Mihaela Draghici

Leadership and product teams often use the same words but mean different things. That language gap turns into rework, delayed decisions, and endless “alignment” meetings. In this 3 hour hands-on workshop, Mihaela Draghici helps you identify the high-frequency terms that quietly slow down execution, then fix them with a practical language mapping method you can reuse within your teams.

What you will learn:

• How identical terms fracture across disciplines, seniority levels and domains, even in experienced teams
• A repeatable facilitation method to surface and resolve meaning gaps quickly
• How to translate shared language into clearer decisions, fewer re-alignment loops and smoother delivery

What you will take away:

• A Language Map showing which terms in your team need translation and alignment
• A glossary of agreed, shared definitions for critical terms
• A reusable framework you can run with your own teams whenever alignment starts slipping

Most product teams do not argue because they disagree. They argue because they think they agree. In this fast, interactive session, the audience votes live on what common product and delivery terms mean. The results show instantly, and the room usually splits hard. “DevOps”, “MVP”, “Done”, “Strategy”, “Production”, and “A/B test” turn out to mean different things depending on role, seniority, and where you sit in the org.
Mihaela Draghici uses each split to show what is really happening under the surface: why teams nod in meetings but execute differently, where rework is born, and which words are the highest-risk triggers in your environment. You will leave with a shortlist of terms to fix and a lightweight method to align meaning quickly, without adding process.

Outcomes:

• Identify the words most likely to create false agreement and hidden misalignment
• Understand why teams “align” verbally but still operate differently based on interpretations
• Take a lightweight technique to fix meaning drift quickly

Hiring today is broken. Candidates are getting filtered out by AI before a human even sees their application, and hiring managers are often relying on outdated methods that don’t assess the full potential of a candidate. This discussion will tackle hiring challenges from both sides of the table:
- How candidates can stand out despite AI screening and generic recruitment pipelines.

• Why skills, mindset, and cultural fit matter more than portfolios or take-home assignments, and how hiring managers can assess them effectively.
• How hiring managers can better brief recruiters to identify the right talent, even if they aren’t design or product experts.
• How teams are using AI and hiring tech effectively without missing top candidates or introducing bias.
• Real-world hiring strategies to improve hiring outcomes for both job seekers and hiring managers.

Cross-functional collaboration is widely regarded as essential for effective product development. You’ve built cross-functional teams. You’ve broken down silos. You’ve aligned product, business, and engineering more. Yet, collaboration can still feel challenging at times.

In this talk, Mihaela shares reflections on the experience of embedding business stakeholders into hybrid product teams, and the unexpected ways that teams often find themselves gradually drifting 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. Drawing from real-world examples, Mihaela explores common patterns that cause well-intentioned collaboration to falter over time and 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 how to support collaboration more effectively over the long term.

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.