Agenda

Have you spent week's pulling together the data to make a compelling case for changing your processes or adopting a new way of working. Your manager congratulates you on doing a great job and everyone is on board.

But then nothing happens.

It's clear that we will make more money or save more costs if we go for it but there are always competing priorities and deadlines that seem to trump your change.

We'll talk through why this is happening, and what you can do about it.

Design has gone from savior to suspect in many organisations, and now AI is accelerating the shift again. This talk will reflect on how the story of design needs to evolve, what practices are still relevant, and how to lead when the old narratives no longer apply.

• Identify which parts of design’s traditional playbook are still useful, and which to leave behind
• Learn how to lead design teams through time, uncertainty and shifting expectations
• Understand the impact of AI on product and design roles beyond the buzz
• Gain strategies for staying relevant when stakeholders think they’ve “seen it all before”

• Explore the tensions between speed, quality, and cross-functional collaboration
• Hear real-world examples where design enabled, or hindered, business outcomes
• Learn how leaders are adjusting team structures and rituals to keep pace with change
• Walk away with practical tactics for aligning design more closely with product and engineering

AI is redefining what it means to be a high-performing product team. At Airtable, we’ve seen how today’s most impactful teams go beyond shipping features—they’re driving org-wide transformation, collapsing product cycles, and staying on the frontier of emerging technologies. In this session, Anthony Maggio shares practical insights for how product teams can operate at 10x scale in the age of AI.

Key topics will include:

• Operating at the frontier of AI: Why continuous experimentation with cutting-edge models is now essential for modern product development
• Expanding your mandate: How 10x product teams think like GMs—owning outcomes across marketing, ops, and beyond
• Building at warp speed: Why prototypes, not specs, are becoming the most valuable product artifacts in a collapsed cycle
• Transforming to grow: How leading AI-driven change positions product teams for outsized influence and career advancement

Great products don’t just emerge from clever ideas, they evolve from a deep understanding of customers. In this talk, Mariné and Morgan will explore how to build customer intuition and foundational knowledge across the product development lifecycle. By building a strong foundation of customer insights, you'll not only save time and resources but create products that truly solve customer problems. Whether you're in the early stages of a product or revisiting existing offerings, this session will equip you with the tools and strategies to ensure you're always building solutions that deliver value to customers.

How can product leaders think like founders, focusing on business outcomes rather than just feature delivery? In this session, we’ll explore how a venture-building mindset enhances product development, from validating ideas to aligning sales and strategy for scalable growth.

Led by Lisa Gerkens, you’ll gain actionable insights on securing stakeholder buy-in, leveraging market signals, and driving strategic decisions that impact the bottom line—whether you’re in a startup or an established company.

Key Discussion Points:

• Venture-Building Mindset: What it means to treat products like investable businesses, not just projects
• Validation & Scalability: How to bake market validation and long-term scalability into product decisions
• Stakeholder Alignment: Tactics to navigate internal buy-in, early sales, and funding conversations, even in corporate environments
• From Execution to Strategy: How to shift from a delivery-focused role to making impactful business decisions

While people may debate the quality of code that AI agents are producing the reality is that companies are using them.

The difference over the coming years will be how developers adopt these tools and the best ways to use them.

Join our forum to discuss:

1. How the role is changing?
2. How do you get the best out of the current tools?
3. How can junior devs upskill in more architecture related skills?

A/B testing has become a superpower in product development, enabling data-driven decisions that fuel business growth. But with great power comes a shadow: an over-reliance on testing can lead to incremental tweaks over bold, groundbreaking moves. This talk sheds light on both the superpowers and the shadows of A/B testing, exploring the risks of a test-heavy culture and how it can stifle creativity and big-picture thinking. Discover practical strategies to balance optimization with innovation, fostering a culture that leverages testing without losing sight of visionary product development.

