Last month, I attended the 2025 edition of the Product Management Festival in Zurich. AI was omnipresent on almost every stage, so about time to jot down two thoughts to see how they age.

Is the “Problem first, solution second” principle dead?

Many talks and presentations felt like a shift away from the “Problem first, solution second” principle. A principle I heavily rely on in my approach to product management - discovering needs through research, prioritizing problems, and focusing on building solutions that drive outcomes.

With the advent of generative AI we are witnessing the reversal of the “building is extremely expensive” economy. The cost of producing (many) first drafts - whether it’s code, service design, or a policy draft - has plummeted to near zero. Collapsing the “do” phase of the plan, do, study, act cycle from weeks into minutes. So let’s skip the problem space and test an array of prototypes to learn? It is so tempting, it feels so rewarding to quickly generate something “tangible”.

These are some of the reasons why this solution focus, to me, feels like a dangerous shortcut:

  • Technology is moving towards the center of attention, but technology can be adapted, while user needs stay rather constant.
  • With a solution focus, we often forget to simplify (the hard work), by doing so, we risk optimizing the wrong parts.
  • And finally, at least in government, let us not forget the element of trust. A unit gained in spoons but lost in buckets.

So my take, no the principle is not dead: the rigor understanding of the problem space and the prioritization of the right problems will turn out to be a key differentiator for the product your building.

Especially in the times when building gets cheaper and probably more solutions will compete for user attention.

Is the one-fits all user interface dead?

With his artistic and well-crafted story, Michael Baeyens talk “Interface ZERO (UI0): The Rise of Invisible Products in the Age of AI” renders a future where there are no standard user interfaces as we know them today - everything is highly personalized, created on the fly, and specific for the context. What at first sounds like the dream - a world in which the user tells us what he needs/wants - makes product management a lot more fluid. No standard interface or journey the user follows, no UI/UX that differentiates. So we need to design for the new intermediate(s)?

My take: you must double down on improving the value-creating core of your product.

And now?

To state the obvious, AI, as a tool, can help you with both and it will change the script. So lets end with this: we will need to respond to change rather than following the plan we thought we had about building products - and that, for once, feels like pleasant old news.