest companies. Today he advises on AI transformation through Munk AI. His diagnosis is not that Danish companies are gripped by hype. The opposite: ambitions are too small, and leadership lacks the imagination to see what is already possible.

Among the things we get into

• Why the problem is not hype but a lack of imagination in leadership
• 84% say AI strategy is important, 5% have one, and where it goes wrong
• Personal AI vs structural AI: why Copilot is not a competitive advantage
• AI as a feature is overrated, AI as a change to the user's workflow is underrated
• The rift between stable IT operations and AI speed: where vibe-coding projects run aground

Execution has become free. What remains is taste, critical judgment and responsibility.

Mikkel Malmberg has been programming since he was 12. Now he puts robots to work doing it. We talked about what really changes when delivery becomes free, and what is left to be good at. His point cuts through the hype: it is easier than ever to build software, but that does not make it easier to build something good. Execution is a commodity now; what counts is taste, critical judgment and responsibility.

Among the things we get into

• Why most of programming was never about writing the code, and what disappears as a result
• AI slop: the best or the worst thing that has happened to the craft? (The answer is yes)
• Why AI always picks the safe, average design choices, and how to avoid looking like everyone else
• What happens to open source when a PR can be pure prompt, and why projects are closing for contributions
• Why you should send your developers a prototype, not a "finished" solution

You are quickly 90% done, and then all you are missing is the last 90%.

Bjarne designed spaceships for LEGO in the 80s and made Lego Boost with me ten years ago. Today he comes up with names for companies, a job an LLM should in principle have taken over long ago. It just has not: AI can generate, but it cannot reduce, and it cannot feel.

Among the things we get into

• The 90% problem: you are quickly 90% done, and then all you are missing is the last 90%
• Why AI always adds, while the hard part of product work is cutting away
• Lego Boost today: hard fun, and why voice control would have ruined the product
• Point your AI tokens at discovery instead of delivery
• Vibecoding waste and the 3D printer parallel: apps nobody uses

Roadmaps were designed to manage slow engineering. That era is over.

Dennis was the first product manager at Falcon.io. Now he is building Propane, an AI product for product teams. His point is simple: we have become good at building fast. We have not become better at deciding what to build.

Among the things we get into

• Why Dennis thinks roadmaps are dying, and what should replace them
• The large Danish company that wanted to rebuild its entire product stack in six months (and found out it would take years)
• What happens when everyone can build but nobody knows what to build
• Why product sense, not product management, is the skill every organization lacks
• Why you cannot know what AI tools can do for you until you have tried them yourself

The new bottleneck is not code. It is how fast you make decisions.

Ulrik has spent 15 years helping organizations transform. Everyone talks about AI clearing the backlog. Ulrik flips it: if your team runs out of tasks, the problem is not solved. It is exposed. A feature factory just gets faster with AI.

Among the things we get into

• Democratisation of product development: what happens when the ability to build moves all the way into the business
• The new bottleneck: not code, but how fast the organization can make decisions
• Governance as an AI task: an agent that checks your decisions against the organization's principles
• The glitter-paper problem: why polished AI output makes us drop our critical guard

When delivery is free, discovery is the only thing that counts.

Kasper Juunge teaches software developers agentic engineering: AI agents on real production codebases, not prototypes. I talked to him about what happens to product management when code stops being the bottleneck. His point is blunt: the PM job is not under threat. It matters more than ever, because when delivery is free, discovery is the only thing that counts.

Among the things we get into

• When agentic engineering actually started working on real codebases, and what changed in August/September 2024
• Quality assurance as the real bottleneck: good old software best practice matters more than ever
• The trap for juniors: outsourcing understanding, and what happens to the codebase in the long run
• The biggest mistake Kasper sees in the wild: building things you do not understand, and losing respect for each other's craft

The biggest risk is not that AI takes your job. It is that we build feature factory 2.0 and produce twice as much of the wrong thing.

Natalia spent two years defining product roles razor-sharp at Novo Nordisk. Then AI came thundering in. I talked to her about what actually changes, and what does not.

Among the things we get into

• Why "hurry slowly" is her most important advice for product people right now
• Feature factory 2.0: what happens when delivery becomes free and discovery becomes the only thing that matters
• The difference between an efficiency task and a qualification task
• What happens to roles when everyone can build everything: from "who does what" to "what do I quality-assure"
• Why regulation in a pharma company paradoxically gives you more freedom to experiment