A comprehensive guide exploring various career trajectories for Product Managers, delving into the essential skills and experience necessary to ascend to a leadership role within the realm of product management. This session will provide insights on how to develop strategic thinking, effective communication, stakeholder management, and decision-making abilities to excel in the dynamic field of product management. Additionally, it will cover the importance of continuous learning, adaptability, and staying updated with industry trends to stay competitive and advance in your career as a Product Manager.

Join Amber Clifford as she explores the product strategy fundamental to a critical business decision: international expansion. In this session, Amber will outline her methodology for initiating new markets from a product perspective. She will concentrate on the strategies she utilizes to decide between hyper-localization and a scaled approach. Acquire invaluable knowledge from her broad expertise as an expert in international expansion, with work experience spanning more than 120 countries and territories with organizations such as Uber Eats and Disney+.

Engineering and product strategy, when seamlessly integrated, forge a roadmap that significantly enhances Return on Investment (ROI) and user experience. This synergy begins with a deep understanding of the user's needs, which informs the development of products that not only meet but exceed expectations.

In this session we will dive into how engineering excellence ensures that these products are not only innovative but also reliable and scalable, thus maximizing their market potential. Moreover, we will examine how a cohesive strategy aligns technological advancements with business objectives, facilitating efficient resource allocation and streamlined development processes.

Attendees will see how this results in accelerated time-to-market and reduced costs, directly impacting ROI positively. The convergence of engineering prowess and strategic product vision creates a virtuous cycle, where enhanced ROI and user satisfaction drive each other in a continuous loop of improvement and success.

In the dynamic environment of SaaS companies, addressing software complexity is paramount for engineering leaders. Subsequently, the emphasis shifts from simple software delivery to generating genuine value. This session by George Nikolaropoulos, SVP of Engineering at GWI will highlight user-centric development, agile methodologies, and data-driven decision-making as essential for delivering not only software but also substantial, enduring value to users.

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.

In the whirlwind of growth, how do we ensure our products scale with intention and clarity? This illuminating session delves into the art of scaling products without losing sight of their foundational essence. We’ll explore the paramount importance of anchoring product strategies firmly in the company’s overarching vision. By understanding and internalizing this vision, we can craft holistic product strategies that serve as robust blueprints for the journey ahead.

These strategies then evolve into clear, actionable product goals, ensuring that every milestone achieved aligns seamlessly with the larger purpose. And finally, we’ll discuss how to design and implement solutions that echo these goals, offering tangible value to users. Join us for an insightful discourse on creating resilient product strategies that resonate with purpose, ensuring meaningful growth and impact.

Measuring the success of a product is crucial for any business strategy. This workshop will focus on utilizing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and KPI trees to effectively measure product success.

A KPI tree is a structured visualization tool that breaks down overall business or product objectives into specific, measurable metrics. It resembles a tree, with a main objective as the trunk, key results as limbs, and individual KPIs as branches.

The benefits of using KPI trees include clarity, focus, alignment, and easier issue identification. By breaking down objectives, teams gain a clear understanding of what needs to be achieved and can concentrate efforts on improving metrics that directly impact higher-level goals. KPI trees also ensure alignment among employees and facilitate the diagnosis of issues at a granular level.

Digital transformation has accelerated. Especially now with AI technologies taking over across a plethora of domains - within and beyond tech.

At the same time the demand for skilled tech talent across the board increases and new digital products are produced at bulk - without necessarily prioritizing customer experience.

And the question remains the same: How can tech leaders prioritize new product development and deliver scalable products without breaking the bank? What is the role of Product Management in the equation?

In this fireside chat we will delve into the collaboration between product and technology teams,and spotlight best practices for seamless department interaction, essential for effective communication and project success. The discussion will cover the importance of a shared understanding of priorities, beyond just aligning schedules, but appreciating strategic direction and critical milestones for cohesive product development.

Software engineers are increasingly integrating machine learning (ML) into application development to create innovative solutions. Our in-depth workshop is designed for those eager to enhance their technical skills, covering machine learning and deep learning theories and practical applications. Attendees will learn through interactive lectures and hands-on activities, tackling topics like data preprocessing, feature selection, model building, and algorithm optimization. They'll also explore deep learning architectures such as neural networks.

By the end of the workshop, participants will be equipped to build ML models for their applications, making data-driven decisions and crafting intelligent software. This experience provides a foundation for anyone aiming to specialize in ML or improve their current applications' features. The workshop is an opportunity for both experienced engineers and novices to stay current with AI and ML technological advancements.

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.

