AI narratives, agency, and why product people still matter

Turn and face the strange - opening remarks from product at heart 2026

Every year, before we plan a single session, my co-organizer Arne Kittler and I sit with one question: which word best describes where product management stands right now? Curiosity in 2023. Courage in 2024. Curation last year. This year, the word came fast: CHANGE.

These are the opening remarks from Product at Heart 2026, our ninth year running the conference together in Hamburg. We opened cold, with David Bowie's "Changes" played live in the room, and used it as the thread through everything that followed - the AI doomsday narratives everyone in the room had been quietly carrying, why those narratives are stories and not facts, and why product people have more authorship over what happens next than most people realize.

We've put together a few ways to engage with it below - a video recording, the slides, and the full written transcript. Pick whichever works for you, and please share it with anyone you think would get something out of it.

Recordings

  • Product at Heart 2026, Hamburg

 

Talk Slides

[SLIDES EMBED - pending export]

TRANSCRIPT

(Final - built from the delivered moderation script, opening-remarks segment only. Petra confirmed Aug 21 this stays as-is, it's exactly what was said.)

Petra: Good morning and welcome to Product at Heart 2026! We know... this was an unconventional conference opening.

Arne: You've just heard David Bowie's "Changes." Played live, in this room, by La Saxa - thank you for that. We chose this song deliberately. You'll hear why in a moment. My name is Arne, and together with Petra, I'm running this conference. We curate it, we organize it, we host it. And we've been doing so for nine years. Some of you have been with us since the beginning - for others this is your first time. Either way: we're really glad you made it.

Petra: Every year... before we start planning anything, we sit with one question: which word best describes where the product management profession stands right now? In 2023... the word that described the status well was Curiosity. Because we believe this is a very crucial personality trait for a successful career in product. In 2024 we've picked Courage, because we believe courageous product people build stronger, bolder products. And last year it was Curation. Because saying no to things and yes to others means curating experiences for millions of users, and we better make these curation decisions intentional ones.

Arne: And this year, the word came quickly, it's obvious. It's CHANGE. Which is why we opened with Bowie. You already guessed it. It is not the first time our industry goes through substantial change. We've had changes in our ways of working and in how the internet and software works. We've had agile. We've had user generated content. We've had mobile. We've had remote. Each of those was disruptive. Each of them asked for some real CHANGE from product people and their teams.

Those former changes hit one dimension at a time. What's happening now... and the speed of things changing seems faster than ever, and does therefore confront each and every one of you with the question of: how much and how fast. And if we're reading the room right, most of you brought it with you when you walked in this morning.

Petra: We're not going to pretend we have the full answers to any of these questions yet. But we'd love to explore them together. And with today's program we want to do so. And we want to offer perspective.

We know right now things feel pretty overwhelming, and many people are subscribing to the AI doomsday narratives: it will influence how we think and replace our judgment, it will decide who gets hired without anyone knowing why, it will raise our kids and maybe not in a good way through screens, it will quietly rewrite what's true. But we don't think you have to accept any of these narratives as inevitable futures. There's a difference between a risk worth taking seriously - and a future you've decided is already written. We want to remind you that the future is not a place out there, waiting to happen to us. The future is a story. A story that gets told and retold - until someone starts building toward it.

Arne: Which brings us to one particular line from our opening song. A line we'd like you to carry through today. First: we want to ask you to embrace the strange. When things feel uncertain, the instinct is to settle quickly on a story and stop looking, stop listening. We're asking you to stay with the strangeness. And observe. The strangeness of a new thought, an uncomfortable conversation, a take shared on stage that might not be yours. Stay with them a little longer than you usually would. Don't close it down too fast. Second: take that same willingness and point it outward. The loudest stories about AI are everywhere right now, and the easy thing is to just follow them. We're asking you to look past the loudest stories, and stay curious about where they even came from. Some of the stories currently shaping the AI industry weren't designed as visions for where we should go. They were borrowed from films, from fiction - some of them written explicitly as warnings. And they're now being treated as roadmaps. We'd encourage all of you to look at those stories more closely - and not just pass them on.