• Harnessing the super powers of A/B testing to make revenue generating business decisions
• Recognizing the limitations of A/B testing and the risks of focusing solely on incremental improvements
• Identifying the “shadow side” of a testing culture on stifling creativity and broader strategic thinking
• How to balance rigorous testing processes without sacrificing creative exploration for breakthrough developments
• Practical steps to push beyond data dependency, fostering a mindset of experimentation that leads to transformative product outcomes.

AI is already changing how we work, but too often people assume it’s about full automation. Barclays have been running a major AI across their internal learning teams and exploring how AI tools can genuinely improve efficiency and quality. This talk will go through the structured testing done, the real measurable gains seen, and the unexpected ways AI has fallen short. Mike will also touch on the risks and challenges of integrating AI in a highly regulated environment like banking, where zero risk is the goal, not just moving faster. Key take aways:

• AI is great for small process improvements, not full automation
• Real, measurable savings exist—but only with human oversight. AI can massively reduce hours spent on certain tasks, but nothing we’ve tested can just be handed over and left to run on its own.
• People often think too big, too early. The real benefits come from integrating AI into existing processes, rather than trying to revolutionize everything overnight.
• The ‘AI will catch up’ mindset is delaying work. There’s a growing trend of teams deprioritizing tasks because they assume AI will automate them in six months—this can be a dangerous gamble.
• Regulated industries have unique challenges. In banking, AI adoption requires absolute certainty, which limits its use cases in ways other industries might not face.

Explore 5 product tools and how they can help improve the way you work with live demos with their expert team! This is a great opportunity to see their solutions in action, ask questions, and learn how their tools can benefit you and the way you work. Whether you’re curious about features or seeking hands-on experience, their team will be there to guide you every step of the way. Don’t miss out on this chance to connect and discover something new!

Cross-functional collaboration is widely regarded as essential for effective product development. You’ve built cross-functional teams. You’ve broken down silos. You’ve aligned product, business, and engineering more. Yet, collaboration can still feel challenging at times.

In this talk, Mihaela shares reflections on the experience of embedding business stakeholders into hybrid product teams, and the unexpected ways that teams often find themselves gradually drifting back into misalignment and silos—even after setting up strong collaboration frameworks. The culprit? A mix of hidden structural forces, team habits, and, most critically, language misalignment. When teams unknowingly speak different “languages”—not just across industries but across functions—communication breaks down, expectations become misaligned, and collaboration suffers. Drawing from real-world examples, Mihaela explores common patterns that cause well-intentioned collaboration to falter over time and teams to revert to silos. Mihaela will share lessons learned and practical strategies to prevent these failures, from identifying linguistic mismatches early, to maintaining long-term alignment across business, product, and engineering teams. If your teams are struggling to stay aligned despite their best efforts, this talk will show you why—and how to support collaboration more effectively over the long term.

As AI becomes embedded into every digital product, many teams face a common challenge: building AI-enhanced features without a cohesive strategy, resulting in fragmented experiences and confused users. In this talk, Connor Joyce draws on insights from Microsoft Copilot, LinkedIn, and Google Gemini to propose a new approach: shifting from traditional design systems to “interaction systems” a scalable, adaptable model for designing AI-integrated experiences.
This talk will unpack the patterns emerging across AI products, explore how to align user intent with interaction modes, and offer a practical decision framework for teams to ensure coherence across rapidly evolving features. You’ll walk away with actionable insights to guide your team through the next phase of product development—where AI is not a feature, but an experience layer.

Product Management is one of the most confused roles in the tech industry, but how does it play out in real life? This session cuts through the theory and social media soundbites to explore what the PM role truly looks like in practice.
Join this discussion to:

• Compare the idealised PM role described in books and by influencers with the realities of day-to-day responsibilities.
• Hear stories of how PMs balance strategy, stakeholder alignment, and firefighting.
• Explore the unique challenges PMs face in different team structures, industries, and company cultures.

Explore 2 product tools and how they can help improve the way you work with live demos with their expert team! This is a great opportunity to see their solutions in action, ask questions, and learn how their tools can benefit you and the way you work. Whether you’re curious about features or seeking hands-on experience, their team will be there to guide you every step of the way. Don’t miss out on this chance to connect and discover something new!

