Mihaela is an Associate Director at SDC Lisbon - Volkswagen Digital Solutions, Portugal. She is responsible for multiple cross-functional teams that build digital products for VW Group departments, in a mission to solve user problems and bring business value, while shifting away from a project mindset and towards a user-centric approach.
Mihaela believes that putting people first, both end-users and teams, is the key to creating great products. Her current role lies at the intersection of people, product, and processes. On top of building and managing teams, she works on improving working models and promoting best practices to empower people to build meaningful products, aligning business and team needs, engaging in C-level stakeholder management, and identifying strategic directions for new product development.
She is a product leader with 14 years experience in building B2C and B2B global products for education, e-commerce, affiliate marketing and automotive industries.
Mihaela is also a champion for diversity, inclusive environments and opportunities for women in technology, working with various Women in Tech organisations over the years, bringing positive impact through conferences, events, mentoring and social awareness campaigns.
She relocated from the UK to Portugal in 2020 to learn how to surf, and enjoy the beautiful, sunny beaches south of Lisbon.
Upcoming Talks
20 May 2025
Cross-functional collaboration is often celebrated as the gold standard for product development. You’ve built cross-functional teams. You’ve broken down silos. You’ve aligned product, business, and engineering more. So why does collaboration still feel challenging at times?
Mihaela Draghici reflects on the experiences with embedding business stakeholders into hybrid product teams and the unexpected ways that teams drift back into misalignment and silos—even after setting up strong collaboration frameworks. The culprit? A mix of hidden structural forces, team habits, and, most critically, language misalignment. When teams unknowingly speak different “languages”—not just across industries but across functions—communication breaks down, expectations become misaligned, and collaboration suffers.
This talk explores real-world examples of cross-functional initiatives that started strong but slowly eroded, revealing common pitfalls that cause teams to revert to silos. Mihaela will share lessons learned and practical strategies to prevent these failures, from identifying linguistic mismatches early, to maintaining long-term alignment across business, product, and engineering teams. If your teams are struggling to stay aligned despite their best efforts, this talk will show you why—and what to do about it.
Past Talks
11 October 2023
In this insightful discussion, Mihaela will introduce how Volkswagen Digital Solutions is taking steps towards a successful transition from software delivery to product delivery lifecycle, highlighting the challenges and the innovative tactics to break down traditional silos within the product teams as well as between “the business” and "IT". Learn how the Volkswagen Group established new delivery centers across Europe to foster interdisciplinary product teams, and the hurdles they overcame including stringent security, legal, and compliance boundaries, as well as people adaptation. Mihaela will share hands-on examples of their unique approach to get “the business on board", offering a glimpse into their working models and approaches on engagement and collaboration between the product teams and stakeholders. Discover how they faced resistance and fostered an inclusive process to move towards an efficient product delivery cycle. This talk is an exploration into digital transformation, with practical examples, offering key takeaways for those aiming to break silos and cultivate a collaborative environment within their organisations.
12 October 2022
There are a number of ways technology companies scale fast. Scaleups that acquire other companies achieve their goals faster than those who grow organically, however they have mammoth culture, team and product integration complexities. Those who have grown organically, that culture and process that helped define their launch can be one of the hardest things to scale. Leaders of these companies are under pressure to determine which elements are worth preserving, how they align with the forward-looking business strategy, and how to define and foster that's ideal as the organization expands and integrates new people into the ranks.
- Integration of acquisition: How you bring that into your portfolio
- How do you manage that coupled with organic growth
- Balancing short and long-term vision
8 October 2021
We’ve heard them all - Double Diamond, Basecamp Cycles, Intercom Product Management, Lean Canvas, Scrum, the list goes on. But what does frameworks mean for the individual person; the team; for the organisation? This panel will discuss the value of “trendy” vs valuable long-term approaches for when it comes to framework implementation and ongoing management including;
- How individuals can adapt to the new frameworks seamlessly
- Adapting the team, processes and company culture
- One size does not fit all - how to prepare accordingly
- Challenges to look out for
