Speakers

“Self-contained, cross-functional product team looking for vacancy at well-funded, self-aware software company, who’s ready for proper product practices and global success” - as a product leader, I’ve actually been offered this job - and learned quickly that fairytales still don’t exist.

Successful products - and the organisations that build them - need more than just autonomy, mission statements and funding. They need functioning product cultures that reach further than the product team.

Product cultures are hard to develop and maintain, and it takes time to get your organisation onboard. But it always starts with some simple, actionable steps which every team can take, starting tomorrow.

Why should PMs do user research? What's really in it for them? In this talk, we'll share stories of how user research informs product building and some tips to have effective customer conversations.

Why should PMs do user research? What's really in it for them? In this talk, we'll share stories of how user research informs product building and some tips to have effective customer conversations.

How is the product you’re building affecting society? How does it affect matters of privacy, bias, and more? Technology has become so pervasive that we must build with intent and be aware of how products are impacting us, our experiences, and our societies. As product managers, you are the best person who is in a position to ensure that both your team and company act ethically. Join this session to hear about how the Ethics & Society team at Microsoft is approaching this work, hear real stories of overcoming ethical challenges, as well as some tools and methods to bring ethical thinking into your product development process.

How can I get product a seat at the decision-making table? How do I benchmark the quality of my product team? How do I chart my own path from PM to senior PM? Based on my conversations with PMs and product leaders from start-ups and scale-ups across diverse sectors and both B2B and B2C, this talk explores some of the pressing questions in product today. Find camaraderie in how their challenges overlap with yours. Find inspiration in their persistence to have an impact. And learn from their experiences with specific, practical takeaways.

Building products shouldn’t be just to maximise profits. That can happen, but it should always be the output of focusing on customer outcomes. Customer focus has helped us grow to over 10 million businesses and people using Wise. We’ll talk about how to deeply understand your customers, drive customer advocacy and identify the most impactful product opportunities for your customers.

Agile Manifesto is outdated! We urgently need a Product Manifesto! The challenges we face nowadays are completely different than the ones faced when the Agile Manifesto was written. Mainly, the manifesto focuses on the output while not mentioning the outcome. Therefore, blindly following it will not ensure you deliver value to the users and businesses. The Agile Manifesto has done its job well, but now we need something more to combat our challenges. Today, many companies can easily build working software, but they often fail to deliver value. My philosophy is: - Building features cannot ensure value. - Being Agile is not enough to deliver value. - Until teams can focus on producing value, useless software is the outcome. I believe it’s time to create a Product Manifesto! We cannot keep building features that nobody needs. We need to stop wasting our time. An urgent change of focus is what we need.

Prioritization is hard, and we HOPE that a clear corporate strategy plus well-considered OKRs will get our internal stakeholders to agree on what’s most important: unambiguous #1 and #2 and #3 priorities. That our spreadsheets and analysis will sell everyone on our plan. But that rarely happens: Sales wants us to put 100% of our development effort against shiny new features (except when every big deal includes a commitment for some tiny off-off item); Support/Customer Success want 100% against bug fixes and workflow improvements and productivity tools; Engineering lobbies for better architecture and scalability and more refactoring; Marketing wants us to document more use cases in more industries so that we can widen the funnel. We may wait for each department to “see the light” and give up its specific asks in favor of the greater good, but that can be a very long wait. How do we understand this behavior, appreciate their effort (rather than just being frustrated), and find strategic tools that let us build out a single plan for our products and teams? How to some progress on our notional roadmap amid the chaos?