Agenda

How do we future-proof our careers, products, and business models in the age of AI? In this hands-on workshop, Mirela will guide participants through the shift from simply using LLMs to speed up PM workflows to designing AI-first product opportunities where they actually matter.
You'll work through a live exercise to learn how to identify, evaluate, and prioritize AI-native bets.

Leadership and product teams often use the same words but mean different things. That language gap turns into rework, delayed decisions, and endless “alignment” meetings. In this 3 hour hands-on workshop, Mihaela Draghici helps you identify the high-frequency terms that quietly slow down execution, then fix them with a practical language mapping method you can reuse within your teams.

What you will learn:

• How identical terms fracture across disciplines, seniority levels and domains, even in experienced teams
• A repeatable facilitation method to surface and resolve meaning gaps quickly
• How to translate shared language into clearer decisions, fewer re-alignment loops and smoother delivery

What you will take away:

• A Language Map showing which terms in your team need translation and alignment
• A glossary of agreed, shared definitions for critical terms
• A reusable framework you can run with your own teams whenever alignment starts slipping

Do you feel like your team is waiting on perfect data to validate a strategic change?
This hands-on workshop offers a practical approach to bring your product strategy to life. Drawing from Kristina’s experience helping teams move past incremental experiments, you’ll learn a framework for exploring strategic opportunities, evaluating bets, and getting them on the roadmap.

Outcomes

• Evaluate your product strategy and goals.
• Rapidly research, frame, and assess new verticals or product directions.
• Align stakeholders on the strategic approach.

**Audience: **Designed for a senior audience who can bring their current product strategy to the session

This practical workshop helps UX, product and engineering teams turn a product concept into a sharp, stakeholder ready pitch using one minute video manuscripts. In this session, Michael suggests a product idea and guides participants through a six scene storytelling framework and an AI powered layer of synthetic personas so they can practise pitching, pressure test the message and leave with a clear, compelling value story.
Outcomes

• Craft a concise one minute video pitch that clearly communicates the value proposition to stakeholders
• Translate a product concept into a narrative that works across decks, roadmaps and agile backlogs
• Use a filmmaking inspired storyboard to keep the pitch consistent as it moves from discovery into delivery
• Rehearse the pitch with synthetic personas and AI generated reactions to refine messaging and anticipate stakeholder questions

This practical workshop shows how teams can use AI to keep Web accessibility intact from prototype to production. Rather than treating accessibility as a late QA step, it focuses on embedding it into design systems, design-to-code workflows and everyday engineering work. You will work through a simple end-to-end flow, using AI powered tools such as Figma plugins, code assistants and automated accessibility tests. Leave with a clear mental model for an accessibility-aware pipeline across design, engineering and deployment that you can adapt to your own context.

Outcomes

• Pinpoint where accessibility is commonly lost between design, handoff and implementation.
• Embed accessibility intent into Figma components and design systems using roles, structure and states.
• Steer AI design-to-code tools towards semantic, accessible output, then review generated markup with an accessibility lens.

AI is landing on every roadmap, but most teams are still stuck with vague mandates and scattered ideas that never make it into production. This hands-on workshop gives product, design and engineering leaders a structured way to turn AI noise into one or two clearly framed, testable use cases that align with business goals, reduce delivery blockers and can move straight into a design sprint or build track.

Outcomes

• Translate top down AI mandates into a clearly framed problem that connects customer pain, business impact and technical feasibility
• Map the current journey or workflow to pinpoint where AI can remove real blockers for users and for your teams
• Use structured prioritisation to decide which AI use cases to test first based on value, risk and effort
• Leave with a lightweight AI problem framing canvas you can reuse with your own stakeholders to unblock the next wave of experiments

AI isn’t coming. It’s already reshaping how products are built.
It writes code, generates designs, synthesises research, and compresses workflows that used to span teams and weeks into minutes. It removes friction—and with it, many of the traditional boundaries between roles.
But it doesn’t just accelerate output. It exposes it.
When execution becomes abundant, the bottleneck shifts.
From building → to deciding what’s worth building.
From producing artefacts → to exercising judgment.
From process → to understanding.
This is not the end of product, design, or engineering.
But it is the end of operating at the surface.
In this session, we’ll examine what actually changes when AI becomes embedded in the way we work—not from a hype perspective, but from the realities teams are already facing.
We’ll explore how roles evolve when tools can do the work, where depth still matters, and what differentiates teams that get better with AI from those that simply move faster.

