Product & Design Drinks in Ploiești: Why Small Meetups Hit Different
I grew up in Craiova, a city that, in the 2000s and 2010s, was not exactly a hub for tech events. If you wanted to attend something cool, you’d take the train to Bucharest. There was no tech conference like Webstock in Craiova. There was no digital marketing summit like iQ Digital back in those days. You either traveled or you missed out. That left a mark on me.
So when Bülent Duagi announced he was organizing the first Product & Design Drinks Ploiești under the Product Makers umbrella, my reaction was immediate: sign me up, I’m going.
Getting There is Half the Fun
For those not from Romania: Ploiești is a city roughly 45 minutes north of Bucharest. Some consider it a suburb, considering that it’s not uncommon for people to live in Ploiești and commute to Bucharest for work. I wouldn’t dare compare it to San Mateo and San Francisco, but close enough.
The Slack coordination the night before was a thing of beauty. One group organized a train expedition with timetables and meeting points. Then Dragos Manescu showed up with the counter-offer: seats in his electric car and a promise to evangelize EV benefits during the ride. The train group stuck with the train. I took Dragos up on the ride and offered Claude lobbying in return.
The whole coordination felt like planning a weekend trip with friends, not attending a professional meetup. Which set the tone perfectly.
Small Gatherings, Deep Conversations
The meetup was cozy, and that turned out to be its greatest strength.
Bülent had proposed three conversation starters: how do we see 2026 professionally, how do you stay relevant as a product maker, and how is everyone using AI. We touched on all of them, but the beauty of a small group is that conversations go wherever they need to go.
Big events are the aspiration of every community, and for good reason. They bring visibility, energy, and critical mass. But small gatherings have something that conferences never will: you talk to everyone. No bouncing between sessions, no awkward hallway networking, no “let’s connect on LinkedIn” as a substitute for actual connection. You sit down, you talk, and you go deep.
As people who work or have worked in product development, the conversation flowed naturally across software, AI, cars, job opportunities, and, unexpectedly, Process Communication Model (PCM) and how valuable it can be to understand how people communicate and collaborate. The kind of cross-pollination that only happens when a group is small enough that everyone’s voice is heard.
Things That Stuck With Me
The AI industry is more than LLMs. There are multiple layers of potential business that serve the AI ecosystem. Tools like Temporal make it possible to have durable execution and build business logic around it without worrying about events not happening. I have past experience (read: horror stories) about saga patterns implemented with cron jobs and RabbitMQ queues that were kinda working, triggering endless maintenance efforts and often leading to production incidents at hours when you should be sleeping, drinking, or engaged in… different activities :D
The world is a small place. You talk to someone and realize you have so many acquaintances in common, that you’ve been part of so many overlapping experiences without knowing it. Serendipity is a strange and wonderful thing.
Sometimes, things sound too good to be true. Or they get taken lightly, as a joke. And then they turn out to be very real.
Cool jobs and great workplaces on paper can be nightmares in practice. Or hidden gems for others. Some people want autonomy at work. Others prefer to be a cog in a system so they can focus on other aspects of their life. There is no one-size-fits-all, and the sooner we stop prescribing what a “good job” looks like, the better.
Sparking innovation inside a company is about empowerment and trust. Giving your employees $1,000 and a week off can be a legal, accounting, and HR hassle. But it’s a very cheap price for what might turn out to be your next big thing as a company.
There are cars, and there are BMWs. Not all BMWs are equal. Some are more equal than others.
Why This Matters
The Product Makers community expanding beyond Bucharest is something I want to support as much as I can. Not because Bucharest isn’t great, but because this country has more than one city worth showing up for. If my experience growing up in Craiova taught me anything, it’s that people outside the capital are hungry for these kinds of connections. They just need someone to say “let’s do it here.”
Bülent said it. And we showed up.
And it’s not just Ploiești. Product Drinks already happened in Cluj-Napoca, Iași, Brașov, and Bucharest. More formats are coming: Product Walks, Product Dinners, workshops, mentoring programs. The community is expanding across the country and 2026 is shaping up to be a big year.
The next Product & Design Drinks will happen. When it does, do yourself a favor and show up. It’s free, it’s a couple of hours on a Saturday, and the conversations are worth more than most full-day conferences I’ve attended. Follow Product Makers to find the next edition in your city.
All in all, it was a fun Saturday morning. I’m glad I got to spend quality time with Bülent, Dragos Galateanu, Dragos Manescu, Andrei Stroescu, Radu Minea, and Raluca. Such a pity Valentina couldn’t make it after all, but we’re both going next time for sure.
Once again, thanks Dragos for the ride and the talks. It was an awesome Saturday morning.