Alexander Hipp
Alexander Hipp is an AI Product Lead at Miro in Barcelona, with 15 years in product. In this conversation they discuss Core PM Philosophy, Product & Decision-Making and AI & the Future.
“When building gets cheap, judgment becomes expensive.”
- Martin Knapic, Product MoatAlexander Hipp has spent 15 years in product. He started as a developer, built recommendations for 20 million users at XING, onboarded new hires during N26’s hypergrowth, raised around five million for his own startup, Beyond, and now works on AI quality at Miro in Barcelona. A few tech shifts in, he keeps landing on the same part of the job: judgment.
In this conversation he explains why decisions are the real work of a PM, how he scales the effort behind a call to how reversible it is, and what building his own startup taught him about getting the problem definition right early. He also shares how AI lets him prototype, research and test ideas on his own at remarkable speed, and why that speed makes good judgment more valuable than ever. His advice is simple and timely: stay close to users and write your context down.
On a personal note, I was really happy to get the chance to talk with Alexander. I have been a Miro user since 2016, so it felt pretty cool to hear from someone inside a company with such a strong track record and such an interesting product experience. Alexander shared some killer points, and many of them resonated with me personally. If you work in product, you will pull a few gems from this one worth storing in your own mind cloud.
Between parenting duties, Alexander was also generous with tips for me as a newcomer in Barcelona, including where to find the best coffee in town :)
Identity & Background
- Name
- Alexander Hipp
- Current role
- AI Product Lead
- Current company
- Miro
- Location
- Barcelona
- Years in product
- 15 years
Your story: how did you end up in product?
I started as a developer. I quit because solving the wrong problem efficiently is pointless. Product properly started at XING, building recommendations for 20 million users. Then N26 during hypergrowth. Two to seven and a half million users, tens of thousands of signups a day. I onboarded new people in my second week. It was chaos, and it taught me that when things get unstable the job isn't frameworks. It's staying clear and cutting what doesn't matter. Then I founded Beyond. Raised around five million, pivoted three times, and talked to hundreds of PMs and CPOs along the way. I learned more there than in any job. Now I'm at Miro working on AI quality. Four tech shifts in, and I keep ending up on the judgment side of the work instead of the delivery side.
Core PM Philosophy
How do you define product success?
Not features shipped. Features are guesses. Shipping one tells you nothing. Success is someone behaving differently because of the work. They come back. They finish the task faster. They stop calling support. Two things I usually check first. If I can get the same outcome without shipping code, I don't ship code. And I ask whether a win is local or real. For example, I once removed a feature users liked, because it pulled engagement away from the thing we actually cared about. A few complaints, then retention went up for real.
What's your decision-making philosophy?
Decisions are the job. A product is just the sum of a lot of choices, and as a PM, we make a lot of them. Clarity beats consensus. When a team disagrees, the instinct is another workshop. Don't. Go back to the problem, anchor it in real behavior, put the tradeoffs on the table. Weak options eliminate themselves. I'm data-informed, not data-driven. And I set the bar by reversibility. The harder something is to undo, the more it deserves upfront. Then I write the big ones down and review them out loud later. Our industry is bad at that part.
What's your biggest PM lesson or mistake?
I built and sold a tool for product leadership. Leaders kept telling me they couldn't set clear goals or communicate priorities properly across the org. That's a real problem. It still is. I fell in love with the problem, built software for it. The execution or product wasn't the problem. The diagnosis was. The industry doesn't lack tools. It lacks leaders who lead with context instead of control. I was selling process into a problem that was really about understanding, and no amount of product craft fixes that. Now, before I solve anything, I want three answers. What does this cost today. How often does it happen. What's at risk if nobody fixes it. If I can't answer those, I don't have a problem.
Product & Decision-Making
How do you do customer discovery and validation?
I'm a big fan of continuous product discovery practices therefore I always prefer to being close to the user as often as possible. Small, continuous pieces of feedback are way better then week-long deep studies imo. They both have their places but I'm way more interested in frequent insights.
AI & the Future
How is AI changing product management?
It expanded what I can own. I used to frame problems and align people, and execution happened with others. Now I prototype, poke at technical directions, and test ideas myself. I use Figma less, build and write more. Research stopped being a phase. Understanding a market used to take days. Now it takes minutes. Here's the uncomfortable part. When building gets cheap, judgment gets really expensive if done wrong. The risk isn't being slow anymore. It's scaling a bad idea twenty times faster. So the job shifts. Less writing specs, more defining the problem, sharing context, and saying what good looks like. With one trap: if all that context lives in my head, I'm the bottleneck even when engineers are twenty times faster. It has to be written down. What didn't change is talking to users. It matters more now, because AI makes it very easy to decide fast and understand nothing.
Which AI product do you use and respect?
I'm a huge ChatGPT and Claude user, but who isn't, I really do like building with Cursor and using Granola etc. Nothing crazy but I got very mature in using these tools. For visual work and bringing my team along I always use Miro MCP in combination with Claude etc. A real game changer.
Beliefs & Opinions
What makes a great product?
It solves a real problem, in a great way and costs exactly what a user would want to pay for having the problem solved.
Company & Product
What does your product solve?
Miro is solving the visual side of working with people and agents in the most engaging and fun way.
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