Irina Achim
Vlad AndriescuProw Conference is one of the main events dedicated to digital products and technology in Eastern Europe. This year, PROW focused on an essential subject for Romania: how to build digital products that matter, technology that can scale and a growing community that makes a difference in the global software market. This year's edition attracted over 650 digital product professionals from Romania and Europe.
PROW 2025 speakers
For our second round, we got the chance to talk to:
- Toby Humphrey is a seasoned GPM at Bolt - delivering food to millions of monthly customers as the consumer product head of Bolt Food. He has deep technical and customer-centric product expertise having built complex automation, AI and customer service platforms across Bolt’s entire product portfolio.
Toby has a background in design, is a tech nerd at heart and has a passion for crafting liveable cities, democratic access to education and longevity hacking.
- Sharon Doyle is an accomplished leader with over two decades of global experience across Chief Product and Technology Officer, Chief Product Officer, and VP roles. They joined Access in October 2024, where they are responsible for defining and executing the technology and product strategy within the ERP division. Their focus is on delivering world-class, customer-centric, digital-first products.
Her expertise lies at the intersection of technology and product, understanding how to leverage both to drive innovation and foster new ways of thinking, including AI. Their industry background primarily encompasses technology, corporate/leisure travel tech, and financial services.
Sharon holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Limerick, Ireland, and an MBA from Macquarie Graduate School of Management, Australia.
The speakers we interviewed backstage all had to answers the same question sheet:
- What is a good product for today's world (what kind of digital solution can make this world a proud place to be in)?
- What do founders/ product developers got completely wrong about building great digital solutions and you wish to see fixed in the near future?
- What do you believe changed the most in the world of developing products since the AI age?
- What is your own definition of AI?
- A good product is a product everyone knows about or only a few selected groups know about?
Insight driven beats superficiality
The key takeaway from our conversation is focusing on strategy and vision to keep the business going. Our talk focused on what kinds of digital solutions could really improve the world right now.
Toby mentioned three main areas: the negative effects of social media, issues with equity where some people have much more than others, and climate concerns. The bolt GPM, for example, agrees that he doesn’t have all the answers, but these are the top challenges tech should address.
Sharon also addressed climate concerns, but from a different angle, specifically the environmental impact of AI itself, and how the next big thing might be finding ways to make AI and its infrastructure more efficient, so we’re not just burning resources without thinking about the cost.
Next, the discussion turns to what founders and product developers often get wrong when building digital solutions. The main critique is that teams frequently get caught up in adding features rather than sticking to a strong vision and strategy. There’s an emphasis on the importance of insight-driven, strategic decision-making instead of superficial choices based only on what’s trendy or easy. Good product building should be about maintaining focus and delivering quality, not just constantly chasing the next shiny feature.
Toby: “People make decisions from places that are, let's say, too superficial. They're not insight-driven enough. They're not strategically driven enough. And I think this is something that businesses generally can live or die on. So being able to actually structure decision-making and what we build and don't build based on a strategy, this is something that will really help businesses to sustain, especially in a competitive market.”
When asked about the biggest changes in product building since AI became such a big deal, the speakers note that it’s still early days, but productivity has definitely increased. People can do a lot more with less, and AI has allowed some to produce higher quality outputs even if they're not experts. However, there's debate on how much roles are really changing versus just having new narratives about productivity and quality.
Roles in product and engineering are blending more, with teams now mixing in people from different disciplines and even using AI as part of their teams, breaking out of rigid job descriptions.
Sharon: “What hasn't changed? I think actually our roles are radically changing. I was listening to the VP of AI at Microsoft, and she had this phrase called the loop, not the lane. And where she was basically saying is that, you know, roles no longer sit in any given lane. So we're no longer just an engineer or just a product manager or just a UX. We need to be bringing in other skills across the entire organizational discipline into our teams. So whether that's bringing a salesperson onto your team or using AI as a kind of agent salesperson, I think we're seeing a lot of roles change and really moving outside those lanes.”
The speakers share their personal definitions of AI, with Sharon describing it as the interconnection of ideas, like a mental network that enables new connections beyond individual expertise.
They mention that even though AI is modeled after human intelligence, we don’t fully understand intelligence itself, but basically, AI is a software that can make complex decisions based on large datasets—something that seems 'intelligent' when simple programming wouldn’t cut it.
You can listen to the complete discussion in the video below:
