Product Pioneers

🚀 Navigating the New Terrain: The EU AI Act & Its Impact on AI Safety 🚀 As the digital frontier expands, the European Union takes a significant step forward with the introduction of the EU AI Act, setting a new benchmark for AI safety and regulation on a global scale. This groundbreaking legislation brings both opportunities and challenges for businesses and developers operating in the AI space. Here's what you need to know: 🌐 The Importance of AI Safety: At its core, the EU AI Act underscores the critical importance of safety, transparency, and accountability in AI development. It aims to foster innovation while ensuring AI systems are developed and deployed in a way that respects human rights and ethical standards. ⏳ Timeline & Risk-Based Approach: The Act introduces a phased, risk-based framework, categorizing AI applications into different levels of risk—from minimal to high. This approach allows for a tailored compliance strategy, focusing regulatory efforts where they are most needed to protect public interests and safety. 🚧 Challenges in Implementation: Despite its noble intentions, the EU AI Act presents significant business implementation challenges. These include navigating complex regulatory requirements, ensuring data privacy, and adapting to a dynamic legal landscape. The need for clarity and guidance has never been more pronounced. 💰 Severe Penalties for Non-Compliance: The stakes are high, with severe penalties looking for those who fail to comply. Penalties could reach up to 6% of global turnover for breaches, underscoring the EU's commitment to enforcing the Act rigorously. 🔍 Future-Proofing Strategies for AI Businesses: To navigate these waters successfully, AI businesses and developers must: The EU AI Act is not just a regulatory hurdle; it's an opportunity to lead in the ethical development of AI technologies. By embracing these principles, companies can avoid severe penalties, build trust with users, and establish themselves as pioneers in the responsible use of AI.

The episode of the Product Pioneers Podcast featuring Sebastian, a philosopher and senior lecturer of the Science, Technology, Society program at CODE University, provides an insightful exploration of artificial intelligence (AI), with particular emphasis on ChatGPT and generative AI. Sebastian delves into their societal and individual impacts, sharing a unique educational experiment involving ChatGPT. He also presents a brief history of AI, touching upon its origin, decline, and resurgence due to advancements in computing power and the internet. Natural language processing (NLP), he asserts, is integral to AI because language is a cornerstone of human interaction. This leads to a discussion on generative AI, bringing us closer to machines understanding and generating human-like language. The workings of ChatGPT, a large language model trained on extensive amounts of human language data, are also discussed. Sebastian reflects on the cultural significance of AI and human fascination with intelligent machines. Despite the seeming humanlike understanding or consciousness of large language models like ChatGPT-4, he stresses that they merely follow programmed patterns and statistical probabilities based on their training data. Ethical and societal challenges of AI are explored, particularly the risk of misuse and the perpetuation of biases inherent in the training data. He emphasizes the need to remember the limitations of these models, insisting they are tools designed to assist us, not autonomous entities. The philosopher further explores the effects of AI interactions on our social lives and views on reality. He notes the risk of manipulation of user behavior, pointing to instances of surveillance capitalism and social media algorithms that influence user preferences. He also discusses the implications of integrating ChatGPT with personal devices and software, raising concerns about control loss and potential manipulation. Sebastian acknowledges the impact of AI on employment, but anticipates the creation of new jobs requiring new skills. He expects generative AI to enhance human creativity and emphasizes the need for continual learning and adaptation. The legal and ethical implications of AI are not overlooked, and the importance of striking a balance between individual privacy and technological development is highlighted. He advocates for the equitable distribution of wealth generated by technological advancements. He stresses the need for everyone to understand AI systems and their potential societal impact. He also sees a potential role for generative AI in simplifying academic language and assisting in academic writing and various aspects of working life. Finally, Sebastian outlines potential future roles for ChatGPT and generative AI, focusing on augmentation, specialization, cohesive interaction with other AI forms, and ethical considerations around biases, misinformation, and manipulation. He notes the ongoing debate about AI in the arts and creative industries, insisting that the source of innovation and originality will remain innately human. As a key takeaway, Sebastian urges shifting focus from marveling at AI capabilities to appreciating human intelligence, as humans are the architects of these amazing technological advancements. Instead of just learning from machines, he encourages learning from diverse human experiences, knowledge, and creativity.

