We say goodbye to the fifth edition

Last Friday was a doughnut-shaped Friday: an immense hole at its centre opened up for all of us who had spent nearly every afternoon over the past seven months coming together to create that rare alchemy of friendship in debate, happiness in enrichment, and fellowship in inspiration.

A week earlier, with spring awakening, we had said goodbye to all that magic, closing the fifth edition of the Product Management programme at that miracle called Instituto Tramontana.

The spring has many sounds:
Roller skates grind the pavement to noisy dust.
Birds chop the still air into small melodies.
The wind forgets to be the weather for a time
And whispers old advice for summer.
The sea stretches itself
And gently creaks and cracks its bones....

The spring has many silences:
Buds are mysteriously unbound
With a discreet significance,
And buds say nothing.

There are things that even the wind will not betray.
Earth puts her finger to her lips
And muffles there her quiet, quick activity....

Do not wonder at me
That I am hushed
This April night beside you.

The spring has many silences.

— The Spring Has Many Silences, Laura Riding

We enjoyed the afternoon. We looked back and looked at our seven-months-ago selves to analyse the differences. We looked ahead and played with what we had invented over the past few weeks as the finishing touch to the long list of exercises and case studies that had kept us in shape throughout the programme.

The inventions of this fifth edition were propelled by the full contribution of AI in all its variants and flavours: from vibe coding using Cursor or llm directly in the terminal, through environments like Lovable or Make, to all sorts of collage where familiar tools and workflows were mixed but transformed through the lens of agents and models.

The impact of AI was so pronounced in this edition that I was blessed with new personalities. :D

But even more important than all of that was that the inventions were truly driven by a richer way of understanding digital products, starting with the way participants told their stories. It finally felt natural to include any material that could help project them, without stopping at the purely technical aspect.

That is where the nature of digital products begins to offer all its richness; that is where it pulls you out of your screen and your four walls; that is where you start capturing the texture of your customers' voices; that is where your creative potential begins to develop; that is where you start exercising your conjectures on the ground, gathering impressions, problems, errors as quickly as possible... all that dynamic plasticity inherent to software-based products.

It is beautiful to close the programme watching so many of the materials we have covered come into play: a little of what we learned about software as an anomaly; a bit of the economics of information and how digital products differ from industrial products; some of the need to apply scarcity and constraints; a touch of finding qualitative and quantitative anchors to draw conclusions from; something about rationalising the discovery process and making it revolve around stories to detach it from the merely technical context; and finally, something about how organisations — including these groups of three people creating together — need to incorporate new logics so as not to live at odds with the digital world.

Also a bit about the importance of the fat marker and everything we can learn from great storytellers. I must have been so insistent about it that they gave me gifts connected to this. ;)

THANK YOU. ❤️ Asier, Azur, César, Daniel, Jorge, Laura, Luis, Mario, Marta, Óscar, Paula C., Paula M., Pino. ❤️