Product Agility

Tobias Lichtenstern: Designing AI Service Experiences: Co-creation, Jobs-to-be-Done & Organisational Impact - Productized 2025 TalkInTen

• Ben Maynard, Gábor Suhajda, Tobias Lichtenstern

Share episode

Send us a text

Live from Productized Lisbon 2025 - Episode Snapshot
Productized in Lisbon is a genuinely exceptional conference for product thinkers - energetic, practical and future-focused. We're honoured to partner with Productized for this live series, bringing short, sharp conversations from the workshop floor.

In this 10-minute conversation, we talk with Tobi Lichtenstern (Leeep) and Gábor from Bobcats Coding about designing AI service experiences, why co-creation matters, and how designers can shape organisational change.

Key topics discussed

  • What makes an AI solution different from a traditional solution
  • Co-creation: inviting customers and stakeholders early
  • Applying service design tools (blueprints, jobs-to-be-done)
  • Balancing speed of AI delivery with thoughtful discovery
  • How AI will spotlight service & organisational design


Guest Bio:

Tobias Lichtenstern - Founding partner at Leeep, a Berlin-based design strategy consultancy now rooted in Lisbon. Tobi specialises in service and business design, facilitating co-creative workshops to shape customer-facing AI solutions.


Gábor Suhajda - Lead designer at Bobcats Coding, a digital product studio operating in Budapest and Lisbon, focused on AI engineering and end-to-end product development.

We want to thank Productized for hosting another standout edition - the speakers, community, and workshops make it one of Europe's best product conferences. And a big shoutout to our partners at Bobcats Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Download their free AI economics guidebook at bobcatscoding.com.

Enjoyed this episode? Subscribe to Product Agility Podcast and catch the rest of our Productized "Talk in 10" series. Thanks to our sponsors, Bobcats Coding - helping teams build AI-powered products the right way.

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

Stay up-to-date with us on our social media📱!

Ben Maynard

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmaynard-sheev/

🐦 https://x.com/BenWMaynard

💻 https://sheev.co.uk/

Product Agility Podcast

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/productagilitypod/

💻 https://productagilitypod.co.uk/

🖇️ https://linktr.ee/productagility


Listen & Share On Spotify & iTunes


Want to come on the podcast?

Want to be a guest or have a guest request? Let us know here https://bit.ly/49osN80

Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast where we explore the ever changing world of product leadership and org design, helping you navigate complexity and build better outcomes for your people and your customers. This week we're coming to you live from Lisbon for the third year in a row at the Productize conference where I'm grabbing 10 minute conversations with product thinkers, leaders and innovators from around the world. These quick fire chats are all about what's shaping our industry right now, from AI and product strategy to the human side of building great products. Now a huge thank you goes out to Bobcatz Coding for making this Lisbon series possible. Bobcats is a Budapest and Lisbon based digital product studio specializing in AI engineering and end to end digital product development. They're also on a mission to educate the market, exploring a new topic every six months and this fall is no exception. Their latest AI economics guidebook is out now and you can download it for free@bobcatscoding.com now here's your talk in 10. It's workshop day at Productize 2025. I am joined by Toby Alechtenstern and Gabor, the lead designer from Bobcat's coding. It's gonna be a fun day. This is our first sit down conversation that we've had today. We did one outside earlier with Tamash, which is awesome, but I'm super excited about this. I didn't mention that beforehand. I didn't want to put the pressure up, but I'm really excited. Tabor, your talk is creating AI service experiences. Words which I have never put together into a sentence before. Me neither. I can't wait to hear your talk. Would you mind maybe just telling our listeners a little bit about yourself? But then also what is your session at Productize then about? Would love to. So again, my name is Tobi. I'm the founding manager partner of Leap. It's a design strategy consultancy from Berlin. I myself are based in in Lisbon and Estudio since like four and a half years. Got the yeah, the love for surfing and the good weather, the people in Portugal. So I got stuck here and yeah the talk tomorrow as you said, like it's crazy words put together but like where I'm from like I'm a service designer, business designer. So what we do is usually we co create so we're not designing any products or solutions ourselves. So we try to open up the process inviting users, customers, stakeholders and that's what we going to do. In the talk tomorrow I'm going to show them an approach the audience of how you can Actually open up the process to designing AI service experiences with the customers, with the stakeholders and. Yeah, because we're kind of shifting towards AI solutions which are customer facing eventually. And those kind of solutions have to be designed well and with the stakeholders and of course customers at the end. Here's a question for you then. What's the difference between a traditional solution and an AI solution? And I'm not asking that for. It's like a loaded question. I think it's something that people are generally interested in because AI as a term, it's in my opinion almost jargon now. It's kind of meaningless because we're not being specific enough about the application we're talking about. So in your mind and what you're gonna be talking about, what's the difference between a solution then and an AI solution? Yeah, I think, I think I always see it from like different perspectives. I think it's pretty loaded from an organizational perspective because like everyone has to do AI right now. But like also recent research showed me when I was talking with customers that they're actually not interested in AI, they just want to get the ship done. Yeah. And I think that is a very important point to make here. And interestingly, customers are fucking. Sorry, profanity is fine. Okay, perfect. They're ready. So what I saw the last month as well, customers, B2B, B2C whatever, they're using ChatGPT, they're using AI as a means to improve their day to day tasks. So they're like there and they expect certain criteria or quality in touch points. So I think that's a point I want to make as well. I see this perception for a lot of people that building with AI or using AI speeds up stuff and it's really fast to deliver anything. And relative to that, user sessions, co creation sessions might be relatively slow. Do you see that as a problem for your workshops or the expectations of your clients? I mean it depends on what stage you are with your product. I think if you, I mean co creation can happen at all stages of the process. Right. Designing new solutions. But I think also like in a discovery phase, it's very nice to actually think about where do I want to implement AI in the service and like what kind of stakeholders do we need to have on the table to actually design that and eventually also like of course the customer. But like, because it's such a loaded topic that I think it's the necessary to like go a step back and that's what I wanted to show tomorrow as well is like there's so many tools already available, especially from service design and business design. I'm talking about service blueprints where you can see like this is actually the customer's tool steps. Right. This is the customer going through and what is actually happening behind and who is actually responsible for those services and who of those stakeholders and people have to sit on the table designing those new solutions? Right. Apart from of course the customer. But yeah, I mean it's a common theme system I talked to Tamash about this morning is that we are seem to be. We seem to be having lots of conversations about saying let's break this down bit by bit. Let's understand where it's a human, where it's not a human, let's understand where we need AI and where we don't need AI. And so when you're talking about these service experiences, by and large is it generally speaking about where do you get a large language model somewhere in that process to act in place of a human? Yeah, somehow, yeah. But it doesn't have to be like an LLM. It has to be. The question is like that's what we always ask in service design is like what do the customer actually want to achieve and is it necessarily an AI solution in it and does he actually have to know this is an AI in it? Of course this is not an ethical question but like yeah, so I think it's really up to the tasks or the job to be done from a customer perspective. Jobs to be done. Love to hear that. Actually it's interesting, I'm finding that's getting very popular with people that I'm kind of around at the moment because it is really focusing on a shift from saying what's the use case? How are people going to use our product? To say actually what job are they doing when they happen to use our products? And that's a very different question because then we can begin to see the dependencies and the beauty of a lot of the opportunities we get of AI is we get to collapse dependencies in a little bit upon things in your workshop. I wish I could come along so I'm genuinely fascinated by it. What is the top takeaway? You think participants will leave with the. Top takeaways is bring people stakeholders very early in the process, designing solutions and invite them on the table. So customers have to be on the table, stakeholders have to be on the table. Because it's like co creating we like in a major transformation fast. Everyone has to be part of it. Right. And this has like talk to your customers, don't do AI solutions by assumptions. Right. This is the biggest risk you can or have in that field as well. And yeah, I mean be curious and step into your customer shoes and really open up the process, invite people to join those interesting time we are in and yeah, make it, enjoy the ride, make it enjoyable. So if you think of the future, what is it that excites you about the opportunities for AI service design in the next couple of years? I think with AI getting so much traction, service design as an approach or business design or human centered design if you want to call it, will be in the spotlight again even more than before. And I think we have seen that in the face of digital transformation where technology was like really hyped as it is AI now as well. So we like AI centered where it's human centered. And I think if we decide for human centered and also take the organization and the people with us, I think it would be tremendous time for great output and great customer experiences and fun working. Right. So I think yeah. Do you see designers as an important like participants or, or like consultants in these processes guiding AI transformations and AI implementation? Absolutely. But I think designers get way more traction in organizations as well. It's not just designing the front stage of an experience, but I think if you do it well you have the power to actually design organizations as well. And this is what I want to emphasize tomorrow as well. So it's not just designing experience for the customers but also like how can, what's the impact on organization? How do I have to design my organization towards great service experiences? And yeah, I think the key is co creation and design processes co creatively. So I think that's the key. I think you teased on like a really interesting topic there but we haven't actually got time to explore unfortunately. But it's how AI is going to change. Organizational designs isn't a topic which I think is in the forefront of people's minds. But if I was to make a prediction, I say give it five years. The bookshelves will be full of people making shit up about how they think it should be. But I think that there is a huge opportunity to, to I think capitalize on a lot of the promises that we've had over the last 20 years, particularly around Agile. I think that now we're in a time when actually a lot of it can happen and will happen organically because we are able to do so much more as individuals and work together in different ways. I think it is set to be a really exciting, really exciting next five years at least, before the AI overlords take us over. And until then, let's just have fun, eh? Toby, thank you so much for coming along. It's been really interesting. I just again, wish we had more time. Gabor, thank you for coming on. It's been great to have you as a co host and you'll be coming back again later today in the afternoon. I'll be back. Well, great, everyone, thank you very much for listening. This has been yet another awesome talk in 10. Do make sure that you follow the product Jersey Podcast and click on the download link so it helps our stats and you don't miss out on all of the talks in 10. They're going to be coming out over the next few days. Again, thank you very much, Gabor. Toby, we'll be back again soon.

Head Shot

Ben Maynard

Host