ProductPlan Acquires Winware.ai and Names Steven Cohn CEO: Building an AI-Driven Product Intelligence Platform
ProductPlan has acquired Winware.ai and appointed Winware founder Steven Cohn as CEO. The goal is straightforward: bring first-party customer and market intelligence into every product decision inside the ProductPlan platform.
The combined stack adds agentic and generative AI to ProductPlan's existing modules for Strategy, Prioritization, Idea Capture, Roadmapping, and Product Launch. For product teams, that means less guessing and faster, higher-confidence calls from idea to monetization.
Why this matters for product leaders
- Decision intelligence inside the roadmap. Instead of running research in one place and planning in another, insight flows directly into prioritization, positioning, and go-to-market.
- First-party signals, not assumptions. Agentic AI captures voice of customer and voice of market to reduce risk before commitments are made.
- Faster cycle time. Continuous research shortens the gap between learning and action, helping teams focus resources on the right work.
- Enterprise scale with proof. ProductPlan is used by 1,000+ organizations, powering 860,000+ roadmaps and 23 million strategic initiatives since 2013.
What's new under the hood
- Agentic AI for signal capture. Run ongoing, first-party customer and market research without spinning up a separate process for every question.
- Generative synthesis and outputs. Turn raw insight into structured artifacts: opportunity briefs, prioritization inputs, positioning, and GTM plans.
- Tighter feedback loops. Plan, test, and refine in one place-so decisions improve with each iteration.
- End-to-end continuity. From strategy to launch, the same intelligence layer informs what gets built, funded, and shipped.
Leadership update
Steven Cohn, founder and CEO of Winware.ai, now leads ProductPlan. He previously founded Validately (acquired by UserZoom and later part of UserTesting) and built products acquired by TripAdvisor and LivingSocial. His focus: remove uncertainty from product decisions.
"What product teams struggle with today isn't execution, it's certainty," said Cohn. "I built Winware around agentic and generative AI to bring first-party customer and market intelligence directly into product decisions. Bringing that capability into ProductPlan allows teams to plan and prioritize with confidence before decisions become commitments."
Timeline and access
Winware's capabilities will roll into ProductPlan over the coming months, with broader customer access planned for April 2026. For updates and early access, follow ProductPlan on LinkedIn.
What you can do now
- Audit your decision stack. List where research lives, how it informs prioritization, and where handoffs slow you down.
- Commit to first-party signal. Capture direct customer and market input before roadmap decisions are locked.
- Pilot a closed loop. Pick one product line to connect research → prioritization → launch in a single workflow.
- Set guardrails. Define data quality standards, governance, and success metrics (e.g., forecast accuracy, cycle time, rework).
- Upskill the team. Teach PMs, Designers, and PMMs how to run AI-assisted research and convert insight into positioning and GTM. If you need a starting point, explore curated AI learning paths by job at Complete AI Training.
The big picture
Roadmaps still matter, but the bar for decision quality is higher. By pairing ProductPlan's scale with Winware's AI-native research engine, product organizations can cut uncertainty, reduce waste, and move faster with evidence-backed choices.
That's the shift: fewer opinions, more signal-baked straight into the plan.
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