In this insightful episode of our generative AI podcast season 3, serial entrepreneur Henri discusses his journey and the pivotal role of business models in shaping successful ventures in the era of generative AI. Beginning with the inception of his AI-powered publishing house, Henri details how perfect timing and CODE facilitated the realization of his dream of writing books with AI. He provides a deep dive into the founding journey of Mailwrite, a company inspired by ChatGPT for writing customer emails. The episode intricately traces the path from initial API exploration to roadmap building, stumbling blocks, eventual launch, and the formidable challenges that led to a fresh start. The episode pivots to the crucial subject of crafting effective business models in the context of generative AI. Henri compares ChatGPT to a gatekeeper, using companies like Amazon and Google as illustrations. In a thought-provoking segment, he brings up the challenges of constructing moats, instituting network effects, and blitzscaling, weighing the necessity of defending such strategies. The open-source vs. closed-source debate is broached as a strategy to stave off competition from ChatGPT. The narrative moves on to the dichotomy between expectations and the actual capabilities of creative AI. Henri stresses that AI should be viewed as a smart assistant only, not a world-changing creator. Despite AI's ability to synthesize data and demonstrate creativity, it lacks the deep understanding of customer needs and a level of novelty originating from lived experiences, revolutionary ideas, or paradigm shifts. He suggests that AI companies' competitive edge lies in niche expertise fields and edge cases. In the closing segment, the focus shifts to understanding customers and their use cases, the necessity of a robust business model, and the proactive initiative to exploit APIs to develop products. Henri also lays out the next steps, encompassing the accumulation of relevant resources such as books and tools. Throughout the episode, Henri underscores various methods and tools, like hypothesis-driven business model design, the Business Model Canvas, the Four Box Model, and the Business Model Navigator. He also poses strategic and tactical questions around experimenting with different business models in the market, defending against competition through network effects and gatekeepers, user acquisition, economic viability, alternative business models, and anticipating potential future disruptions. Henri also elucidates the opportunities for startups to monetize relationships through B2B, B2C, or two-sided relationships. The episode emphasizes the necessity of speed, scale, and deep customer understanding, along with the concept of user-based moats. It further explores pricing strategies for B2B models, including API costs and code. In conclusion, this episode offers profound insights into the importance of business models, along with the challenges and opportunities associated with building companies in the era of generative AI.

In this episode, we discussed the following: - How artificial intelligence and cognitive science come together to redefine automation and productivity - Revisiting the history of human-computer interaction and the future of brain-machine interfaces - How Calmar.ai integrates into your daily workflow and revolutionise the way you work References: https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.08137 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rXrGH52aoM https://www.linkedin.com/in/raphaelvolpert https://calmar.ai Join their Discord channel for early access: https://discord.gg/CbZ9WeneN4 Follow us on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-pioneers-podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/productpioneers Website: https://productpioneerspodcast.com/

