Product Agility

Blagoja Golubovski: Redesigning Product Orgs for the AI Era — Turn Your Team from Cost Center to Revenue Engine - Productized 2025 TalkInTen

• Ben Maynard, Barbara Fazeka, Blagoja Golubovski

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In this Talk in Ten from Productised 2025, we sit down with Blagoja Golubovski (Head of Product, Usercentrics) to explore how product organisations must redesign themselves for the AI era. Together, they unpack the move from outputs to outcomes, how AI accelerates change, and why product teams must learn to speak the language of revenue.

Key topics discussed

  • Shifting from output-centric to outcome-driven product management
  • How product teams become growth engines rather than cost centres
  • What the “AI era” means for product org structure and skills
  • Blurring of roles: designers, engineers and PMs collaborating differently
  • Using automation and AI to free time for value-driven decisions

Guest Bio:
Blagoja Golubovski — Head of Product at Usercentrics, where he leads teams focused on building privacy-first solutions that deliver measurable business impact. With a background in scaling product organisations, Blagoja explores how AI and automation can transform product teams into true growth engines.

Co-host:
Barbara Fazeka — Co-founder and CEO of Bobcats Coding. Barbara helps teams adopt revenue-focused product practices and drives conversations about how AI reshapes product organisations.

Thanks to our sponsor:
Bobcats Coding — a Budapest-based digital product studio specialising in AI engineering and end-to-end digital product development. Download their latest AI Economics Guidebook for free at bobcatscoding.com

