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She Coaches Product Teams at a Global Bank. Here's How She Brings AI Into the Work.
Giada Sartori is a product and agile coach at UBS Asset Management in Zurich. She joined Product Masterclass to learn how to embed AI across the product lifecycle. Eight weeks later she had built her own product discovery skill grounded in Teresa Torres's opportunity solution tree framework, brought reverse requirements gathering into the evolution of her product prototyping, and started coaching product managers and senior leaders on using AI for product backlog and stakeholder management techniques.
Giada Sartori lives in Zurich and works at UBS, a Swiss bank with a global footprint. She sits in asset management technology, where she oversees Agile ways of working and contributes to the product management cycle. Over seven years, she has moved through roles as product owner, product manager and scrum master, and is now an agile and product coach.
She came to Product Masterclass with a specific goal.
"I thought it would have been a great idea to join the Product Masterclass and understand how to embed AI-assisted practices throughout the lifecycle of a product, particularly a digital financial product, which is my area of expertise."
How the program works
What stood out first was the format: reading and preparing before class with the instructors' recorded sessions, working through the assignments, then time-boxed live sessions where peers discuss real cases together.
"I appreciated the preparation from Thomas and Sebastian. We had access to the material beforehand, before every instructor gave their own classes, since the focus of the classes was on exchanging our takeaways from designated assignments based on our professional experience and on the context of our firms."
What she built
The piece she still comes back to is a product discovery skill she built herself, based on Teresa Torres's opportunity solution tree framework.
Her own discovery skill
"I particularly enjoyed building my own skill related to product discovery, which was based on the opportunity mapping from Teresa Torres."
Her plan for it is practical: use the product discovery skill to coach product owners and product managers at the bank on how to uncover new product opportunities, starting from the product's desired outcome.
A new way to gather requirements
The session with Julia changed how Giada thinks about moving from an idea to a tested product requirement.
Reverse requirements gathering
"You work on a prompt with the product team and stakeholders, and that gives you a prototype you can see immediately. If you don't like something, you can either modify the prompt or modify the GUI directly. And then, when you want a step-by-step requirements gathering process, you do reverse requirements gathering by asking the LLM to list the key acceptance criteria and test cases. Then you can review them by checking their feasibility with the engineers."
Making it work inside the bank
UBS is a highly governed environment, with many (understandable) rules around onboarding new tools and handling client data. Giada treats her firm's context as part of the job, something to accept rather than complain about. She practices new product management techniques, including AI-assisted ones, in her own time, then brings what fits back to work.
Working within constraints
"Some can be frustrated. I accept the nature and the constraints of my firm, and I like that I can broaden my perspectives in my spare time. I like the fact that I need to customize it [what I learn and test in my spare time] based on the constraints and the context of my company."
Coaching senior leaders
Most of Giada's work now is with senior leaders running large product teams. The stakeholder management session with Justyna gave her something she could put to use right away.
"I really liked the class about stakeholder management: doing your stakeholder mapping, applying shuttle diplomacy, documenting your decisions, and having AI assist you in the process. This is what I'm recommending that senior product and tech leaders do to tackle, for example, decision conflicts in the product strategy or in the product roadmap."
With the product owners she coaches, the additional focus is on making Scrum events more effective and more purposeful.
"What my team and I are building is a set of prompts to assess the different Scrum events, particularly the refinement and the iteration planning, and to automatically assess the readiness of the iteration backlog so product teams don't have to manually check all the items. This is another use case that I'm bringing into the company."
What changed
More comfortable with AI
"I feel more comfortable working with AI. I feel more comfortable building agents in my company. With Copilot, you can build agents, which are similar to skills in Claude."
"I need to be adaptable to the constraints and the context of my firm's environment."
What she'd tell the next cohort
Her main piece of advice is to use the assignments as an opportunity to do the real work.
"I would encourage students to build their own AI skills, because it's so easy to copy-paste what's available in the cohort material and not think about how to build AI skills that fit the nature of their own product and the context of their own firm."
"Building your own AI skills [like I have done with the product discovery skill] doesn't take a couple of hours. It can take up to a day, with a lot of refinement, if you want to do a good job."
More from the conversation
How the program runs
Coaching senior leaders
Backlog readiness prompts
Practice over lecture
At Product Masterclass, we train product managers to work effectively in the AI era. Our 8-week intensive program covers everything from customer interviews to vibe coding to building your personal AI workflow. Check out the next cohorts
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