Join Cliff Seal as he shares insights on fostering career-defining growth and organizational influence as a long-term individual contributor (IC). Drawing from his extensive experience at Salesforce, Cliff highlights the individual and business benefits of staying deeply involved in the design craft over the years. He'll explore how individual contributors can navigate workplace dynamics, build trust, and make a lasting impact—all without managing teams.

• Learn how senior ICs can shape business strategy and influence decisions, regardless of organizational size
• Discover the key benefits of long-term organizational knowledge and its potential impact on career growth and business goals
• Consider how self-guided experiments, personal development, and side projects can support and sustain your career momentum

As product leaders transition into executive roles, the shift isn’t just about strategy—it’s about redefining influence, decision-making, and impact at scale.
Join Rhiannon White, CEO of Clue and former CPO, as she shares her journey from leading product to running the entire organization.
In this fireside chat, Rhiannon will explore how her perspective on product, leadership, and business outcomes has evolved, the unexpected challenges of stepping into the CEO role, and how product thinking shapes her approach to company-wide decision-making.
Whether you're a senior product leader eyeing the next step or curious about how product experience translates to broader leadership, this session will provide candid insights into navigating this career transition successfully.

Join Jeff Chow, Chief Product & Technology Officer of Miro, as he explores the challenges and strategies of managing rapid organizational change from 50 to 1,600 employees in just four years. Jeff will talk through the journey through the scale-up phase towards establishing a mature, unified team and culture. You’ll learn about the unique strategies and frameworks Miro employs to sustain momentum, and understand the evolving roles of product managers, engineers, and designers in driving continuous improvement and collaboration. Learn about Jeff's innovative approaches to maintaining agility and cohesion in a fast-paced environment, ensuring that every team member is engaged in accelerating product development and problem-solving.

Steven Roest, a former designer turned product leader, shares his experience navigating the complexities of building IT4IT products at ING, a global organisation with 30,000 employees across 12 countries. In this talk, he discusses how he has helped ING transition from an IT-driven approach to a product-led operating model by integrating design thinking into product management and IT processes. Through real-world examples, Steven explores how ING is addressing challenges such as aligning local and global needs, setting clear standards for product maturity, and breaking down silos between business, design, and IT. This session highlights how a design mindset can transform IT from a cost center into a collaborative force driving product innovation.

Hiring today is broken. Candidates are getting filtered out by AI before a human even sees their application, and hiring managers are often relying on outdated methods that don’t assess the full potential of a candidate. This discussion will tackle hiring challenges from both sides of the table:
- How candidates can stand out despite AI screening and generic recruitment pipelines.

• Why skills, mindset, and cultural fit matter more than portfolios or take-home assignments, and how hiring managers can assess them effectively.
• How hiring managers can better brief recruiters to identify the right talent, even if they aren’t design or product experts.
• How teams are using AI and hiring tech effectively without missing top candidates or introducing bias.
• Real-world hiring strategies to improve hiring outcomes for both job seekers and hiring managers.

Scaling LLMs for real-world applications demands more than just cutting-edge algorithms, it requires overcoming intricate engineering challenges.
From optimizing colossal architectures and streamlining inference workflows to maintaining performance under heavy workloads, this talk delves into actionable solutions.

Attendees will discover field-tested strategies, key lessons, and best practices to successfully integrate LLMs into production environments, enabling seamless scalability and reliability in diverse operational contexts.

With reduced headcounts and tighter budgets, research teams are finding creative ways to deliver impactful insights. This session dives into the strategies teams are using to adapt and thrive despite resource constraints.
Join this interactive discussion to explore:

• The rise of guerrilla research methods and their role in rapid, cost-effective insights.
• How teams are democratising research by empowering non-researchers to contribute effectively.
• Tips for prioritising high-impact research when resources are stretched thin.

In this talk, Serhii shares the journey of Grammarly's platform transformation.

