AI-Era Product Teams and Sustainable Growth: the September edition
In September 2026, Pinnacle Product Institute welcomed Jiaona Zhang and Casey Winters to speak with our audience as part of Product Conversations. The edition brought together perspectives on product foundations, adapting strategy and team structures for AI, and improving growth through retention and engagement.
Why these perspectives belonged together
New tools can change what a team can build and how it works, but growth still depends on customers finding sustained value. We selected Jiaona and Casey to connect organisational adaptation with the customer behaviour and strategic choices behind a growing product business.
Jiaona Zhang — Product foundations, team structures and AI
We invited Jiaona to connect strong product foundations with thoughtful adaptation to AI. Her expertise was relevant to our audience’s questions about evolving responsibilities, organising teams around new opportunities and keeping customer needs central as tools and ways of working change.
Casey Winters — Growth strategy, retention and engagement
We invited Casey to connect product choices with sustainable growth. His expertise was relevant to practitioners looking beyond acquisition to understand retention, engagement and the bottlenecks that prevent a product from building a stronger relationship with its customers.
Connecting team adaptation with customer value
The pairing framed two related questions: how should product teams adapt to AI, and how can they judge whether their choices strengthen customer relationships? A useful connection is to define the intended customer outcome before changing a process or introducing a capability, then examine whether people engage with the product and continue finding value over time.
Questions to carry into your own practice
Which product foundation should remain central as your tools change? Does your team structure support the decisions it now needs to make? Where do customers stop finding value? What evidence would identify the largest constraint on growth? These are Pinnacle’s editorial reflection questions, rather than quotations or a transcript of the speakers’ remarks.
Continuing Product Conversations
The September edition continued our 2026 series of conversations with product experts whose perspectives complement one another. The companion Product Expert Feature introduces Jiaona and Casey and explains why each was invited. For an earlier perspective from Jiaona, explore her September 2025 speaker feature.
We thank Jiaona Zhang and Casey Winters for joining Pinnacle’s audience in September 2026.