**Welcome to this very special episode.** + Our guest is Patrick Haede, the head of product from Gorillas the 10 Minute Grocery delivery app (Europes fasted ever unicornI) + We celebrate the last episode of season 2🙏 + We are live on Product Hunt today🚀 We appreciate your support: 👉https://b.link/phe **More about our guest+ the episode :** Our guest today is Patrick, the head of product from Gorillas - The 10 Minute grocery delivery app (Europes fasted ever Unicorn). He started at Gorillas as one out of two product people about a year ago and built, together with Barbara, head of design, the product organisation to about 30 people today and more than 10.000 employees. Before that he founded and sold Mapify. A travel app that allows you share your travel experiences, get inspired for your next trip and easily book these complex roundtrips. We will briefly talk about mapify and his exit but mainly focus on the the insane growth that he witnessed at Gorillas. We talk about, hiring, building great teams how he built the product organisation, and generally about the all the different moving pieces that are needed to create a service like Gorillas. Visit the shownotes here:https://b.link/shownotes_gorillas **About Season 2 and the Product Hunt Launch: ** This episode will mark one of the last episodes of season 2. As you know this podcast is run by a team of CODE University students and now has a total of 34 episodes with 13 episodes in Season 2. Simon, our host, will need to focus on his bachelor thesis in the coming months and also wants to pass this incredible opportunity of podcasting on to new students, so they can take it to new heights! To celebrate it we are live on Product hunt today. Product hunt is a platform where people can vote for products. The more people vote the more people see it and have the chance to get value out of each episode. If you liked and got value out of at least one of our episodes we would highly appreciate your support. 🚀 If you want to show some love and dont already have an account on Product Hunt you can create one in under 5 minutes with Apple, Google, Twitter or Facebook sign-in. Please upvote Product Pioneers https://b.link/phe), it would mean allot to everyone on the team! And of course you can also support us on LinkedIn or Instagram. 🙏 Huge thanks to Patrick our guest today, all guests that have been on the show and made each episode possible, the entire team from Season 1 and Season 2, and of course our dear listeners! If anyone from the CODE students listening are interested to join the fun for Season 3 please get in touch. Thanks for being on the ride with us! Follow us here: **Instagram**: https://www.instagram.com/productpioneers **LinkedIn:**: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-pioneers **Our Website with Shownotes:** productpioneerspodcast.com **Support us on Product Hunt today:** https://b.link/phe

For the last episode of the year we open a new category on this podcast: Solo entrepreneurship, bootstrapping and indie-hacking. Our guest today is Noah Bragg the founder of Potion.so. He is the perfect person to speak about this. Before Potion.so he built and sold two businesses. Potion.so is a Notion powered website builder that allows for custom domains, custom CSS styling and more. Since he started with this project roughly a year ago he reached $4.000 in monthly returning revenue and grew his Twitter following to over 8.000 followers by building in public, all while still having his day job. I hope you will enjoy this episode. Happy holidays! Follow us here: **Instagram**: https://www.instagram.com/productpioneers **LinkedIn:**: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-pioneers **Our Website with Shownotes:**productpioneerspodcast.com

This episode covers allot off ground, because our Guest today no other than Tom Kendall, Director of hardware engineering at IronOx. IronOx is a US based indoor farming startup "solving global climate through our food, grown renewably, using technology". They use greenhouses, robotics, automation and AI to optimise everything about the plant growth process including energy consumption. Tom Kendall is the director of hardware engineering at IronOx. He oversees multiple teams at IronOx and has over 10 years of experience building/managing hardware. He also worked as a process engineer at Apple. In this episode we talk about: - IronOx and what makes them unique in their farming approach. - The development process of their new farm robot Grover. - The daily life of a director of hardware engineering & how to manage multiple teams. - What it was like to work at Apple as a process engineer on the Iphone. - Advice to build hardware at different scales & more. Tune in to get all the details Jump to major sections: Apple: Minute 0. IronOx and his role: Minute 20 Developing robot Grover: Minute 39 Managing Teams & General learnings: 108. Follow us on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/productpioneers_/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-pioneers Website: http://productpioneerspodcast.com

In this episode we take a closer look at what is needed for a successful crowdfunding campaign via Kickstarter or Indigogo and look at the different steps needed if you want to bring your hardware product to life. Our guest is Joshua Fairbairn CEO MorphpMFG, a turnkey solution provider offering a start-to-finish product experience including prototyping, sourcing, mass manufacturing, IP protection, and more for production in China. We also look at how he started the company and their secret for success - the Component Control Method. This episode is special because it adds insights into the later product development cycle especially when it comes to hardware based products. If you want to work with them, make sure to use this email and subject line to get a discount: bryant@morphomfg.com | Subject-line: CodeBerlinXMorphoMFG21. Let's tune in together. **Follow us on:** **Instagram** https://www.instagram.com/productpioneers_/ **LinkedIn** https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-pioneers **Our Website:** productpioneerspodcast.com