It all began with a "you build it, you run it" culture that required developers to be software engineers and operations experts. While empowering, this approach created a significant cognitive load and slowed the onboarding of new team members. Grammarly has since significantly evolved its platform to boost developers’ productivity and improve their experience.

The evolution of the platform can be traced through several key stages:

• Initial Platform Team Intervention: Segregated environments with self-service provisioning and other automation were introduced, though new developers still needed up to a month to become productive.
• Platform University: Creation of structured online training courses, reducing onboarding time to one week.
• Golden State and Golden Path: Implementing high-level abstractions like one-button service deployments, simplifying complex operations.
• Current Infrastructure Abstraction: Moving away from "you build it, you run it" to specialized Infrastructure teams and a whole new tech platform.

Looking ahead, Serhii explores how the platform might continue to evolve, incorporating AI-assisted operations, enhanced developer experience features, and a more robust internal platform ecosystem.

OKRs promise alignment, focus, and measurable impact—but for many teams, they can feel like an imposed structure that limits autonomy. How do you craft OKRs that serve both business goals and team needs without creating unnecessary bureaucracy?
In this interactive forum, Laura and Raif will facilitate a candid discussion on the challenges teams face when implementing OKRs. This is a highly participatory session where attendees can share experiences, ask questions, and debate:

• When do OKRs work, and when do they hinder creativity?
• How can UX teams balance strategic alignment with bottom-up innovation?
• Common pitfalls in OKR adoption and how to avoid them
• How to get buy-in from teams who see OKRs as a top-down mandate
  Whether you're struggling with OKR adoption or looking to refine your approach or just talk through it, this session will give you real-world insights from peers and experienced practitioners.

AI tools are flooding the content space offering promise for speed, scale, and consistency. But are they truly enhancing the craft of UX writing and content design, or creating more problems than they solve?
Join this interactive forum to:

• Share how teams are using (or avoiding) AI in their content workflows
• Discuss the balance between automation and human tone
• Debate the risks of speed vs. quality in AI-generated content
• Explore how roles, responsibilities, and expectations are shifting in the era of AI

Big ambitions create big chaos. In fast-moving teams, complexity is a feature not a bug. This talk shares how to stay effective, earn trust, and influence decisions when the ground keeps shifting.You’ll learn how to design clarity in the mess, deliver consistent value without burning out, and work with — not against — the chaos around you. Whether you’re leading teams, building products, or designing experiences, the real skill isn’t avoiding complexity — it’s navigating it with intent.
Key Takeaways

• Why chaos happens (and developing resilience within it)
• Building credibility and influence beyond your immediate team
• Balancing effort on short-term delivery and long-term impact
• Protecting your focus and energy, without losing momentum

Transitioning from output-driven KPIs to outcome-driven goals requires more than frameworks—it demands cultural transformation. Learn how Eneco redefined success by embracing continuous discovery and delivery, fostering cross-functional collaboration, and putting customer value at the core. Jay will discuss the challenges, breakthroughs, and lessons learned in creating a customer-centric and value-driven organization.

• Transitioning team and org KPIs from output to outcome
• Building a customer-focused culture across product, design, and engineering
• Lessons from implementing frameworks like Opportunity Solution Trees

Mergers and acquisitions are common in our industry and they create seismic shifts in product strategy, company culture, and team structures. But how do you maintain product integrity, keep teams engaged, and navigate the inevitable friction of new leadership and decision-making approaches?
Join Tali Melchior, VP of Product at Everway, as she unpacks the human, product, and process challenges of scaling through M&A. With seven acquisitions and a major merger under her belt, she will share first-hand insights on:

• People: The emotional rollercoaster of restructuring, promotions, and adapting to new leadership dynamics.
• Product: Deciding what gets integrated, sunset, or rebranded—balancing customer loyalty with business priorities.
• Process: How her team designed a best-in-class release planning framework—only to discover a fundamental rethinking was necessitated post merger.
  Expect a candid conversation on navigating uncertainty and the reality of making product decisions when the ground keeps shifting.

