Five Questions with Product Strategist, Actor and Writer Francesca Lubrino

Hey all 👋,

Our first speaker event of 2026 is just around the corner, and we are super stoked to kick off the new year featuring 5 questions with January’s speaker Francesca Lubrino, presenting “Yes, And… Embracing Improv Intelligence: Listen Better. Adapt Faster. Communicate Clearly” on January 29th, at 6:30pm at The Center for Entrepreneurship at Monmouth University.

Francesca is a Senior Product Manager at Colibri Group, and brings more than fifteen years of experience building digital products with The Girl Scouts of the USA, and New York University, among others. Check out Francesca’s LinkedIn to learn more.

In addition to be a successful product leader, Francesca is also an actor, improviser and sketch comedy writer having trained at American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Art House Productions and Kentucky Shakespeare. Improv credits include murder mystery dinner theater, member of Louisville’s first sketch comedy group and a mom of two toddlers.

This event will be both informative and interactive (for those who want to participate). Should be a great opportunity to learn and have fun!

🙏 Thank you Francesca for taking the time to answer our questions. As tradition, we snuck an extra question in because because five just wasn’t enough.

…willing to ask the question others are thinking but not saying. I think a lot of that bravery/boldness actually comes from my background in theater. My job as an actor is to connect - connect with my character, the scene, my partner. The way you connect to all of that is to ask questions.

We can start with the concerns first. Two come to mind: Changes in hiring requirements for product roles and then the AI ‘vibe coding’ hype.

As someone who was recently very active on the job market looking for a product role, I saw more than ever a requirement or ‘competitive edge’ for candidates to have domain or ‘subject matter expertise’ tied to the product. To be honest, I’ve always felt that what’s made me a great practitioner was my ability to step into any business, no bias, and help create a path forward. While I can see the pros in this approach and its potential to reduce risk or speed up onboarding time, I think it’s a shame to cut out so many great candidates due to lack of experience within the subject area. I think it also speaks to the de-emphasis (or maybe never-enough emphasis) of giving time to learn about the business and its unique userbase, business problems and goals. This concern leads me into my second concern around AI vibe coding.

I’ll admit, I completely get the value of it. I took a vibe coding bootcamp and had my ‘holy guacamole’ moment. Working in product for almost a decade, and then in academic technology prior to that, I cannot begin to explain how empowered I felt to finally have the agency and autonomy to develop on my own, by myself. However, seeing the rise of the ‘AI PM’ role is a bit like looking for a unicorn on steroids, powered by AI go-go juice. My concerns around this point back to what great product managers do best - set context. And we create that context by engaging with users, doing field research, discussing technical and business tradeoffs. It takes time. Shortening the ‘baking’ process by setting the expectation that I now need to be a builder may seem like it’s leading to a quicker deliverable, but there’s going to be some long term cost, and I’m not sure if I’ve seen the conversation really go in that direction.

There have been countless times where I’ve designed an experience and a seemingly innocent data visualization or pagination schema sets off a technical discussion that will result in a design tradeoff. Imagine needing to do that after a stakeholder has already gotten their hands on your very real-feeling ‘vibe coded’ product and has the unrealistic expectation of seeing that same thing in production next week. I’ve seen this countless times before when demoing a mid-fi or high-fi prototype…the conversation always ends with ‘This is great, when can I use it?’ I’m not a software engineer and I’m still learning about how frontend experiences are dependent on architecture choices. However, I guess what also excites me about AI vibe coding is the (hopeful) forced collaboration between product and engineering - it’s always interesting to learn which organizations have the two paired up in the same department versus separated, and perhaps that dialogue will be another way to showcase that all architecture decisions or constraints create design tradeoffs and the role of the product manager is to negotiate between all of them in order to get to a desired end-result.

Finding this group (Jersey Shore Tech & Design) within the last few months has been a game changer. I grew up on Staten Island and spent my teens years with the mentality that anything ‘cool’ going on was happening in Manhattan.

