Panoptia is a Product Lab – where strategy becomes product. Independent experts turn complex questions into validated decisions, testable hypotheses, and real outcomes.
How we work
Decision Architecture
Structuring strategic questions, making priorities visible, and turning implicit bets into explicit ones – before resources are committed.
Narrative & Connectivity
Making ideas understandable and translating strategy into effective stories – so that decisions connect inside and outside the organization.
Product & Innovation Logic
Developing hypotheses, structuring experiments, and building operational connectivity – where strategic intent meets product reality.
Team ↗
Independent perspectives that deliberately complement each other – product, design, strategy, and systems thinking.
Field Notes
How AI changes product work, what context engineering means in practice, and where design systems meet agentic workflows – curated observations and assessments from our lab.
AI ethics keeps producing guidelines — and changing little. Critical Theory from the Frankfurt School offers an analytical toolkit that explains why. Four missing modes of analysis.
Figma publishes guidelines for AI-compatible design system documentation. The principles — atomic files, imperative over descriptive, structure as routing — redefine what documentation even is: no longer a reference, but a control layer.
Andrej Karpathy describes his setup for LLM-powered knowledge work — and it sounds familiar. Markdown, Git, Obsidian, an LLM as operator. Practitioners independently discover the same architecture. That's not coincidence — it's convergent evolution.
Industry experience
Retail
In retail, margins are shrinking while channels keep fragmenting. Digitizing here means moving legacy systems and new touchpoints forward at the same time.
At Douglas, we worked on the strategic foundation for their digital transformation — from innovation strategy to the first digital touchpoints across stores and e-commerce.
Future topics
Construction & Trades
Construction and skilled trades are among Europe's least digitized industries. Fragmented value chains, paper-based processes, and over a million small businesses make standard solutions ineffective — what's needed are products that truly fit the daily reality of work.
At ABS Safety, we helped develop digital self-service products, and at ista we contributed to building management infrastructure across 17 countries. With Tooltime, we accompanied a trades platform from its first hypothesis to a market-ready spin-off.
Future topics
Insurance
Insurance operates with regulated products, long contract cycles, and complex legacy systems. Innovation often happens in separate units and rarely makes it back into the core business.
At codecentric, we translated insurance processes into digital products. At the black frame, we accompanied new benefits models from idea to testable product.
Future topics
We listen before we design.
No pitch deck, no 90-slide framework. We start with a conversation — about your product, your market, and where things are stuck. From there we figure out together whether and how we can help.
Reach out directly — David and Jan are your personal contacts.
David Latz
Jan Musiedlak