In this episode we have the Head of Product from Treecard Jessica Carta on the show. TreeCard is a debit card that puts 80% of profits directly to responsible reforestation projects through the help of Ecosia. By 2026, they aim to plant one billion trees. Jessica is a passionate payments and fintech product professional with **10+ years creating, building, and launching fintech products across the globe.** In this episode we look at the story of Treecard, why they choose treeplanting as a mean to tackle climate change, talk about Human Centered Design and how Treecard uses it to build the leading green finance brand. Tune in to learn more. Follow us on: Instagram: www.instagram.com/productpioneers Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/product-pioneers Website: productpioneerspodcast.com

Mirela Mus is the founder of Product People a Product Management community and consultancy firm. **Product People** helps companies to discover and deliver great products faster. They do all the hands-on and unglamorous work of a Product Manager/Owner on an Interim* basis (3-36 months). We onboard fast, align teams, and deliver outcomes. Product People is also a product community with 7k+ members with the goal to share knowledge generously. They are on track to become one of the biggest product communities in Germany. **Mirela** is a Technical and creative product leader who built and scaled customer-centric products, experiences, and teams. On behalf of product people she gained experience at: Tier, Zalando, Scout24, DrSmile, Omio, & HeyCar to name only a few. In this episode we talk about how Mirela started Product People, what it is about, how they work internally and what makes a good Product Manager and how to hire them. Tune in to get all the details! Follow us on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/productpioneers_/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-pioneers Our Website: productpioneerspodcast.com

In this Episode we have another CODE Startup on the show. Our guests are Vincent Amm (Co-Founder) and Daniel Reichhart (Lead Front-End Engineer) from Tokenstreet. Tokenstreet is an investment app that allows the general public to invest in opportunities that were previously only available to the ultra wealthy (e.g. Venture Capital, Private Equity, Real Estate). The founding team, Daniel and other team members are all CODE University students. We talk about their journey so far, how they approach product development, why they launched a waiting list, how they got funding and what their future plans are. Tune in to get all the details. Tokenstreet Website: http://tokenstreet.com/ Download the App: Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/tokenstreet/id1549557098 Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tokenstreet.main Follow us on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/productpioneers_/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-pioneers Our Website: productpioneerspodcast.com

This episode is all about NFT´s (non-fungible tokens)and three PM frameworks you probably haven´t heard of. Our guest today is Daud Zulfacar, the founder of License Rocks. He breathes blockchain and decentralized technology and has founded numerous startups before. License Rocks uses NFT´s for licensing software and currently develops a new product sweet (listen to learn more). In this episode we cover the basics of NFT´s understand what the hype is about and how License Rocks fits into the picture. We also cover three PM frameworks that Daud developed and uses himself: - Treppenstrategie: A Roadmapping/ product validation and financing method. - Cacha Days - A Team Empowerment Method - DEFF Concept - A design and product development approach. If you want to learn all about NFT´s and the above frameworks, give it listen! You can contact Daud on: Email:daud@licenserocks Twitter:twitter.com/zulfacar Factory Slack: Daud Zulfacar Book recommendation: Start With Why - Simon Sinek Follow us on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/productpioneers_/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-pioneers Our Website: productpioneerspodcast.com

Our guest in this Episode is Stuart Johnson. He is the Senior Product Manager for Search at Ecosia, our favourite planet friendly search engine that plants trees. He is an open source developer by heart and was a physics teacher before he built two startups of his own in the Ed Tech space. In this Episode we talked about the similarities of being a teacher, a physicist and a product manager, the influence of a purpose company on the product management role, dove deep into the development of Ecosia´s Green Leaf feature and how search can nudge people into more sustainable behaviours. If you want to become a product manager in a purpose/sustainability company you don´t want to miss it. Let us tune in.