At Standard Chartered, AI adoption isn’t just about technology—it’s about ensuring AI solutions work for people across the organization. From governance to engineering and workforce strategy, Emily will share how her team are embedding human factors and UX principles to drive responsible AI adoption. Emily will share their approach to ensuring AI is ethical, explainable, and truly beneficial to both employees and the business. This journey has uncovered key learnings for the team that have helped scale AI responsibly while improving trust and engagement

Key Learnings:

• Integrating UX into AI Governance to improve compliance & adoption across the org
• **Cross-Functional collaboration for scalable AI adoption: AI initiatives are not just the responsibility of engineers: How HR, corporate affairs, and supply chain teams are playing a role in shaping how AI integrates into business processes. **
• Employees need to understand how AI decisions are made. By designing AI interfaces with transparency and user feedback mechanisms, we improve adoption and confidence in AI-driven workflows.
• Beyond technology, AI success depends on preparing employees for AI-driven changes. Investing in AI literacy and reskilling programs helps teams work effectively with AI, fostering a culture of trust and innovation.

In this talk, Dónal O’Mahony shares hard-earned lessons from a career at the forefront of industry disruption from the iPad’s impact on e-learning, to GAI in content management and 5G and edge computing in connected vehicles.

Grounded in real-world experience through seismic tech disruptions, company acquisitions and digital transformations, he explores how to move fast without breaking everything (including yourself), turning uncertainty into opportunity:

• Balancing rapid innovation with smart decision-making, learning from past disruptions
• Applying the parable from the book "Who Moved My Cheese?" to UX and product leadership
• Seeing change as a fun (!) opportunity, not a threat, with real-world lessons and advice
• Keeping your eye on that directional North Star while staying curious and adaptable along the journey

This workshop brings together skilled professionals to collaboratively tackle a real, high-stakes challenge presented by a leading company. Designed to drive actionable solutions and foster deep engagement, this session transitions participants from theoretical discussions to hands-on problem-solving, delivering immediate value for businesses and participants alike.
How It Works

• A company representative outlines the context, hurdles, and goals of their challenge, providing a real-world scenario for collaborative resolution.
• Participants dive into the details with probing questions to fully understand the problem.
• Unfiltered, honest feedback highlights blind spots and identifies areas for growth or change.
• Guided by expert facilitators, participants brainstorm innovative, actionable solutions in a structured, interactive setting.
• The session concludes with a summary of key learnings and potential next steps for the challenge owner
  Who Should Attend
• Professionals eager to engage in hands-on problem-solving and gain fresh perspectives.
• Practitioners with relevant expertise looking to share actionable insights and expand their knowledge.
• Anyone curious about tackling real-world product challenges in a collaborative, interactive environment.

The pace of change in the UX field is staggering: AI is accelerating, roles are shifting, and many professionals are left wondering how to keep up without burning out. Breaking from the design and development of AI-driven experiences, this workshop takes a more personal and empowering approach, helping you evolve with the change, not get swept away by it.
Led by Connor Joyce, a behavioral scientist, AI advisor, and University of Pennsylvania lecturer, this session blends positive psychology, career strategy, and practical task decomposition to help UX professionals future-proof their careers. You’ll reflect on your own path, build clarity around what work will define your future, and develop the mindset needed to thrive in a world where automation is no longer optional.
In this highly interactive session, you'll:

• Deconstruct your role into core tasks and categorize them into three buckets: Let Go, Partner with AI, and Own as Human.
• Learn how to apply a growth mindset to navigate comparison, uncertainty, and reinvention.
• Gain tools to reframe fear, build identity beyond your title, and design your own evolution path.
  This workshop is for anyone feeling the weight, or the thrill, of our industry’s transformation. Whether you’re mid-career, emerging, or evolving, this is your space to regain clarity, reclaim confidence, and reconnect with the parts of your work that matter most.

Cross-functional teams are different to teams of functions. On the outside they look the same but how they work is completely different.

