Product Discovery at the Speed of Code: Prototyping in the Age of AI
Free, 60-minute session. Ian Pilon, founder of VoiceClaw and former forward-deployed engineer at Input Output (the company behind Cardano), sits down with Eran Dror to argue about whether AI can actually replace what a human sees embedded inside a customer's operation, and what that means for how Product teams run discovery now that building is no longer the bottleneck.
Every AI lab selling autonomy is quietly hiring forward-deployed engineers. That's an admission: the hard part was never the model. It's knowing what to build, for whom, inside which workflow. Ian has lived that gap from both sides: two years running product design for Cardano's decentralized identity and wallet products, then solo in the field building VoiceClaw for trades and trucking owner-operators.
This one gets concrete, not theoretical. What field context looks like when it never makes it into a ticket, a transcript, or a survey. Whether AI transcript analysis can actually replace embedding a person as a company scales from 50 to 500, or whether that's wishful thinking dressed up as a roadmap. And what changes when the prototype becomes the interview: build in hours, put it in front of the operator, watch, revise.
Casual and cameras-off. Drop questions in chat as you go, live Q&A at the end.
Here's What You'll Walk Away With
The forward-deployed engineer tell. Why every AI lab is hiring FDEs while marketing autonomy, and what that quietly admits about where the real work still lives.
What never makes it into a ticket. The contextual intelligence an FDE picks up inside a customer's operation, with stories from IOHK's blockchain customers and Ian's trades and trucking accounts.
The 50-to-500 problem. Which field signals actually scale (sales and support calls, usage, community, in-product feedback) and which don't, plus the live argument over whether AI transcript analysis can stand in for a person on the ground.
Discovery as a build discipline. Why the prototype should be the interview: build in hours, put it in front of the operator, watch, revise.
What it does to the org chart. PM headcount growing faster than engineering, who owns context, and what a PM's job becomes once making things stops being the bottleneck.
A field-ready playbook. Three moves a Head of Product at a 100-person company can run next quarter to get FDE-grade context without hiring FDEs.
Live Q&A. Bring the question you'd ask a forward-deployed engineer if you had one on staff.
Who Should Join?
Heads of Product and VPs of Product at 50 to 500 person companies
PMs who want real field context without a forward-deployed engineering team
Product leaders deciding how PM and engineering headcount should split as AI changes both
Anyone who sat through an AI transcript analysis demo and still isn't sure they believe it
Founders who need discovery to move as fast as they can now ship
No technical background required.
About the Speakers
Ian Pilon is the founder of VoiceClaw, a voice AI system that gives mid-market owner-operators, in trades and trucking, a second brain they can talk to. Before VoiceClaw he spent three years at Input Output (IOHK), the company behind the Cardano blockchain: two as Head of Product Design leading a 10-person team across its decentralized identity, wallet, and governance products, then as a forward-deployed engineer and Senior AI Solution Architect embedded directly with customers. He is the author of Cultivating Clarity: The Art of Discerning What Matters Using Contextual Intelligence, drawing on interviews with nine industry experts including Jeff Jonas, Nick Shackleton-Jones, and Bob Moesta. He also founded the AI Agents Waterloo community and co-founded ETHWaterloo, the world's largest Ethereum hackathon.
Eran Dror is the Co-Founder & CEO of Evermuse, an AI product intelligence company. He is also the Managing Partner of Remake Ventures, a venture studio focused on building human-centered startups. He has helped 40+ startups raise $300M+ by finding product-market fit, including his first exit SetJam, a smart TV startup that sold to Motorola in 2012.