We’re honoured to partner once again with Productized and thrilled to bring more Talk in Ten conversations live from Lisbon.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast where we explore the ever changing world of product leadership and org design, helping you navigate complexity and build better outcomes for your people and your customers. This week we're coming to you live from Lisbon for the third year in a row at the Productize conference where I'm grabbing 10 minute conversations with product thinkers, leaders and innovators from around the world. These quick fire chats are all about what's shaping our industry right now, from AI and product strategy to the human side of building great products. Now a huge thank you goes out to Bobcatz Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest and Lisbon based digital product studio specializing in AI engineering and end to end digital product development. They're also on a mission to educate the market, exploring a new topic every six months and this fall is no exception. Their latest AI economics guidebook is out now and you can download it for free@bobcatscoding.com now here's your talk in 10. We're here with Blagoya. Hi. Hi. Yeah, it's day workshop day of the Productise conference. I'm getting towards the end of our day and we're here at blagoia because your talk title is very enticing and we'll get into that in a second, but I'm joined with Barbara who is co host, co founder and CEO of Bobcat's Coding. Welcome again, Barbara. Thank you for having me. And I'm excited about talking to you because I have so many questions regarding your talk. And the interesting thing is I think that if we just recorded the conversation that was had earlier between these two, we'd probably have an episode done. Unfortunately, we didn't. So we're here to kind of go through some of that again. So would you mind giving us and our listeners a bit of an insight into what your talk tomorrow is all about? Excellent. Yes. Thank you for having me. So my talk tomorrow will focus on some challenging questions and a little provocative. How do we move our product org from being a cost center to a revenue engine? So how do we adjust our product orgs in this new era with all the fancy tools and all the changes this speed, everything that's happening with this era of AI and how do we stay relevant? How do we keep up with automation and how do we stay relevant as a product team in the future? So my opening question for you is, what's the biggest structural change you think that product organizations need to make to really thrive in this new era of AI? First thing, the most Important thing is to transition from managing outputs to managing outcomes. So you might have heard this term, it's been used quite a bit out there. But the idea is that instead of continue to build features, which is not really your moat, you need to build value for your customers and ask a question that basically should drive any decision. As a product team that you make, how do we do anything that moves the needle for our customers? Does it save them money or does it make them money? If it doesn't, it doesn't belong on the roadmap. You are head of product at User Centrics, right? Correct? Yeah. And I guess I already met a few colleagues of yours down there and like, you're kind of mentor to them as well, I believe. And like, how do you help your team to not to think about revenue as a swear word and salespeople as enemies. So, like, what's your strategy as a product leader to do that? Very good question. So we come from the current structure with product teams is delivering. Everything is focused around delivery. Do it faster, do more, do more. And what we're missing as a product function is flipping that upside down and instead of doing more, do the things that actually matter and to find out what matters. It's an art on its own and that's what we're here to do. So changing that mindset from just go faster, deliver faster, deliver to find the one thing that actually makes an impact. It's all about value to customers. It's all about saving or making money for your paying customers. You can skip this question if you want. I'm not quite sure how it's going to come out, but your talk, your subtitle, is Redesigning Product orgs for the AI Era. If you had to explain what the AI era is to somebody, how on earth would you explain that? The era of AI is a time where we have these very powerful tools that are able to synthesize a lot of information very, very fast and that changes the game in what we can actually do. It doesn't replace anybody, it just makes things faster. It gives you the opportunity to shift the groundwork to a space that automation can do it for you. It opens up time for you as a product team to focus on the things that matter. Judgment, taste, value. I like the fact that you're including automation in the bracket of AI because it's nice to have a distinction coming from someone other than myself. So I'd like to thank you for bringing that up. What experience then has led you to being in a position where you Wanted to come and give a talk at Productized on this topic. I think that we're at an inflection point where we, as a product of organizations, the product function, need to start talking about the language of revenue. My talk focuses a lot on how do we transition from cost center to growth engine and what that really means, what that really implies is that we need to be seen as the team that grows the business, not just the cost center of executing things. That's the delivery to outcome shift. So. So I believe that we don't talk about this enough. And without having those conversations now, we are going to lose relevance as the new time of era kind of unfolds. So in a way, and you can correct me if I'm kind of going down an alley here, which is maybe incorrect, but AI is a Trojan horse in some respects for getting the change that we've always needed. It's a disruptor. Yes, it is. It's accelerating the shift of mindset that should have been there from the beginning. Yeah. So we know we want to go from output to outcomes, and we're using this opportunity with AI to expediate that and find ways to enable it. So it is a disruptor. AI is a scary thing, but it's also acting as a great enabler for change if the hypothesis being is if we can harness that in the right way. That's right. I say that AI really has accelerated the timeline. And it also puts highlights. If you have a bad strategy, AI will tell you immediately. It's not going to fix your strategy, but it will tell you you don't have one. And I'm curious what you think about this. Do you think in the AI era we have to distribute product skills more evenly in the organization? Because my experience is that we do a product studio and I cannot sell developers anymore who don't speak the product language. So, like the setup when there is a product manager babysitting five developers, it's over. That's what I feel. Do you have this sense in your organization? So. So if you have a product manager that babysits engineers, that's not a product manager. Okay, that's the first thing. But to your earlier point, I think that the lines are getting very much blurred between functions, especially on the product organization, the adjacent functions, whether it's a product management or design or engineering or research, everybody can do everybody's job to a point. And AI is enabling that. You have a product manager doing prototyping, you have a designer doing some testing, you have an engineer talking to a customer, these lines are starting to blur. Obviously, each of these functions have their own specialty, but that collaboration, that gelling on function to operate as a unit, I think it's what is going to make or break teams to be successful or not. We're getting dangerously close to our time on this one, which is unfortunate because with so many of the talks in 10 that we've done at Productize, we just feel that we're skimming on the surface of something much deeper and more impactful. And I think that if there was a way that anyone could listen to your talk other than be here, I think they would try and figure that out. So my last question to you is, are you giving your talk anywhere else? Have you given anywhere previously in case those people that aren't here kind of want to experience the full fat version? And what do you have to say? This talk, it's I'm giving this talk for the first time here at this conference, so I have not given it before. It will premiere here at productize in 2025. But I'm looking forward to speaking more and opening the conversation. So if people are interested in hearing more or maybe having you come into organizations or do something, you'll have open to offers, I take it? Absolutely, yes. Amazing. Great. Well, everyone, thank you so much for coming along. And Barbara, once again, thank you for being a wonderful co host. We will be back again with another talking 10 from productized in the very, very immediate future, I suspect so.

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Ben Maynard

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