The Rise of the Product Builder

About the event: A conversation with Kate Ivanova (Manychat) and Sabin Roman (Linear) about the role that's quietly forming in the gap between product and engineering, and what it takes to do it well. The "Product Builder" doesn't have a clean definition yet. It's the PM who now prototypes, contributes more and more to production code, and no longer throws specs over a wall. It's the engineer who uses AI to scope and prioritize their own work without waiting on a roadmap. The line between who decides what to build and who builds it is blurring fast, and AI is the thing dissolving it.

Kate is a Product Leader at Manychat with 9+ years building and scaling B2B and B2C products. She's been pushing this boundary in the open, prototyping with AI agents, shipping things that used to require an engineer, and writing candidly about how AI compresses the path from idea to working software down to a week.

Sabin is the first Engineering Manager at Linear, and an Uber alum. Linear was a different experiment entirely: there was no PM role at all, and now only 2 people for 50 or so engineers. Engineers are hired for strong product instincts, and the company runs on principles rather than process, which makes it one of the clearest live examples of what "everyone is a product builder" actually looks like.

Two people experiencing the same shift from opposite ends. Since the industry hasn't scoped this role yet, we'll learn from two people defining it in real time: what the work actually involves day to day, where it breaks down, which skills suddenly matter (and which stop), and how AI keeps rewriting the boundary between product and engineering, sprint by sprint.

This is an in-person event

Location: StartDock Singel

Address: Singel 126, 1015 AE Amsterdam

Date: 25 June 2026, Thursday

Time: 18:00