(2025-12-17) Pereira Why Context Beats Technology With Productboard Ceo Hubert Palan

David Pereira: Why Context Beats Technology, with ProductBoard CEO Hubert Palan.

“Everyone has their own agenda. They’re not telling you the truth, or they’re telling the truth in a way that benefits them.”
When I heard this sentence from Hubert Palan, Productboard Founder & CEO, I became speechless, and that’s when I realized how valuable critical thinking is.

The Three Brutal Decisions That Built ProductBoard

The first hit during the 2022 recession when they dramatically shifted from SMB to enterprise. That meant walking away from existing business.

The second was the classic enterprise pressure. Big customers bring big revenue and bigger demands. ProductBoard drew boundaries. They said no to customer-specific features that wouldn’t advance the roadmap for everyone else. Even when it meant losing those customers.

The third decision came recently. They moved resources from the traditional roadmap to AI. Existing customers complained about missing features. But Hubert knew: “If we don’t make the investment today, you’re going to be screaming at us two years from now that we’re not the leaders with AI capabilities.”

You’ve got to listen to signs and separate customer wants from needs. That’s the difference Hubert nailed. Conviction backed by understanding versus conviction backed by hope.

Stop Pretending AI Will Do Your Thinking For You

Here’s the part that will piss people off: AI isn’t going to save you from bad product thinking.

Hubert tested this with his co-founder.
They spent a whole day going through product discovery to delivery using Cursor and Claude Code. The efficiency gains weren’t in coding. They were in specification. Understanding the problem. Identifying edge cases. Making sense of dependencies. (product taste)

Activities that used to take weeks now take hours. But only if you know what you’re building and why.

ProductBoard Spark, their AI agent, doesn’t just generate PRDs. It helps product managers maintain context across massive organizations. When Salesforce.com has 20,000 people in R&D, context sharing becomes critical. The agent knows your customers, your competitors, your market positioning, and your internal principles.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Success Stories

When Hubert started ProductBoard, Steve Blank gave him advice. Ask potential customers: “Do you understand jobs to be done?” If they don’t, move on. They’re not your target market segment yet.
That’s focus.

But here’s what Hubert said that made me pause my notes: “You can’t just read something on Reddit that someone did and assume it’s going to work for you.”

He called a friend at Uber to verify a glowing blog post about their tech stack. Turns out the solution completely failed. They had to re-architect everything. But you wouldn’t know that from the blog post. (The more subtle point is that a solution that really works in one place/context will fail in another.)

What Actually Separates Winners From Losers

The AI boom has accelerated the birth of many startups. Everyone’s building with the same technology. The differentiator isn’t technical skill anymore. It’s domain expertise.

Good product managers understand the product. The best ones master the market.
That hasn’t changed. AI just made it more obvious.