In April 2026 my dear friend Selçuk Döven invited me as a guest speaker to his GenAI course at İstinye Üniversitesi. It was an online session with his students, so we did the whole thing over a video call.
We talked about the past and the present of product management, and where it’s heading in the AI era. My main take hasn’t changed in a while, and that’s that the fundamentals still win.
At the end, I shared a few essentials for the extra mile on product. There were classics like The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and Inspired by Marty Cagan, and also The Culture Map by Erin Meyer, which I find essential for working internationally.
The odd one on the list was Just My Type by Simon Garfield, which is a book about typography. But really it’s about how much culture and personality lies behind a single momentary choice, like picking a font, and that kind of thinking applies everywhere in product.
So for me, it all comes down to understanding and framing the right problem, then solving it with the right engineering approach. Whether it’s a dev team shipping production code or someone vibe coding their way to an MVP, the solution design behind it is what always matters.