During this session, we'll investigate strategies for assessing the user experience of observability tools. We will be exploring essential UX metrics, various research methodologies and key instruments employed to establish a baseline and benchmark the iterative implementation of new functionalities over time. The focus will be on a user-centered approach, covering aspects from early incident detection to mitigation, to ensure a comprehensive evaluation of user experience quality in observability platforms.

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).

This workshop will instruct participants on creating a customer-centric roadmap, essential for business prosperity. Participants will acquire skills to comprehend customer needs, prioritize satisfaction, and foster robust relationships. Through interactive exercises, attendees will learn to tailor presentations to address customer challenges and enhance credibility.

The session offers methods to simplify technical information for clients, encompassing lucid communication strategies, case analyses, and practical activities. Attendees will also master addressing customer concerns and expectations, thereby improving transparency and fostering relationships via role-playing and discourse. Strategies for engaging with customer inquiries and resistance will be covered, with an emphasis on active listening and empathetic interaction, as well as managing question-and-answer sessions efficiently.

Conclusively, attendees will develop practical skills to promote a customer-focused strategy, refine presentations, elucidate technical matters, address concerns, and navigate objections.

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.

Product management is teeming with methods like Lean Canvas, RICE, and OKRs, crucial for planning and running tech projects. Yet, a shift towards valuing profitability over unchecked growth is changing the game.

Startups and tech firms are adjusting their strategies to focus on revenue and sustainable growth in response to economic shifts. This means we need to rethink our roles within companies and the broader market.

In this session, Fabrice des Mazery, Chief Product Officer at Tripadvisor, will share insights on transforming tech solutions from cost centers into profit generators. He will provide strategies and real-life examples to help products become key sources of profit along with a guide to product managers and tech experts in a business world that now requires judicious investment and expenditure.

The evolution of a company can be roughly drafted into four stages: Discovery, Growth, Maturity, Decline. Each stage requires different product management skills and activities. Therefore, being aware of the company’s stage can help make better decisions and, especially, set our own expectations about our product leadership role.

Having worked in booming start-ups in the Growth phase, product led organizations in companies in the Maturity and in the Decline phases and mentored early-stage entrepreneurs in the Discovery Luca will reflect his own learnings and provide recommendations on how product leaders can better shape their own role and their team in each phase.

In this presentation, we will introduce the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture. This technique uses natural language capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM) to query a private database. You can literally ask question about your data, without the need to fine-tune an LLM. In the lab session we will design a RAG system in Python using Langchain, an open source framework. We will store private documents in a vector database (i.e. Elasticsearch) and ask questions using natural language thanks to the usage of an LLM (e.g. ChatGPT).

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.

Modern software teams know the importance of measuring product usage, but product-led organizations go one step further, leveraging those insights to build better customer experiences and deliver ROI for their companies.

Product-led companies break down data silos and use product insights to inform strategy up to the executive level. Data is the common language across the organization, and each department monitors usage and behavioral insights to ensure the product delivers maximum value to the customer.

Join Brian Walsh, SVP and GM of products and platform at Pendo, to learn how to leverage product data throughout your organization to drive business outcomes.

We're set to explore the complexities of leading a global technology team, discussing challenges and victories in managing across time zones, which can foster collaboration and innovation. Our talk will cover how a global tech team interacts with different business sectors, each with unique demands, making leadership both challenging and fulfilling.

We'll go beyond theory, offering tangible tips for leaders to drive customer satisfaction—a key indicator of success in tech. We’ll also look at how to encourage team growth and learning, creating a culture where every member, from new recruits to executives, contributes to continuous improvement.

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.

Buckle up for a non-miserable ride through the Python development journey! In this talk, we'll navigate the path from coding bliss to production pragmatism. Uncover strategies, pitfalls, tools, and tales of triumph as we transform your Python development saga into a genuinely enjoyable experience, from development to production.

Join us for an insightful discussion on harnessing the power of diversity of thought in software innovation and product development. Discover how embracing diverse perspectives leads to a variety of outcomes, ensuring that products and solutions are inclusive and representative of the populations they serve.

45% of women exit the tech industry within 8 years of entry. Uncover the root causes behind this trend through real-life examples and explore strategies to address these challenges. Learn how fostering inclusivity will not only benefit women but contribute to a more diverse and welcoming tech industry for all.

You created a scalable tech team that generates impact internally. You enhanced your strategy with innovative products that will (hopefully) deliver the expected ROI.

Did you at the same time invest in the role of product or just bypass this new hire, due to the rising costs and budget cuts? Even if you did, did you offer your product organization a seat at the table? Did you anticipate user experience as one of the key growth drivers?

These are just some of the questions we will answer in this fireside chat where we will delve into why a strong product team can be the heart of an innovative company along with how to we ensure that they have the resources and influence needed to succeed.

