Strategic Circles
Heads of Product Circle.
For leaders building and scaling digital products and platforms — navigating roadmap prioritisation, stakeholder alignment, and the challenge of shipping in organisations not built for product velocity.
Product leadership at scale is a uniquely isolating role. You sit between engineering, design, commercial teams, and the C-suite — responsible for outcomes that depend on all of them, with authority over none of them. The leaders who understand this challenge are the ones doing it in different organisations and industries.
The product leadership paradox
You're responsible for what gets built, but your influence is primarily through persuasion. Stakeholder management, roadmap negotiation, and organisational politics consume as much energy as product strategy. Most product communities focus on methodology. This Circle focuses on the leadership challenge — which is where the real leverage lives.
What gets discussed
How to maintain product vision when stakeholder pressure pushes toward feature factories. Building product teams in organisations with engineering-first or sales-first cultures. The real challenges of platform strategy — build, buy, or partner. Prioritisation frameworks that actually survive contact with organisational reality. Scaling product thinking beyond the product team.
The cross-industry advantage
Product challenges in a B2B SaaS company and a consumer marketplace are structurally similar despite surface-level differences. A Head of Product at a fintech and one at a media company share more operational reality than either shares with their own CMO. This circle leverages that functional kinship.
Curation approach
Every participant holds genuine product leadership responsibility — strategy, not just feature management. The mix spans B2B and B2C, different categories, and different organisational structures to maximise the exchange value.
This Circle is for leaders who:
- —Hold Director+ Product, Platform, or Product Strategy roles
- —Own product roadmap, platform architecture, or product P&L
- —Navigate the tension between product vision and stakeholder pressure
- —Want functional peer exchange beyond product management conferences
- —Value senior leadership perspective, not methodology debate
Founding Exchange — Shape the Format, Set the Price
2026 gatherings are hosted on a founder basis. Boris covers accommodation. Participants contribute €700 per person — all meals, activities, and local logistics across the full weekend.
€700
per person · all-inclusive
From 2027: €2,000–2,500
Your host
Every gathering is built personally by Boris.
"I built two companies, scaled across borders, then spent years inside EMEA headquarters advising the people who run them. That's why I can build this room: I've sat on both sides of the table."
Boris builds every gathering personally, not through an algorithm, not through a team. He reviews every application, builds the room as a whole, and is present for all four days.
Boris built two companies from scratch, scaling to 35 FTE across four offices before pivoting to enterprise advisory. Through his SO DIGITAL and Otto Ziegler Consulting practice, he worked with Directors, VPs, and SVPs at EMEA headquarters: Nike across 14 markets, Uber across 46, WarnerBrosDiscovery / HBO Max across 17, Amazon Ring across 10, and global HQs like TomTom, Victorinox, and Jacobs Douwe Egberts, spanning brand, marketing, creative, e-commerce, supply chain, operations, and procurement. Parallel to this he attended dozens of cross-industry conferences both across Europe, but also across the globe from Hong Kong to Las Vegas. He saw the downsides of mass gatherings for genuine professional connection. It's this combination, founder experience and cross-industry HQ exposure, that shapes how he builds every gathering: he knows which problems are universal, which people can help solve them, and how to build a room where that exchange actually happens.
Frequently Asked Questions
Register Your Interest
Our events are invite-only. Share your details and interests, and we'll reach out when we're curating a gathering that's right for you.
Ready to join the Product Circle?
Register your interest and Boris will be in touch.
Register InterestKnow someone who belongs here?
If a name came to mind, that instinct is usually right.
The best gatherings come together through people who know each other — not through applications. Forward this page to them, or write to Boris with a brief introduction.