• Why AI exposes every discipline in product development
• Why both shallow generalists and narrow specialists are increasingly vulnerable
• How team structures shift when handoffs disappear and individuals can execute across domains
• What “depth” really means when output is cheap and instant
• How to rethink generalist vs specialist when AI fills capability gaps but not judgment
• Which skills, mental models, and fundamentals compound, and which decay

To survive and thrive in an AI-first world, Intercom made the deliberate decision to abandon every aspect of how it built software, something the company is well known for. When organisations talk about implementing AI, there’s a temptation to look for the minimum necessary adaptations or to focus on the changes that are the most fun, but that is not even table stakes.

Building real AI products demands rewriting the entire approach to software at a fundamental level. At Intercom, that meant rethinking everything including its processes, speed and roles. For example, software development operated less like a factory and more like a lab, the pace moved faster with timelines and even team sizes cut in half, and roles transformed across the company as designers and product managers became AI coders and builders.

In this talk, Intercom’s Chief Strategy Officer, Des Traynor, details the necessary messy chaos of rebuilding the plane while it’s flying. He’ll explore how this radical shift ultimately led to the creation of Fin, Intercom’s AI Agent for customer service, and what it taught Intercom about building products that can actually win in the AI era.

Design doesn’t slow teams down, handoffs and uneven engineering capability do. Marcus Knight shows how to expose the hidden friction between design and development, set pragmatic standards, and use exemplars to raise implementation quality without slowing velocity. We’ll also separate AI myth from reality so teams invest where it actually saves time.

Outcomes:

• Identify and fix the top 5 friction points in the design→dev handoff.
• Establish a “code-ready” Definition of Ready (tokens, states, constraints).
• Use exemplar squads and pairing to lift engineering implementation standards.
• Apply AI where it works (discovery/synthesis), not where it wastes cycles (UI prompting).

Most design systems improve UI consistency. Moldova’s national design system changed the law. Backed by a new legal framework, design became a formal requirement in the country’s digital transformation plan. In this talk, Ramona Ziemann shares how that shift turned a Figma library into a national standard and why it gives designers a real seat at the table in how government services are built.

Outcome:

• How a national design system can reset the rules for how public digital services get built
• Ways to bring Design into early scoping
• How shared standards subtly shift the collaboration between institutions, vendors, designers, and developers
• Ideas for nudging your own organisation in a similar direction, even if you don’t have legislation on your side

Join Alex Burke as he interviews Romain Berthomé, Head of Product at Booking.com. Leading 80+ people across London, Amsterdam, and Bangalore, Romain has learned that scaling product impact starts with scaling culture. He reveals how Booking.com builds high performing cross-functional teams grounded in trust, shared understanding, and business-driven decision making.

Outcomes:

• Learn how to prioritise focus and resources when managing large distributed teams.
• Build a culture rooted in customer understanding, data literacy, and product thinking.
• Enable autonomy while maintaining alignment across time zones and disciplines.
• Discover how to grow leadership capacity without losing team cohesion or velocity.

Everyone’s racing to ship AI features, but in the enterprise world, you can’t just flip the switch. Daria exposes the unseen side of building AI responsibly: navigating compliance, legal, and data-security minefields while keeping innovation alive. Drawing from Miro and other SaaS companies, she shares what really happens when design, product, and legal collide to make AI both safe and usable.
Takeaways:

• What every SaaS company needs in place before “turning on” AI
• How compliance, design, and product teams can co-create trustworthy innovation
• Why building AI for enterprise is as much about people and process as it is about technology

In fast scaling organisations, boundaries between roles blur; designers, PMs, and engineers all engage with users. Tanya Adlam from monday.com shares how her team is navigating this shift while integrating AI tools into daily practice, redefining what it means to “do research” in modern product development.

Key Takeaways:

• Rethink the role of dedicated researchers in cross-functional, AI-enabled teams
• Identify where human expertise adds irreplaceable value over AI-driven insight
• Create frameworks for consistent high-quality research across functions
• Foster collaboration that empowers all team members to connect meaningfully with users

The wind industry has faced significant headwinds in recent months and years. Leaders are grappling with a major shift: IT cannot be treated as a separate function. The core focus of transformation is now to integrate technology much more tightly with the business.
In this session, Ather and Aitor will explore Ørsted’s design principles for integrating IT closer into the business. They will share learnings of working with organisational design, and journey toward building strong product management and product leadership practices. The talk highlights what it takes to collaborate, design and deliver real change under pressure.

Key learnings

• Design principles that scale IT integration into business without creating coordination debt
• Adoption mechanics: rituals, artifacts, and leadership behaviors that made the change stick
• Decision Stack in practice: turning strategy into trade-offs teams can execute
• Product leadership and management: balancing strategy, delivery, tech constraints and real-world insights

In complex enterprise environments like ITVX, building a design system isn’t just about components, it’s about bridging silos, aligning business priorities and balancing innovation with legacy constraints. Marianne Ashton-Booth shares how her team navigated multi-platform challenges, reduced resources and built cross-functional alignment to make design systems a driver of efficiency and discovery.

