Accountancy is a bottleneck profession. Every company needs one, and the work is overwhelmingly manual compliance. Silverfin set out to change that. Serving 360,000 companies across 16 countries with an NPS of 40, Silverfin automates mandatory compliance work for accountants. At Gathering #7, Benjamin Vandermarliere, Head of Product at Silverfin, shared the product management lessons the team accumulated from 2017 through 2024: seven years of building, shipping, and iterating on AI features in a domain where getting it wrong has real consequences.
Benjamin structured the talk around three AI features Silverfin ships today and eight lessons (numbered zero through seven) that emerged from building them. The features all target compliance automation, but the lessons apply to any product team introducing AI into an established workflow. What made the talk especially valuable was its honesty: Benjamin shared direct user quotes, including the unflattering ones, to illustrate what each lesson cost to learn.
