Mihaela Drăghici is a product leader with 15 years of experience building global B2B and B2C products across industries including education, e-commerce, affiliate marketing, and automotive.
She has led cross-functional product teams and launched digital products, working closely with engineering, design, business, and executive stakeholders in complex organisations.
In these environments, she observed a recurring pattern: product teams rarely fail because of strategy or talent. They fail because people across functions interpret the work differently.
She challenges a common assumption: that alignment is a process problem. In reality, it’s a language problem.
Drawing on her education in linguistics and her experience leading cross-functional product teams, she focuses on making this invisible layer visible: surfacing assumptions, aligning meaning, and building the shared language that enables teams to move faster and make better product decisions.
Past Talks
29 May 2026
AI is changing the scale of personalisation. Products can now infer needs, predict behaviour, recommend the next action and sometimes pre-empt what a customer may want before they have asked for it. But the same capability that feels helpful in one moment can feel intrusive in another.
In this session moderated by Mihaela Draghici, Pallavi Modi and Sam Bradley explore the leadership judgement required to make AI-driven personalisation feel like a service, not surveillance.
The discussion moves beyond how much data a company can collect, and focuses instead on how products behave with the data they have. When does relevance build trust? When does it cross the line into manipulation? How should teams think about context, timing, consent, explanation and data provenance, especially when customer money, identity or long-term brand trust are involved?
Together, Pallavi and Sam will unpack where personalisation genuinely helps customers, where teams should deliberately hold back, and what product leaders should ask before scaling AI-enabled experiences.
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are getting filtered out by AI before a human even sees their application, and hiring managers are often relying on outdated methods that don’t assess the full potential of a candidate.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.