Key Takeaways:

• Practical strategies for gaining buy-in and resourcing a design system across a large enterprise.
• How to evolve from a feature factory to a discovery-led, research-driven culture.
• Approaches to scaling design systems across sixteen device platforms with varying capabilities.
• Frameworks to foster shared language between design, product and engineering teams.

Even sustainability-minded teams face friction when balancing product roadmaps with greener engineering practices. In doing so, they are missing out on a lot of potential to reduce not only emissions but also costs.
This talk explores how to integrate sustainability into everyday development without slowing delivery. You'll learn practical steps to embed sustainability into existing delivery workflows. We'll discover how to quantify carbon emissions in software and cloud infrastructure and what low-hanging fruits there are to reduce them.
Finally, we discuss what part Product can play in greening your software product, since it's not only about engineering. You'll leave the conference with plenty of ideas and concrete actions for a greener software delivery

What does a real design led culture look like in day to day product work? At Delivery Hero, the UX team spent nearly 2 years reshaping how they showed up in planning and decision making across the organization. The turning point came with a high stakes project that revealed how much had changed. In this session, Sara shares the concrete practices, process shifts and leadership moves that turned design into a driving force for strategy and execution.

Outcomes

• Turn organisational turbulence and reorgs into drivers of focus and innovation
• Use design led planning to get ahead of product, engineering and data dependencies
• Elevate IC designers into trusted leaders
• Create an experience north star and shared vision that aligns squads and stakeholders

This year in Berlin, we will be announcing the winners of The Unblockers, three awards built to recognise cross functional teams who can show a clear chain from evidence to decision to impact. This is not a popularity contest, and it is not about glossy decks or “best process” theatre. It is about practical case studies that other teams can learn from, grounded in what actually changed and what it moved.

Award categories

• Impact Award: Evidence that led to real outcomes (adoption, retention, conversion)
• Best Use of AI Award: AI that changed how you work or what you built
• The Unblocker Award: Removing barriers so cross functional teams move faster

Winners will be announced live in the final session.

Too Good To Go is best known for fighting food waste, but its growth story is also a lesson in how product and engineering teams evolve when impact, scale and operational discipline have to move together. From finding product-market fit in a friction-heavy marketplace to expanding across 20 markets, 120M+ registered users and 200K+ saving stores, the company has had to repeatedly adapt its systems, teams and product strategy as its impact grew.
In this talk, Morten Keldebæk shares Too Good To Go’s product and technology journey, from early marketplace validation through rapid country expansion, high-volume transactions and security demands, to the shift from one-size-fits-all scaling towards more tailored and diversified solutions. He will unpack what it took to scale the platform, where early team and product structures had to evolve, and how the company continues to build new solutions across campaigns, supermarket workflows, parcels and food-waste prevention.

AI is changing the scale of personalisation. Products can now infer needs, predict behaviour, recommend the next action and sometimes pre-empt what a customer may want before they have asked for it. But the same capability that feels helpful in one moment can feel intrusive in another.
In this session moderated by Mihaela Draghici, Pallavi Modi and Sam Bradley explore the leadership judgement required to make AI-driven personalisation feel like a service, not surveillance.
The discussion moves beyond how much data a company can collect, and focuses instead on how products behave with the data they have. When does relevance build trust? When does it cross the line into manipulation? How should teams think about context, timing, consent, explanation and data provenance, especially when customer money, identity or long-term brand trust are involved?
Together, Pallavi and Sam will unpack where personalisation genuinely helps customers, where teams should deliberately hold back, and what product leaders should ask before scaling AI-enabled experiences.

In B2B and B2B2C mobility the experience spans both the physical and the digital. In this talk, Priya shares how automation and selective use of GenAI can improve the tangible and intangible moments that shape how customers feel your service, without overclaiming what AI can do. The session covers how to shorten onboarding, reduce friction in core transactions, reuse data instead of re-asking for it and apply automation behind the scenes to lift the experience customers sense but never see.

Outcomes

• Shortening onboarding by automating back-office steps and reusing customer information rather than adding new UI layers
• Building chatbots and portals around real transaction intents such as ordering, swapping devices or managing eSIM
• Applying AI in small measures with guardrails so humans validate sensitive moments
• Improving the felt experience by tracking signals such as time-to-onboard, first-transaction success and customer effort

Trust is what brings customers back, but most teams still measure success through short-term conversion.
In this talk, Sam Bradley shares lessons on how trust is built, and broken, across marketplaces, payments and personalised products. He explores why transparency, security, reliability, fairness and human connection matter just as much as speed and growth, especially when data does not tell the full customer story.
From checkout timers and reviews to AI summaries, personalisation and customer support, Sam will show where products create confidence, where they quietly erode it, and why the moments when something goes wrong often matter most.

