Hey!
Welcome to your monthly dose of product wisdom, straight from the dualoop team.
As 2025 draws to a close, one theme stands out. The teams that made real progress this year focused on fundamentals: clear strategy, solid discovery, stronger teams, and tools used with intention.
This edition closes the year with some topics that shaped the work we saw in 2025 and the ones that will define 2026.
Let's get into it 🔥
🚨 What's up in product?
Building AI products that users actually adopt
AI kept everyone busy in 2025, but what mattered far more was whether users actually integrated those features into their daily workflow.
Tey Bannerman, AI strategy, product & design leader, advisor & ex-McKinsey partner, shared a simple truth: most AI initiatives fail because they start from the model, not the problem. Here are the essentials.
Too many teams build “AI features” that appear impressive on paper but fail to solve anything meaningful. The result is predictable: usage spikes for a week, then falls sharply, and adoption never truly takes hold.
1. Start with validated friction
Have a look at
- tasks that take far too long for the value they create
- places where users “soft abandon”
- repeated searches, showing the system fails to understand intent
- the work users do outside the product that should happen inside it
2. Make AI disappear
The most effective AI in 2025 wasn’t branded as AI.
Tey’s favourite example: grocery search. Customers often typed natural language queries like “purple vegetable”, and the search engine returned irrelevant results. Instead of adding a chatbot or a visible AI assistant, the team built an intent layer behind the existing search bar.
No new UI, no “Ask AI” button - just a search that finally worked the way customers expected, leading to a major uplift in usage and conversion.
3. Match ambition with reality
AI can generate, classify, predict, interpret, but:
- costs can explode
- latency kills UX
- maintenance is real
- cultural nuance matters
- hallucinations still happen
A good AI idea is worthless if it can’t run reliably, affordably, and repeatedly.
4. Measure adoption, not usage
Usage is activity. Adoption is when users notice if the feature disappears.
Look at measuring:
- time saved on critical tasks
- improved conversion for key cohorts
- reduction in support tickets tied to friction
Why this matters for 2026
AI isn’t the differentiator anymore, execution is. The teams that stand out will be the ones who make AI useful in the background, not the centrepiece of the product.
👉 The full article goes deeper with real examples, the constraints PMs forget, and a practical lens for evaluating AI opportunities. It’s worth a read if you’re planning any AI initiative next quarter!
✅ NotebookLM for product discovery
Faster research, same rigour
Discovery often starts with a pile of documents, interview notes, and reports that take hours to sort. NotebookLM helps you cut through that: It organises your inputs, surfaces patterns you might miss, and gives you quick summaries you can actually act on.
Find out how to use it in practice, where it fits in discovery, and the limits to keep in mind.
⭐️ In the spotlight
How Adobe builds teams that make history
Lessons from Nicolas Liatti, Senior Director of Product at Adobe
Adobe ’s Substance 3D team has spent years refining how they work. Nicolas Liatti walked us through the practices that helped them stay consistent, make better decisions, and keep raising the quality bar in a fast-moving industry.
Teams are built for context, not roles
One of the most distinctive choices: some of their product managers were originally artists (their end-users). These artists were familiar with the workflows, pain points, and production constraints better than anyone. Instead of forcing a traditional PM profile, the team trained people who lived the user problems every day, creating faster decisions and much stronger intuition.
Customer proximity is continuous
Nicolas’ teams worked directly with professional studios, not as a validation step but as an ongoing collaboration. Product, design, engineering, and support all stayed close to how real artists used the tools in live production. This gave the teams real insight into what mattered.
Want more?
The full article also covers:
- how stable teams build stronger ownership and faster alignment
- how product sense grows through repeated exposure to real decisions
- how linking product choices to business outcomes shapes long-term impact
Why this matters for 2026
Adobe Substance 3D shows us that strong product teams are built through context, proximity, and consistency. Hiring people who understand the customer deeply, keeping teams stable, and making decisions grounded in real usage are practices any product organisation can adopt.
🚀 From designing screens to shaping direction
Aurora, one of our product management & design consultants, shares her move from product design to product management. She explains what translated well from design, what didn’t, and the skills she had to build from scratch.
It’s a useful read for anyone curious about stepping beyond the design craft into broader product ownership.
🚀 Highlights from PR_D_CT Day
Four signals that will shape product work in 2026
The Louvain-la-Neuve edition of PR_D_CT DAY showed how fast Belgium’s product community is maturing. The conversations moved away from templates and toward the real work: strategy, behaviour, collaboration, and ownership.
Here are some of the signals that stood out:
1. Prioritisation problems are strategy problems
Teams are still relying on scoring frameworks to compensate for unclear strategy. Without a clear set of choices, prioritisation becomes sorting, not decision-making.
2. Success is defined by behaviour change, not activity
The best teams start by asking whose behaviour needs to change and how they’ll observe it. Metrics follow that intent, not the other way around.
3. Discovery works only when it’s shared
Product, sales, engineering, and design need a common view of the problem from day one. In B2B, this means merging what users love with what buyers actually buy.
4. PMs must own the full lifecycle, including pricing
Pricing and packaging are becoming core product responsibilities. Every product decision either creates or destroys value, and PMs need to understand those dynamics.
👉 Read the full breakdown of these signals with examples + why they matter for 2026.
⚡️ Don't miss it
Here’s where you can learn, connect & grow with us:
Risk as a career strategy
Webinar | Dec 10th | Linkedin Live
Lindsey Nguyen will share her experiences navigating high-stakes career decisions across companies like Apple, fast-growing startups, Techstars, and McKinsey.
She’ll unpack how strong product leaders approach risk, how they choose their next career moves, and how they maintain continuous learning as the market changes.
Product management training
Brussels | Feb 9 +10th | Training
Join the next cohort of our product management training in Brussels.
More in December…
- CPO Summit | London, UK | Dec 2
- Generative AI Summit | London, UK | Dec 2
- The International AI Summit | Brussels, Belgium | Dec 11
This is the last newsletter of 2025, thanks for reading, sharing, and being part of our community.
Wishing you a calm end of the year and a great start to 2026 👋
