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Mihaela Draghici

Product Leader | Language Mapping Blueprint

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. 

Keynote: Language as Design Infrastructure: Why Teams Don’t Align, and How to Fix It.

Shared language isn’t a “nice to have”. It’s the connective tissue that turns cross-disciplinary teams into coherent product creators in a world where complexity (AI, Web3, hybrid work) demands more than isolated expertise.

When organizations chase innovation, especially in Web3 and AI products, the loudest challenges aren’t technical: they’re collaboration breakdowns. Teams bring expertise (UX, product, engineering, business analysis), but without a shared way to talk about outcomes, risks, customers, and trade-offs, alignment turns into friction, assumptions, and rework.

This talk presents a practical blueprint for transforming team communication into design infrastructure. Moving beyond “we all care about users”, teams need actionable, shared constructs: clear mental models, aligned definitions of success, and ways to make assumptions explicit. I’ll show how this works at the intersection of business strategy, UX and product thinking, using real practices that shift teams from siloed specialists to coordinated builders.

You’ll walk away with a Language Mapping Blueprint, a set of tools that help cross-functional teams surface misaligned interpretations and build the shared language that enables them to move faster and build better products.

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