Empowered teams own a part of a product from idea to satisfied customers. This means they need to do continuous research, continuous design and continuous development. But what about their practices and processes.

In this workshop we will cover:

1. How teams gain the context needed to make decisions
2. The new team Kanban
3. From push to pull systems
4. Pairing and Teaming practices
5. Upskilling, when isolated from functions
6. Aligning with other teams around the org

Join if you want to know not just how empowered teams should work but also learn why (and be able to back up your suggestions).

In this hands-on workshop led by Josh Kimmell from IBM, participants will explore how to design cross-product, modular user experiences that prioritize seamless workflows over siloed functionality. Drawing from real-world practices at IBM, this workshop will demonstrate how teams can align around "Jobs to Be Done" to enhance collaboration and user satisfaction. Through engaging activities involving red yarn (!), attendees will identify opportunities for cross-product interoperability and develop actionable strategies to bridge common platform gaps.

In the future era of Zero UI, UX transcends GUI and the constraints it imposes to create radical new requirements on UX to create natural interactions governed not by clicks and taps but by vision, behaviour, and context. Let's look ahead to how to pivot and succeed as designers in this era ahead
Summary of topics:

• Machine vision and what it means for input and interaction between human and machines
• Contextual user experience and what we need to consider as designers moving beyond the constraints of graphical user interfaces
• Designing for spatial intelligence and how movement and presence can become the new formats of interaction
• UX Orchestration and how design for "anticipatory intelligence" shifts the change from UI outputs towards the UX orchestration of inputs and reasoning
• Ethical considerations, for example is consent to process emotional inputs a framework for the future?

Join AJ for this afternoon session where he will simulate the whole of a UX research process for beginners or those wanting a refresh on the basics. We'll start by exploring a simulated problem space, narrowing down to the right research questions and building a strong set of questions, running an interview, and finally analysing your data to draw insights.

Feel like you don't have time to research in your org? This session will help you appreciate the practical ways to get data even in the hardest circumstances.

A hands-on workshop for UX and product teams ready to scale. Transform your content design workflow and leverage AI to create consistent, impactful user experiences at scale. Join Yuval Keshtcher, founder of UX Writing Hub, for an intensive 3-hour workshop that will revolutionize how your team approaches content operations.

Why This Workshop Matters

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, traditional content workflows can't keep up with the demands of enterprise-scale products. Learn how leading organizations are using AI and automation to:

• Reduce content production time by up to 60%
• Maintain consistency across multiple products and platforms
• Scale content operations without sacrificing quality
• Automate routine tasks while focusing on strategic work

What You'll Learn

This hands-on workshop combines real-world case studies with practical exercises to help you:

• Build a future-proof content operations framework
• Integrate AI tools effectively into your existing workflow
• Create automated content validation and QA processes
• Develop scalable content governance systems
• Implement no-code automation for routine tasks

Who Should Attend

This workshop is perfect for:

• UX Writers and Content Designers
• Content Strategy Leaders
• Product Managers
• UX/UI Designers
• Anyone responsible for scaling content operations

Are you struggling to align your UX team's efforts with broader business goals? Many UX and product teams face challenges aligning their work with company objectives, leading to fragmented focus, unclear priorities, and reduced impact.

In this interactive workshop, you'll learn how to craft meaningful OKRs that drive focus and collaboration across UX, product, and development teams. Through real-world case studies and practical exercises, you’ll leave with the tools to apply OKRs in your own work, ensuring your team's design efforts contribute directly to strategic outcomes.

Drawing from over 10 years of experience implementing OKRs, Laura and Raif will demonstrate how this framework fosters alignment, focus, and measurable progress across cross-functional teams.

• Overview of OKRs, their origins, and relevance to UX teams
• Real-world examples of OKR implementation in UX, focusing on how they improved alignment and outcomes
• Hands-on group exercises—participants will develop OKRs based on scenarios or their own team challenges, with guided feedback
• Group reflection—sharing insights, discussing challenges, and addressing participant questions to solidify understanding