Before I worked for the “big names,” before anyone introduced me as an "expert" in agile product management, I was just a junior PM trying to survive inside early dot-com startups that… well… don’t exist anymore. And no, they didn’t disappear because of just me but I definitely didn’t help.

I launched products nobody needed, shipped features nobody used, scaled things that weren’t even stable, trusted my gut when my gut had absolutely no idea what it was doing, and ignored warning signs that, in hindsight, were basically on fire and waving a flag. That’s where I learned product. Not in books. Not in frameworks. In the wreckage.

This talk is a very honest tour through those early years: the mistakes, the naïve optimism, the “we’ll fix it in version 2,” the sprints that solved nothing, the teams that looked busy but weren’t actually moving, and the countless moments where I realised I had no idea what “strategy” meant.

And somehow, all of this became the foundation of the product leader I eventually became.

You’ll leave with better instincts for spotting bad bets early, a few practical tools I wish I had at 25, and hopefully a bit less shame about learning the job the way most of us do: by getting it wrong first, repeatedly, and occasionally spectacularly.