Our guest in this episode is Lorena Mata Garcia. She was one of the first product managers at Infarm which is now the biggest vertical farming company in the world. Until a month ago of recording this episode, Lorena worked at Infarm as an internal product manager. She built the software infrastructure that took Infarm from a single warehouse with no software, to a global corporation in 10 countries in less than 3 years. Using a mix of off-the-rack and custom-built software, she implemented the processes and tools to power production, operations, sales, inventory. In other words, she built software and mobile apps for internal users. She leads a team of off-shore developers, consultants, and in-house PMs, and helped Infarm become the world's largest vertical farming company, with a growth of over 1,000% percent during her tenancy. As some of you know indoor farming is also the passion topic for our Host Simon. He is also the co-founder of an indoor farming startup, building indoor farms for offices. This episode provides pure gold in terms of learning more about the scale-up phase of an indoor farming/hardware startup, therefore definitely give it a listen. Follow us on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/productpioneers_/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-pioneers Our Website: productpioneerspodcast.com

In this episode, we talked about the life at consulting and venture firms like BCG and Rocket internet, how they differ from founding your own startup and what we can learn from them. Nina Zavrieva is our very own Senior Lecturer and Startup Coach for the product management department at CODE University. Previously she worked at BCG - Boston Consulting Group for example building a material sourcing platform a.o, and at rocket internet building Lamoda the biggest online fashion brand in Russia as part of the managing team. She also worked at her own startup channel kit and at CEO of Ventures Lab - a venture builder Follow us on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/productpioneers_/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-pioneers Our Website: productpioneerspodcast.com

Manosai Eerabathini is a product manager at google, working on Google map and is based out of Boston. He Previously, built music tech at vevo and enterprise email products at Microsoft. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in Networked and Social Systems Engineering. He has over 7 years of hands-on product experience in a wide range of domains. He has a passion for new product development on 0 to 1 projects, whether enterprise or consumer-focused. In his spare time, he enjoys playing basketball and traveling. We will talk about how he got into product management, the importance of soft skills, and his thoughts on early-stage vs later-stage product development. Please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Manosai Eerabathini. Follow Manosai on Twitter: https://twitter.com/manosaie?lang=en Follow us on: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/productpioneers_/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/product-pioneers Our Website: productpioneerspodcast.com

Welcome to a new Episode and a new Season celebrating 1 year Birthday of the Product Pioneers Podcast. Our Guest today is Tetiana Boliukh. She is the founder and idea originator of this podcast and a Product Management student at CODE. We talk about how she started this podcast, what went into it and what makes a great podcast. Additionally, we talk about the new direction of the Product Pioneers Podcast, Season 2, and our new Host Simon Heuschkel. Simon is a Product Management Student at CODE and the co-founder of Susteyn.io, a young indoor farming startup. Visit our brand new website: productpioneerspodcast.com Follow Tetiana on: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tetiana-boliukh/

Being in a product management role demands a lot from you as a PM, it requires you to wear many hats, and deal with many stakeholders. Your role also changes depending on the industry you’re in, and changes as you grow within the organization you’re part of. In today’s episode, we focus particularly on fintech as an industry. We opened a discussion on how to prepare ourselves to get into fintech as a non-technical PM, how to work with different departments that share similar roles or tasks, the importance of emotional intelligence, and many more!Our guest today has a massive experience from both the business and technical development areas. this is why she is the perfect guest to talk about this particular topic. Chiedza Muguti is the Head of product at PENTA, the digital platform for business banking aimed at SMEs and startups. Their vision is to build a platform of connected services around a bank account which would allow business owners to use one platform for all their financial needs. It is designed to let business owners save time and money on banking so that they can focus more on their core business.

What are the outcome goals? And what’s the difference between being outcome-driven and output-driven? How does that affect PMs, teams, and management? These are some of the questions we asked Product management expert Tim Herbig on today’s episode! We also talked about the reality of working with the popular methods used by PMs today and the importance of choosing ways that fit the team, company vision, and the product we’re working on. Check TIm's website for more https://herbig.co/