Christoph Leonhardt leads a cross functional team of product managers at Siemens. When he signed up for the Product Masterclass, his goal was practical: He wanted to understand what AI could actually do for the people reporting to him, and whether he could use it himself instead of treating it as one more feature on a roadmap.

The change did not start with a big rollout. It started with one small thing he built for himself.

The smallest possible start

There was a feature his team had wanted for a long time. A live functionality inside an existing on demand product, asked for more than once by one of their highest paying stakeholders. Instead of writing a spec or briefing an agency, Christoph sat down during the course and built a working version to show people what it could look like.

The team noticed

His team felt it too. They watched one person change what was possible inside their own operating model, in the time it takes to make a coffee.

Leading by example

Christoph is clear about why the shift reached his team and did not stop with him. As the person in charge, he had to be the one using it first. If the leader keeps AI at a distance, everyone reporting to him quietly does the same.

He immersed himself in the homework, looked at his own projects through the eyes of a product manager, and brought every result back to the team to discuss and build on. The outcome, in his words, was surprisingly amazing.

What the team built

Once the team saw it work, they stopped reaching for AI only now and then. They built their own foundation.

The first pet project

Once the foundation was there, they put it to work on something visible. One of the first things they shipped was a prediction game for the FIFA World Cup, open to the whole company. Plenty of SaaS providers sell exactly this. His team vibe coded their own and published it in three days. It is still running, with more than 10,000 active participants.

Impact

The same project tells the money and time story in one shot. Adopting AI practices saved the team real money. And, more important, it made them fast.

Getting a tool like this the old way would have run about six weeks to select and onboard a provider, and cost around 15,000. They did it themselves in a few days, for roughly 1,000 in token spend. Time and money, both cut hard. That is a huge impact, and it was only their first project.

No going back

Today there is not a single day the team does not rely on it. It sits so deeply inside their products and workflows that Christoph cannot picture explaining the old way to his past self. He went through the course during a genuinely busy stretch and still found it practical enough to fit in.

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At Product Masterclass we train product managers to work effectively in the AI age. Our eight week intensive covers everything from customer interviews to vibe coding to building your own AI workflow. See the next cohorts