Design teams don't usually struggle because they lack talent, research or tools. They struggle because different functions operate from different definitions of success. Research brings insight, delivery brings pressure, stakeholders bring opinions, and designers bring craft, but without a shared language, conversations quickly turn into debate instead of progress.
In this session, Rahul shares practical ways to build clarity as a team capability. Drawing on real examples and lessons learned firsthand, they will show how to align research, tools, delivery constraints and human judgement so design decisions become easier to explain, easier to trust and more likely to lead to better outcomes. Rather than getting stuck in subjective opinions or endless discussion, teams can create a common frame that helps them move faster, collaborate better and make stronger decisions together.

Outcomes

• Learn how to create a shared design language that helps teams make clearer decisions
• Understand how to align research, stakeholder input, delivery realities and design judgement
• See practical ways to reduce unproductive debate and build more trust across functions
• Leave with approaches to turn subjective opinions into outcome-focused design conversations

Product-market fit is no longer enough. Teams must constantly test learn and adapt their product strategies. This session with Pooja explores how Product Marketing integrates with UX by informing not just go-to-market motions but also shaping product development decisions.

Drawing on their latest case study experience with her team's work at Sage, Pooja will share details on her latest project and how teams can use from customer journeys and in-life usage to prioritise, mitigate risks, and design experiences that accelerate adoption. Attendees will walk away with practical strategies to better align product, UX, and marketing teams to drive growth, including how to:

- Turn buyer and onboarding insights into product strategy (leverage learnings from customer adoption to shape product investments.
- Build feedback loops that align ICPs, sales enablement, and experience design.
- Use iterative testing to mitigate risk and continuous feedback to validate propositions before scaling
- Measure success beyond revenue to track engagement, advocacy, and experience metrics to prove long-term product value.

Building an AI product from zero to one is hard in any context. It gets tougher when the technology, tooling and norms shift mid build. This session unpacks what it takes to orchestrate cross functional delivery when best practice is still being written, from aligning research, design, analytics and engineering, to deciding what “success” means when productivity metrics do not tell the full story. You will leave with a practical way to lead AI product work that drives enterprise change without forcing teams to start from scratch, plus a sharper view on how to experiment and fail with intent.

Outcomes:

• Build a 0 to 1 AI product plan that stays stable even as models, capabilities and constraints change.
• Orchestrate research, design, analytics and engineering around a shared AI context and a delivery rhythm that adapts as best practice evolves.
• Define and measure AI product impact beyond efficiency, using outcome signals that capture trust, quality, adoption and long term value.
• Design an intentional experimentation strategy, choosing where to take risk, where to avoid it and how to learn fast without creating enterprise chaos.

When David joined Siemens, he faced the situation of many specialized design systems, each tailored for highly complex industrial products with “very” long product lifecyles. In this talk, he will take you through the incredibly complex journey of creating one single Design Language for all Siemens products, and why Siemens decided to open source all design assets. He will give you insights, why it´s not a good idea to enforce only one tech stack, how his team handles legacy products that stay in market for decades, and why design systems break the moment acquisitions occur, unless the system is built to evolve. This is a rare look at design systems at a truly industrial scale.

In a global enterprise, “ways of working” is never one‑size‑fits‑all. You’ll often find teams applying Lean‑Agile alongside teams that still think they’re agile while following old practices—across cultures and wildly different readiness levels. In this session, Duygu Stubrys shares how Nestlé modernised Ways of Working by scaling through people, not presentations. This peer‑driven model has already helped teams improve flow, transparency, collaboration, and customer focus.

You will unpack a hands on, gamified training programme that turns respected practitioners into local catalyst, equipped to teach core concepts, shift habits and lift team maturity where it matters most. Expect polls, audience contributions, and plenty of real world trade offs.

Outcomes:

• Set up a scalable champions model using readiness criteria’s

• Design practical, gamified learning that helps teams grasp the “why” and apply it immediately.

• Identify simple practices and flow metrics to boost flow, unblock work faster, increase transparency, and strengthen collaboration

As teams move faster and organisations grow more complex, the skills that matter most are often the hardest to teach: empathy, negotiation, judgement and human connection. In this discussion, Tasha Melchior and Mike Brown will explore why these qualities remain essential to strong product, design and leadership practice.
Together, they will discuss what it takes to build trust across teams, navigate tension, influence decisions and keep work grounded in real human needs. This session will examine why soft skills are not a nice-to-have, but a core part of how modern teams collaborate, lead and make better decisions in high-pressure environments.