Engineering and Product Management are two sides of the same coin. The success of one depends on the success of the other. Therefore, it’s urgent that we abandon the framework where these two roles coexist as separate functions and look at it as One Team, with complementing skills.
This session will guide you through the model used by OutSystems engineering, making sure that Engineering and Product Management are in lockstep with regard to strategy, roadmap, allocation, and execution.
A model of a unified team is a big transformation step and requires a big change in mindset, so we’ll focus on organization and people management, strategy definition, prioritization sources and models, data-driven decision-making, and the key ceremonies that you and your team should implement.

In this roundtable session, we will explore the ethical considerations surrounding artificial intelligence (A.I.) in product development. As A.I. continues to advance and become more integrated into our daily lives, it is crucial to examine the potential ethical implications that arise from its use.

During this session, participants will engage in a collaborative discussion to address questions such as:
1) How can we ensure that A.I. algorithms are fair and unbiased?
2) What are the potential risks and consequences of relying heavily on A.I. in product development?
3) How can we balance innovation and progress with ethical considerations? Through sharing insights, experiences, and best practices, attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the ethical challenges associated with A.I. in product development.

AI is often seen as just a buzzword. But it can become a real advantage if we let our strategy lead the way, not the other way around. To make AI work for us, we need clear goals, a focus on what will really impact our business, and a good grasp of what AI can and can't do. We also need to know our stuff, have solid basics like infrastructure, and measure how well things are going. Plus, we can't forget about bringing in people who know AI inside out.

On the flip side, just chasing the newest tech trends, copying competitors without thinking, ignoring the basics, changing plans too often because of AI, and getting caught up in the hype - these are mistakes we should avoid.

In this session, we'll talk about how to change our thinking to follow the successful approach, not the unsuccessful one. And we'll look at how to use AI the right way, thinking about ethics too. These will be our key lessons.

In this presentation, Marcel Hild, Architect for Red Hat Developer Hub, explores the implementation of Backstage to enhance productivity in developer teams. The focus extends beyond the widely recognized Software Catalog and Templates to cover essential features of the Backstage core platform, illustrating its comprehensive capability as a developer portal framework. Marcel will discuss the strategic advantages of integrating Backstage for Internal Developer Portals (IDP), challenging the notion that its utility is confined to cataloging or templating. <br
Drawing on experiences from introducing Backstage to a large, globally distributed engineering team, Marcel will share insights into the Proof of Concept, deployment, and onboarding processes. The presentation will cover effective practices for ensuring the platform's performance and reliability, including the automation of misconfiguration detection and the application of observability techniques to evaluate the success of Backstage adoption. This session aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how Backstage can serve as a pivotal tool in optimizing developer workflows and infrastructure management.

Every organization, from six-month-old startups to 30-year industry giants, has legacy systems. These systems hold your company's history but can also block the shift to a modern digital business. We've spent the last two decades helping companies revamp these old systems. We've learned what works and seen many attempts that don't.

In our talk, we'll share several successful strategies for updating legacy systems and some common mistakes to avoid. We'll go over specific methods, when they work best, and how you might use or steer clear of them, with real-life examples. The session includes insights from collaborative work with experts like Martin Fowler, James Lewis, and Ian Cartwright.

In a time when everything is important, a good decision making process is the one key tool in your box to stay sane. You need to decide, with confidence, where you spend your time, where your team is spending theirs, and what priorities to sacrifice for others.

Join Matthias on a journey of a young founder, making decisions on a whim and without any kind of structure, always reacting rather than responding, to becoming an executive that’s much more confident in his decision making. We’ll look at how you can pull yourself out of a reactive decision making mode that causes utter stress constantly, to both you and your team, and make decisions with a high level of confidence and transparency. We’ll talk about what ingredients you need in place for your decision making to flow without you really having to do anything, with just a dash of laziness and looking towards what the future might behold, both good and bad (and neutral).

Every software engineer has stories of bug hunting or spending hours unraveling the root cause of a system failure. In this journey, we delve into a selection of these tales, aiming to extract key ideas, concepts, and hints for improvement. Additionally, we'll explore the impact of debugging and issue resolution on products, and take a glimpse into the future by discussing potential offerings from advancements in AI.

The success rate of software projects has more than doubled since the introduction of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development 23 years ago. Despite this, developers and their managers are increasingly turning their backs on so-called "Agile" just when we need it most. And the sad thing is that they are right; Agile is no longer agile. Let's look at what went wrong, and let's start a discussion about reapplying the core values of the Manifesto and reclaiming the benefits of agility for individuals, teams, and organizations.