This roundtable discussiom aims to provide guidance on how to foster an inclusive culture and enhance recruitment diversity within the tech industry. By implementing these strategies, companies can create a more welcoming environment for individuals from diverse backgrounds, leading to improved innovation, productivity, and overall success.

Key Points of Discussion
1) How do you create a culture that values diversity and promotes inclusivity? Which are the methods that help to encourage open dialogue, respect different perspectives, and provide opportunities for professional growth and development?
2) What are some challenges that tech businesses often face in becoming a more inclusive brand? How can you implement unbiased hiring practices? What actions can you take to enhance the inclusiveness and accessibility of your recruitment processes?
3) How can tech leaders embrace the value of inclusion as a driver for growth and success in the tech industry and encompass different perspectives, experiences, and ideas?
4) How can you establish Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Initiatives and develop specific initiatives and programs aimed at increasing diversity within the organization?
5) How do you regularly monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of diversity and inclusion efforts?

In this session, Michal Mike Pilawski, Chief Product Officer (CPO) at Lokalize, will discuss the metrics, frameworks, and UX diagnostics he uses to pinpoint issues in the sign-up and onboarding process. He will outline his approach for identifying growth optimization opportunities when joining new companies. Additionally, he will offer strategies to assist product designers and managers in finding the best solutions to these problems.

Join this compelling workshop led by Athanasios Kataras, the Global Azure Cloud Engineering Lead at Mondelēz International. The session will concentrate on the transition from on-premises infrastructure to data centers and then to the cloud.

The workshop will highlight Agile/DevOps methodologies as essential for a seamless move to cloud services. We shall also examine the shift-left strategy within the cloud era and its potential to transform your development workflow.

We shall discuss various cloud services that can enable your enterprise to adopt this strategy effectively. Moreover, we will investigate the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and its role in designing solutions on the Azure cloud platform. Attendees will obtain an understanding of the prescriptive architecture that CAF offers, aiding your journey to cloud adoption.

To ensure smooth application of CAF, we will introduce terraform, an influential infrastructure-as-code tool. Through practical engagement, participants will learn to deploy CAF using terraform, equipping them to confidently integrate these practices into their projects.

As the QA landscape undergoes this revolutionary transformation with the integration of Generative AI, it is apparent that we are embarking on a new era of software testing. The evolution of QA showcases the industry’s relentless pursuit of efficiency, accuracy, and comprehensive coverage. In this workshop we will go through example of such systems nowdays like Github Copilot and ChatGPT and provide practical examples how they can be used for developing a more coprehensive testing strategy for React Components and UI testing. While these AI aids can generate code snippets, human guidance is crucial for refining and validating the suggested tests. It discusses the evolution of AI tools, including GitHub's TestPilot and Copilot X, and raises privacy concerns related to cloud-based solutions.

One of the toughest challenges you face as an engineering leader is that your team’s technical knowledge can continuously diverge from your own.

It can become easy to lose touch because you spend so little time solving technical issues or dealing with the problems facing engineers day-to-day.

This talk will explore how you can overcome this challenge, why it’s important to invest time in your technical skills, how to get it done when you’re inundated with meetings, and why getting back in the loop could be the key to making better decisions and building a stronger team.

Managing individual contributors is an entirely different task from managing managers. As a senior leader, suddenly, your role is to work on the system rather than in the system, and you need to set up the structures that allow you to effectively lead your teams and craft fair progression and development pathways. This high-level management requires a drastic change in skillset and a shift of mindset, and this session will help you successfully structure and develop your teams and manage other managers.

This interactive session will give you frameworks to help you:
1. Effectively calibrate performance in your organization
2. Define success for your reports and set realistic growth targets
3.Support your managers as they transition to leadership.

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.

Dive into the complexities of updating legacy systems and discover strategies for a smooth transition to modern platforms. This session will equip attendees with an in-depth comprehension of the challenges associated with updating legacy systems and provide them with practical strategies to facilitate successful change. Specifically we will delve into:
1. Engel & Völkers Case Study: Analyze the company's transition from outdated to scalable systems, with a focus on their worldwide CRM overhaul and the insights gained.
2. Team Management in Digital Transformations: Discover effective leadership techniques and team management strategies during digital changes, along with essential practices for overcoming these obstacles.
3. Choosing Modernization Solutions: Discuss the selection of appropriate modernization approaches, taking into account standards and criteria essential for triumphant transformations.
4. Measuring Success Post-Transformation: Investigate methods for assessing and improving the impact of modernization efforts, ensuring ongoing enhancement through feedback and data analysis.