Malte Scholtz on Fixing Misalignment, Mastering AI Fluency, and the Value of Product Ops
Product State Q&A
Malte Scholtz is the Co-founder of airfocus, and Head of Product at airfocus by Lucid. He’s also the co-founder of welevel. Previously, he was a Sr Product Manager at ePages and a Research Assistant at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg.
Website / LinkedIn
EC: Why do product leaders struggle with misalignment, and how can they fix that?
MS: Misalignment is the silent killer of product success. Nearly 40% of product leaders say it’s their biggest challenge – bigger than technical debt or release velocity.
The real tax isn’t tools or processes, it’s people: Egos, shifting priorities, and competing narratives (check out the full survey).
The mistake many leaders make is thinking alignment comes from ownership or control. Telling PMs to ‘own’ the roadmap sounds empowering, but it actually creates hierarchy and silos. Alignment doesn’t happen in a big meeting – it happens upstream, in the trust you build, the context you share, and the way you tailor the story to every audience.
That means product leaders need to shift from being landlords of roadmaps to orchestrators of context. Over-communicate the ‘why’ behind decisions, invite feedback early, and speak three languages fluently: exec, engineer, and customer. When you combine that with a single source of truth for strategy, roadmaps, and feedback, chaos turns into clarity.
At airfocus, that’s exactly what we provide: a shared product truth that makes the ‘what’ and ‘why’ visible and accessible to everyone.
EC: What are the most impactful skills for product teams to master in the age of AI?
MS: AI is removing a lot of the busywork – writing reports, updating stakeholders, processing feedback. That’s a gift, because it frees PMs to focus on what only humans can do: asking the hard questions, framing trade-offs, and building trust across the org.
But here’s the catch: AI fluency is now table stakes.
The real differentiator isn’t slapping ‘AI-powered’ onto a roadmap; it’s knowing when to say no, and having the discipline to place fewer, deeper bets. Data literacy, the ability to interpret, challenge, and narrate insights, is now mission-critical. PMs who can’t ‘talk data’ risk being sidelined.
So the critical skills shift from execution to influence: Storytelling with data, stakeholder negotiation, first-principles thinking.
AI helps with the ‘what,’ but the human edge is still in the ‘why’ and the ‘how.’
If you want to read a bit more about this, Marty Cagan and I covered it in this webinar.
EC: What’s your take on the role and value of product ops?
MS: Every other function has an ops backbone – RevOps, Marketing Ops, People Ops – but product leaders are still expected to juggle everything themselves.
That’s why burnout is on the rise.
Product Ops is the scaffolding that lets product leaders focus on leadership, not logistics. It’s not bureaucracy; it’s enablement. The real value isn’t in dictating how teams should work, but in removing friction: making data, tools, and processes accessible, standardized, and value-driven.
Instead of hiring more PMs to play backlog Tetris, smart orgs invest in Product Ops to scale clarity, efficiency, and feedback loops across every layer. Sometimes that means hiring a dedicated role, other times it means elevating a PM with a knack for ops into a hybrid role.
We’re going to be talking more about culture in product teams next month with the VP of Product for Zendesk (sign up here).
Looking ahead, Product Ops will become table stakes for any product org beyond the early stage. It’s the infrastructure for customer-centricity at scale — and a competitive advantage for high-performing teams.
“Product leaders need to stop being landlords of roadmaps and start being orchestrators of context.”
— Malte Scholtz
