Mihaela is a product leader with 15 years experience in building B2C and B2B global products for education, e-commerce, affiliate marketing and automotive industries.
At Volkswagen Digital Solutions, Portugal, she is responsible for managing several cross-functional teams that build digital products for VW Group Sales and Procurement 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.
Mihaela is also a champion for diversity, inclusive environments and opportunities for women in technology, working with various organisations over the years, bringing positive impact through conferences, events, mentoring and social awareness campaigns.
Past Talks
20 May 2025
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are getting filtered out by AI before a human even sees their application, and hiring managers are often relying on outdated methods that don’t assess the full potential of a candidate.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.
19 May 2025
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.
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.