The latest tech.coffee meetup brought together members of the local tech community for an evening focused on product innovation, practical insights, and open discussion. Organized by Agilo, the event once again created space for developers, founders, product professionals, and students to connect and exchange experiences.

Joining from Copenhagen, Emma Arfelt shared her unique perspective shaped by experience on both sides of the table — from working on business strategy at McKinsey to building and shipping products as CTO of Jagger, Otto & Ritta.

Her key message resonated strongly with the audience: the most decisive moment in a product journey is not a funding round or a launch, but the point when a team stops asking what competitors are doing and starts asking how a product should truly work.

Thinking from first principles

Through practical examples, Emma encouraged teams to challenge the instinct to copy existing solutions and instead focus on first-principles thinking. She highlighted how bold early decisions, combined with fast experimentation and the smart use of modern tools, can help teams move beyond incremental improvements and build genuinely original products.

At the same time, she emphasized the importance of aligning innovation with real commercial outcomes, reminding attendees that strong product ideas need clear business value to succeed.

Emma was excellent, very spontaneous and engaging, which sparked a discussion that lasted almost longer than the talk itself.

Her approach to innovation emphasizes that it is sometimes necessary to trust your own intuition, as users will often resist certain changes. She also pointed out that in areas like branding, it can be difficult to clearly determine how a specific decision influenced a particular outcome.

One particularly valuable takeaway was her advice on measurement: it’s important to track results both before and after a change, but only if you introduce one change at a time. This way, you can be confident about what actually drove the results.

For example, this approach allowed her team to clearly identify that specific product changes in the app led to increased conversions — rather than, say, something unrelated like introducing a new burger sauce.

Discussion and networking

The talk sparked an engaging Q&A session, followed by informal networking where participants continued conversations, exchanged contacts, and explored potential collaborations.

Once again, tech.coffee proved to be a valuable meeting point for the community: inspiring attendees to rethink their product strategies and approach new ideas with greater confidence.