Building AI Products Competitors Can't Match | Ravi Mehta | Productlab Conf 2026

📺 PRODUCTLAB CONFERENCE, Berlin 2026 Productlab Conference 2026 brought around 1K+ product people to Berlin and online for three days: Leaders Lab for senior product leaders on 15 Sept, hands-on AI-Craft Day workshops on 16 Sept, and Conference Day on 17 Sept across three stages at The Social Hub and CIC Berlin. The thread running through the week: AI made individuals faster, but organisations, judgment and context are where the real work is now. ✨ About the talk Everyone has access to the same models, so Ravi Mehta, former CPO of Tinder and co-creator of Reforge's AI strategy programme, argues the advantage has to come from what is uniquely yours. He describes a market where product-market fit isn't just decaying but collapsing, and two failure modes: training your own model, and bolting AI onto the product as a black box. His Lego-block framework combines the AI capabilities everyone has with data and functionality only you have, connected through context, data flywheels, orchestration and tools, and he shows it at work in Perplexity, Claude Code, Descript and Granola. Two points stick: the breakthrough is often the harness rather than the model, and slop is the accumulation of unexamined defaults. 🎤 About the Speaker Ravi Mehta is a senior product executive who has led product organisations at Tripadvisor, Facebook and Tinder, scaling products used by millions. His frameworks on product strategy and product leadership have been adopted by thousands of professionals, and he co-created Reforge's AI Strategy and Product Leadership programs. Today he is a full-time product strategy advisor and investor. Previously he was Chief Product Officer at Tinder, Product Director at Facebook, VP of Consumer Product at TripAdvisor and Executive-in-Residence at Reforge. 🌐 More talks, slides and Productlab Conference 2027 (8-10 Sept, Berlin): https://productlab.app 🎥 Video: Aleksandra Kononchenko