Product for Engineers IRL: Milan
Software product development is changing. What is the new reality, and are you fully embracing it?
Join PostHog for an evening of honest, practical conversation about what it actually means to be a product engineer — in person, over food and drinks in Milan. Talks will be in English.
Speakers will share real talks on building a product engineering culture and what engineers consistently get wrong (and right) about their craft. The Product for Engineers newsletter inspired this event, and we'll cover other topics from it as well.
The event is in collaboration with The Product Engineers Podcast
What to expect:
Talks + Q&A
Open discussion with local software product engineering enthusiasts
Food, drinks, and networking
Schedule:
18:00 - Arrivo presso Spazio 78
18:30 - Inizio talks
20:00 - Aperitivo di networking
Talks
Talk: Stop Snacking. Start Cooking. AI killed the busywork — now there's nowhere left to hide
AI is really good at the kind of work a lot of us fill our days with — small bugs, quick fixes, tiny improvements.
The uncomfortable truth: that was often the easiest way to feel productive without actually moving the needle.
In this talk, I'll show what happens when that layer of work disappears — and when AI also makes the hardest part of real engineering work, understanding problems, much faster through pattern recognition and correlation.
What's left is the work that actually defines your product: building the right things and making sure they work reliably.
You'll leave with a simple shift in mindset: it's no longer about doing more — it's about deciding what actually matters.
Speaker: Meikel Ratz (Product engineer, PostHog)
Talk: You're Not Ready for AI
Cursor, Codex, Claude, Copilot. In four years, we've adopted them so fast that we can barely remember how we used to work before.
The problem is we're using them on top of foundations that don't hold up: AI doesn't solve the problems a team had before, but it amplifies them.
In this talk, we'll look at why, before bringing AI into our development processes, we need to "tidy up our house," room by room. Does the codebase have a coherent structure, or is the AI working blind? Are the automated tests reliable? How do we work as a team? Are we measuring the impact of our work, or just the output?
You'll go home knowing what could be improved in your team, and where to start tidying up.
Speaker: Peppe Silletti (Independent Product Engineer & Host @ The Product Engineers Podcast)
Talk: Build to Know What Not to Build
What and why remain the PM's focus. What's changing is how they're interpreted: the what isn't written in a doc anymore, it's prototyped. And getting there requires tech discovery alongside customer discovery.
The why is also grounded in alignment with other business functions, not just the voice of the user.
Product Builder and Product Engineer are the evolution of the role, distinguished only by their origin.
Teams come together fluidly based on how measurable the output is. I'll tell you how it really works inside Datapizza, as we try to replace €10k/seat of LinkedIn Recruiter.
Speaker: Davide Sala, Product Manager at Datapizza 🍕
One more speaker coming soon
See you there!