🎆 Hey!
Welcome to 2026! We're excited about what's ahead & we hope you are too.
We spent 2025 working with product teams from start-ups to large corporates, and the same pattern keeps showing up: growth and maturity don't move together.
Teams scale, ship more features, and build faster, but when we ask, "are you getting better at building products?" most can't answer.
🎉 dualoop in 2025
We celebrated 4 years of dualoop, here's what that looked like:
📆 Brought 550+ people together with 8 Product Apéros and 4 webinars connecting product leaders, practitioners, and thinkers
🎓 Trained 120+ product folks and leaders, equipping teams with the skills to build better products
🌍 Went international: hosted our first Product Apéro in San Francisco, bringing the dualoop community across the Atlantic
🎤 Took the stage globally at ProductWorld Europe, South Summit Madrid, DevTalks, inAgile, PR_D_CT Day, Agentforce, and more
🤝 Partnered with the Belgium Startup Ecosystem, Sirris | Innovation forward, The Product Consortium and more to support the communities that drive product excellence forward
🥂 Built stronger as a team, from a team retreat to the Ardennes to VR adventures, a BBQ, and an epic Christmas dinner
Thank you to every looper, client, speaker, and community member who made this possible! 🔥
👀 Three patterns we kept seeing in 2025
In 2025, working with teams of all sizes highlighted one core truth: organisational growth ≠ maturity. As you plan for 2026, here are three insights to shift from "backlog babysitting" to true outcome leadership.
1. Fact-check your reality
Leadership teams are often aware of symptoms (like missed deadlines or stagnant velocity), but their opinions on root causes tend to diverge. Without a shared, evidence-based view of maturity, improvement efforts lack focus and direction. It helps to start by assessing your current situation to create a shared fact base across strategy, discovery, and delivery before jumping to solutions.
2. Break the discovery bottleneck
Delivery speed is at an all-time high, but building more doesn't guarantee impact. The bottleneck has shifted from how to build to knowing what to build in the first place. To solve this, discovery must become a continuous habit, validating assumptions before committing resources.
3. AI is a mirror, not a cure
AI speeds up the work, but it also amplifies existing organisational patterns. If your process is dysfunctional, AI just gets you the wrong results faster. Successful adoption requires solid foundations: a clear strategy and empowered teams.
If you’re thinking about where to focus in 2026, these are the questions worth asking. And if you’d like help assessing where you stand, we're here to help!
⭐️ The North Star Metric: a practical guide
Still figuring out your 2026 priority? This might help!
Most product teams track dozens of metrics but struggle to say which one actually matters. The North Star Metric is the single measure that captures the core value you deliver to customers and predicts long-term growth.
Our guide breaks down how to pick yours, avoid vanity metrics, and keep your entire organisation aligned on what drives real impact.
🚀 The Mom Test review
Most customer conversations lie to you, not because people are dishonest, but because they're trying to be polite, supportive, or optimistic about your idea.
"Would you use this?" gets you a yes.
"That sounds cool!" tells you nothing.
The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick teaches us to ask questions and run conversations that reveal whether our problem is worth solving before wasting months building the wrong thing.
If you've ever shipped a feature customers said they wanted but never actually used, this review breaks down why, and how to fix it.
✅ 8 principles for career growth
Product managers evaluate bets and navigate ambiguity every day, but when it comes to their own careers, most abandon that discipline entirely.
During our latest webinar, Lindsey Nguyen shared the eight principles she used to navigate roles at Apple, McKinsey, and multiple startups, treating career moves with the same rigor PMs bring to their work.
🤩 Coming soon
In 2025, we saw the same challenges across teams: improvement efforts that scatter because there's no shared, evidence-based view of where the organisation actually stands.
You can't fix what you can't see.
We've got some things in the works to help with that. More soon!
Here's to a year of building products that matter.
Whatever your priority this year, we hope you build products that matter and teams that thrive. We're here if you need us!
— The dualoop team
