Julia Bastian

About Julia Bastian

Julia Bastian is a Product Leader with 9+ years of experience building and scaling digital products and driving innovation. She began as an innovation consultant, helping corporates foster intrapreneurship and adopt new technologies. As VP Product at Alasco, a venture-backed proptech, she scaled the product and engineering team from 5 to 50. Today, she leads Alasco’s AI transformation, ensuring the company harnesses AI to stay ahead of disruption and deliver customer value.

Julia specializes on B2B product discovery, working in domains with limited quantitative data, where sales heavily influence priorities, ambiguity is high, and customer pressure is constant.

Alongside her leadership role, Julia works as a Product Coach, AI Educator, and Consultant for B2B organizations, with a focus on AI and Large Language Models. Her goal is to accelerate product managers’ AI learning journey by making the topic approachable and lowering the entry barrier for those just starting out.

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Keynote & Workshop
Julia Bastian

Keynote:
Discovery Slop - The research that looks shiny but is sh*tty

AI has made discovery output faster and shinier than ever. But fast and shiny is not the same as deep and true.

Real discovery is about finding contradictions, sitting with complexity, and synthesising and not about smoothing everything into a polished blur. Product people have stopped thinking. And nobody notices because the output looks great. But product sense is built through thinking, not through consuming.

This talk is about what real discovery looks like in the age of AI. Stop consuming shiny discovery slop. Start thinking again.

Our inspirational speakers

Hector Ayuso

Creative Director @Paradiso

Serena Westra

Senior Business Designer
@IKEA

Jeeyoung Yang

Design Lead
@IBM

Alvin Chan

Creative Director
@Superlarge

Wouter Dirks

business director
@Studio Dumbar / DEPT