Petra: When for example OpenAI unveiled a new ChatGPT voice interface in 2024, Sam Altman posted one word on X. "her." Twenty-one million views. He wasn't describing a product feature. He was pointing at a film. A 2013 Spike Jonze movie called "Her" - in which a man falls in love with his AI assistant. Jonze wrote it as a meditation on loneliness and lack of connection. On what happens when technology starts filling the spaces that human relationships leave behind. It was not written as a product specification. It was not meant as a vision for how we should build. Some of those series and movies were written explicitly as warnings. (Hello Black Mirror.) And yet here was the CEO of the most influential AI company in the world, pointing at it and saying: "This is the direction. This is what we're building toward."

Arne: Johannes Kleske, a futurist that spoke at our Leadership Event in April, summed this up quite well: "If we don't invent the future, someone else will do it for us. And it will be their future, not ours."

Petra: So we invite you to challenge the current AI narratives. We can decide to not step into them, and we can decide to write our own. Brighter futures that are worth building towards. Let us share some ideas on how to do so: go look for beauty. Ruthlessly. There are stories out there - in your industry, in your organization, maybe even in your own product work - where technology made someone's life better. Find those stories. And then tell it to the mountain. Share them on LinkedIn, in your team retros, in your one-on-ones, at dinner tonight. The dystopian narratives travel fast because fear spreads easily. The bright ones need a push. Give them one.

Arne: And while amplifying the positive, make it a habit to not share, spread, and contribute to the darker ones. Not every dark prediction needs your attention. Not every doomsday thread deserves to be reshared. You can take a risk seriously without amplifying it. Build a little teflon. One practice that helps: keep a bright signals file. A running list where you collect the examples that remind you things can go well.

Petra: And when none of that is working - when you're in a really dark spot and the noise is too loud - turn to art. There is more optimistic science fiction out there than you might think. Stories about technology in the hands of people who used it well. Becky Chambers, Cyrus Kabiru, Andy Weir - a whole corner of the internet calls it Solarpunk or Afrofuturism. Let it rewire a few of your brain cells. So turn and face the strange, don't emphasize the dark, contribute to the light.

Arne: And we want to start that work right here, today. Every speaker we've invited into this room is, in some way, a bright signal. Someone who looked at what's changing and chose to build toward something better. So let us tell you what we've put together for you.

(Programme overview, housekeeping, and partner thanks follow - kept out of this transcript excerpt since they're logistics rather than part of the talk itself. Happy to include the full segment if Petra wants it complete.)

TALK INSPIRATION - AS MENTIONED IN THE OPENING

TALK DESCRIPTION

Short Description
Most people walked into Product at Heart 2026 carrying some version of the same question: what does all this AI change actually mean for me, my team, my company? In these opening remarks, Petra Wille and her co-organizer Arne Kittler name the AI doomsday narratives everyone's been quietly circling - and make the case for why none of them are inevitable. The future isn't a place waiting to happen to us. It's a story. And product people have more authorship over that story than most people realize.

Long Description
Product at Heart picks a word every year to describe where the product management profession stands. Curiosity. Courage. Curation. In 2026, the word came fast: CHANGE.

In these opening remarks, delivered live in Hamburg to open the conference's ninth edition, Petra Wille and co-organizer Arne Kittler name what most of the room walked in carrying: a low hum of AI anxiety, and the dominant doomsday narratives currently doing the rounds - job loss, replaced judgment, a rewritten sense of what's true.

They don't dismiss the anxiety. They take it seriously, then reframe it. The future isn't a fixed destination waiting to happen to us. It's a story, and stories get written by whoever is willing to build toward a different version. Product people, who design the software much of the world now runs on, have more authorship over that story than most people realize.

The talk closes with a concrete practice: go looking for the human stories where technology actually helped someone, and share them louder than the dark ones.