It’s probably the biggest project I ever led. I think what made it successful was twofold: it worked, and it wasn’t anything I was asked to do, it sort of emerged as the ‘right thing to do’ that took a lot of negotiating with leadership.

Thinking back to that project, I took the most effort and time I’ve probably ever taken into forming a needs analysis. I devoured Reddit threads and YouTube videos coming from community members, I attended live webinars impersonating the user persona and even flew out to onsite conferences asking to just ‘please let me blend in.’ I channeled my inner Jane Goodall.

I was asked to help solve a critical membership retention problem for a very large, old, and well known global nonprofit organization through a learning and development product lens. But again, no one asked me for what I gave them. I was asked for ‘better videos’ and ‘more engaging content’, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was within an ecosystem of users that had historically been left out of a support plan to alleviate the problem, because they didn’t have a direct path to the business problem. However, they were a part of it because of their relationship to the target user. So what I delivered was an enterprise level, multi-tenant b2b2c solution for over 200k users worldwide.

I actually had an interview recently with someone who was a happy active user on the platform, almost seven years later, and I could not tell you how proud that made me feel.

I think general advice would be to always ask ‘why.’ Why are we doing this? Why is this the next thing? Why is this important? Why is this the choice made? I’ve never been the smartest person in the room, but I’ve often been the boldest, willing to ask the question others are thinking but not saying. I think a lot of that bravery/boldness actually comes from my background in theater. My job as an actor is to connect - connect with my character, the scene, my partner. The way you connect to all of that is to ask questions.

Finding this group within the last few months has been a game changer. I grew up on Staten Island and spent my teens years with the mentality that anything ‘cool’ going on was happening in Manhattan. I was very used to having a two hour commute for various experiences, like shows, meetups or going to a museum. Then I spent the early part of my career working in Manhattan and living in Jersey City - again going to meetups, mostly in the city, was just part of what I did.

I think coming from that background and career launchpad, I just assumed those sorts of experiences were closer to the bigger cities. But you know what? There’s so much talent right in our own backyard! Many of the people who probably once gathered at those early day events at places like ‘General Assembly’ or a ‘WeWork’ space now live elsewhere, but the desire to connect and learn doesn’t disappear. It’s just way less obvious without someone creating the space. So I’m very thankful for not only this community, but intentionally creating space to gather and learn.

I think any recommendation that comes with a set of instructions is an automatic win, and this is no exception. My favorite place for a burger, easily top three of my lifetime, is Portside Bar & Liquor on 36 in Port Monmouth.

Here are your instructions: When you walk in, it’s going to look like a liquor store, because it is one. You’re going to see rows and rows of liquor for sale, but smell something amazing. It may be a little confusing because you can’t see the restaurant yet. Don’t worry, it’s there. Walk straight to the back, with purpose, keep your head up! This will impress everyone because it’s going to look like you’ve done it before.

Eventually there’s going to be an opening to a restaurant with a bar and then tables on the left. Get seated. Order yourself the bacon cheese burger. I will add - this is a restaurant in the back of a liquor store - so whatever you imagine that looking like, you’re probably right. You’re not going there for the ambiance, you’re going there for the food.

I can literally work from anywhere, I just need two things: Headphones and a notebook. I can be in an office, at home or working out of a coffeeshop. Something about putting on my headphones allows me to completely focus in on my work and drown everything else out. And I do a lot of thinking on paper - it’s just how I process.

Thank you for reading. Reminder to join us on February 29th for Francesca’s featured presentation Yes, And… Embracing Improv Intelligence: Listen Better. Adapt Faster. Communicate Clearly event. Thanks again Francesca!

Jersey Shore Tech & Design events are hosted in collaboration with The Center for Entrepreneurship at Monmouth University. Founded in 2010, JST&D community events cover various innovative technology and design topics, engage local professionals and students, and help foster the creative energy and community in our own backyard. Let’s build together 🚀