The rapid advancement of GenAI is fundamentally reshaping the rules of the product world. Beyond transforming product features from “AI-enhanced” to fully “AI-native,” the entire development process is being redefined. From user research and design prototyping to coding, deployment, and iteration, AI is increasingly involved at every stage of the product lifecycle—making it more feasible than ever for a single individual to take a product from idea to launch.

In the face of this paradigm shift, the role of the product manager is undergoing deep transformation. How should we evolve our capabilities? In an era of constant change, which core skills and mindsets remain essential? User pain points are still there; the mission of product work—to solve real problems—has not changed. It is in navigating between change and continuity that product leaders must exercise judgment, creativity, and vision.

Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in open source communities. AI is lowering the barriers to contribution and reshaping human-to-human and human-to-system collaboration. Product managers are increasingly called upon to structure open collaboration, align diverse perspectives, and bridge community vision with real-world implementation—bringing order to complexity and coherence to collective innovation.

This session adopts an open mindset and experimental interactive format to spark new reflections on product development paradigms.

Through structured analysis and a dynamic, debate-style format, we’ll explore what has truly changed—and what hasn’t—in the age of AI. And we’ll try to answer this question: When AI makes the world move faster, can we also make our products truly better?

Speakers:

Emily Chen: Co-Founder of Kaiyuanshe

Emily Chen is the Co-founder of Kaiyuanshe and a current Board Director . A long-time advocate, builder, and connector in the global open source community, she has played a key role in shaping open collaboration across Asia and globle.

Emily served on the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors in 2010 and founded the GNOME.Asia community in 2008, bringing the GNOME.Asia Summit to over ten countries and regions. She was honored with the GNOME Foundation’s highest recognition, the GNOME Pants Award, at GUADEC 2014 in Sweden.

From 2017 to 2025, she hosted multiple visits of GitHub’s executive team and global community leaders to China, building bridges between international platforms and the Chinese open source ecosystem. She also served as the China representative to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Alliance and was Deputy Secretary-General of the China OSS Promotion Union in 2016.

Emily initiated impactful projects such as the Kaiyuanshe China OPenSource Annual Report, COSCon (China Open Source Conference), and the “33 Open Source Pioneers” list. She is a core contributor to Mozilla, a Google Summer of Code mentor, and one of the organizers of the Open Source Congress 2024. Currently, she serves as a TOC Mentor at the OpenAtom Open Source Foundation.

With nearly two decades of experience in open source community building and global-local collaboration, Emily continues to champion open innovation in the GenAI era.

Richard Bian: Head of Open Source, Ant Group; Director of Strategy and Growth (OSS), Ant Group; New Strategic Initiatives, Ant Group;

Richard Bian (Chinese: 边思康) led Ant Group Open Source initiative from day 1 and developed the initiative from a single person effort to a cross-functional Open Source Program Office (OSPO) team covering governance, strategy, developer experience, product development, growth and internationalization efforts.

At this moment, the team collaborates closely with 20+ internal open source projects to help their community development, data science needs, developer growth needs, outreach and partnership collaborations, and go-to-market expansions. We setup rules and processes, building tools and utilities, and design full-fledged products to help both our internal users and external community partners.

As an ex-Square, ex-Microsoft engineer by training and father to a toddler, Richard enjoyed leading strategic initiatives from scratch to fruition and building products that developers and end-users love to use.

Richard has been studying and working for more than 5 years each in 4 different countries (Singapore, Canada, USA and China) with immensely cross-cultural collaboration experience.