Get ready for the era of the product creator
In the opening keynote session at #mtpcon London 2026, Christian Idiodi, partner at Silicon Valley Product Group and co-author of Transform, opened with a talk arguing that product management is entering a new era, which demands a mindset shift from all product people.
Watch the video in full, or read on for his key points.
Oh Product how you’ve changed…
Christian opened with a character scenario. Jim is a product manager. He wakes up, checks Slack, and learns the web app they deployed last night is down. What follows is a day of war rooms, cancelled customer meetings, status updates for sales managers in Europe, vending machine lunches, and a 6:30pm call with his partner to cancel dinner. "Somewhere inside," Christian said, "Jim knows tomorrow is just another version of today."
Product management, Christian believes, has drifted from creation to coordination, such as admin work, writing requirements documents, and attending alignment meetings. He challenged the room to think how much of their work is something they’re making happen, versus something that is happening to them.
Three forces coming together
Christian sees today in product, as an era shift driven by three forces arriving at once, which is completely changing the game.
- Every industry is now technology powered: Too many organisations still treat technology as a support function for "the business." Companies that treat technology as a profit centre will win, Christian believes. “Technology is the business,” he stresses.
- AI's impact on the economics of work. AI is compressing timelines, reducing headcount assumptions, intensifying competition, and amplifying the cost of building the wrong thing faster. It is not, Christian argued, a downsizing moment for the discipline.
- More efficiency = More demand. As AI makes building easier, customers demand more, and faster. The myth that AI will eliminate product work misreads this entirely. “The more people you do something, the more people want it,” Christian noted, citing Jevons paradox.
Creator or consumer, the choice is yours
Quoting Chip Huyen, Author, AI Engineering, Christian added, “AI makes building easier, but the hardest part remains, knowing what to build. A strong product mindset is now more important than ever.”
Christian described a family experiment called ‘AI Thursdays’ where his teenage children aren't allowed dinner until they've created something with AI. He learned from this experiment that there will only be two groups that emerge from the AI era: creators and consumers.
“You have to choose which group you want to fall into,” he said.
What AI is accelerating vs what it isn’t
AI is meant to help you become a better thinker. This includes improving your judgement, amplifying your creativity, and increasing your productivity, he stressed, “The tools are giving us the ability to get the thoughts out of our head. However there are many key skills that AI cannot replace.”
Caption: a breakdown of the skills Christian believes AI accelerates vs what it cannot replace
Christian identified three core imperatives to hone in on as a product professional when AI won’t stop improving:
- Understanding your customer: knowing what it takes to build a good product for your customer within the constraints of your environment.
- Business acumen: Understand full range of stakeholder constraints & needs, including GTM, financial, legal, and compliance.
- Your product: Being the go-to expert on the product that you’re working on.
The things that stay the same, are still changing
Throughout his session Christian reiterated that strategy, discovery, and human skills are still critical for a product to succeed. However, he broke down how each one of these three skills is changing due to AI.
“In the era of the product creator, it is important to remember that we are all product builders,” Christian added.
Another area Christian believes is changing is the way we build. He explained how Product Managers and Designers should be responsible for building the learn, while engineers build to earn.
- Now, product managers must focus on framing better problems, evaluate AI-enabled solution spaces, assess ethical visibility risk, and lead discovery with greater speed.
- While designers must design for human-AI interaction, make intelligence usable, design trust and transparency, and reduce cognitive load.
- Tech leads must understand AI capabilities and limits, architect for experimentation, manage data pipelines, and guard against technical and data debt.
- On leaders, Christian stressed that you cannot demand innovation while requiring exhaustive roadmaps, neither can you expect ownership while micromanaging every decision.
Caption: Christian breaks down how different teams should build.
The memory that lights you up matters
Christian closed by asking the room to remember the last time work felt good. Going back to his introductory scenario, for Jim, it was Covid-19. Revenue had dropped 25% due to lockdown restrictions, so the leadership gave the team a real problem to solve. His team built a tool that let customers evaluate products online instead of in-store. Revenue recovered. The company grew. Jim lit up telling the story, Christian explained.
“Whatever your version of that memory is, that was the last time you felt like a creator.”
That, Christian argued, is what the discipline of product is actually for.
