ProductWorld Main Stage

Building trust within your team is not only critical to employee engagement, happiness, and retention—it's what ultimately determines whether your company will succeed. Shay will discuss critical elements for new and experienced product managers to begin implementing as they build, maintain, and scale high-performing teams. During his time at ActiveCampaign, Shay has been instrumental in leading teams across product, design, and engineering—helping the company grow sixfold in just three years. From tackling difficult conversations to key decision-making, Shay will share best practices to identify and address employee struggles and drive improvements in performance. Attendees will learn strategies to foster growth, create alignment with organization goals, and build a culture of meaningful engagement—resulting in world-class product teams driven to optimize the product life cycle.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past 4 to 5 years, you know that containers have swept the DevOps landscape by enabling the deployment of microservices a heck of a lot easier than doing the same with virtual machines.
In this talk we will look at some emerging trends for containerization and services that run in micro:
1. App Modernization
2. Simplicity and Elasticity
3. Moving from the Margins to the Center of DevOps
4. Thinking of Containers as a service.

Product Manager or Product Owner, this is a title that is very hard to explain and most of the time comes with big responsibilities but yet it is easy to overlook. Moreover, in the Application Modernization journey that focuses on modernizing your legacy application.

It can be difficult to have all your team members gathered in one place and, nowadays, many projects are done by teams that are distributed around the globe. There are many factors influencing productivity of distributed teams: communication strategies, communication technology, personal and cultural differences, language barriers. The talk will cover the difficult aspects of working remotely and the benefits of collocation as well as discuss how latter can be transferred to the environment of a distributed agile team.

The Lean Startup is based on the idea of having a Build-Measure-Learn loop, and making it as short as possible. In this session, you will learn how to shorten the Build stage, so that you don't waste precious R&D resources and money, and still experiment and validate ideas.
Real-life examples will be presented, based on work in Ad-Tech and Fintech companies.

Starting by the premise that the way a PM measures success, shapes her Product more than any feature they'll ever ship - I’ll talk about the 4 steps one should go through to properly define and measure such success.
Step 1: Related to the end-goal-definition of the company, where I introduce the concept of Customer Equity
Step 2: where I talk about focusing on a specific family of problems, by deciding between bringing new customers in vs. keeping the existing ones loyal
Step 3: Where I use the case of Booking and Fever, to break down those families of problems into specific KPIs
Step 4: Where I provide actionable guidelines and tips on how to ultimately define / choose a KPI

Session is to provide practitioner view to Product Managers on how they can take benefit of Kanban approach and maximize the value of their products

Society is grappling with the simultaneous ubiquity of technology in all aspects of our lives and decreasing trust that it is in our best interests. We are over-worked and under-nourished - the simplicity and connection technology promises is too great to resist. As we focus more and more time on our digital self, we hand over our most precious commodity -- our attention.

Innovators and technologists are in an unprecedented position to create experiences that impact how society interacts with every facet of our world. How can we create meaningful products that improve our lives and are worthy of our attention?

During this talk, Carey will share her perspective on how the intersection of ethics and technology leads to the development of more compelling products and more conscious innovation cultures. She’ll unpack how technologists have not just a responsibility, but a mission, to design and build more intentionally with creativity, diversity and the purpose to foster a more positive world.

This talk is a call-to-arms for product managers, UX designers, engineering and all those involved in the software development process to build products for a user base with growing expectations of data privacy and information protection. How can can we, as product leaders, regain trust the of internet citizens by building user-trust-centered experiences in our product? It's not always easy, there are technical limitations, problems at scale, so how can we address them?

When we imagine an ideal product team our vision is usually of a small, autonomous group of product strategists, designers and engineers all aligned and moving with momentum towards a shared mission.

The reality tends to be somewhat different …  especially in large enterprises where functions like Product Management, UX and Engineering sometimes remain inextricably and intransigently siloed even when they are ostensibly working on delivering the same product.

In this talk we’ll explore:

• The roles of Product Management and UX across the full product lifecycle
• Common misconceptions and frustrations about product and UX functions and how skillset biases and levels of influence across functions can radically impact what a team does and what actually gets build
• Essential tips for getting product teams aligned around What to build, How to build it and most importantly, WHY to build it
• Case studies from The SIX on using Design Sprints and rapid prototyping to help teams align and test product market fit in 5 days or less.

Peter Cronin demonstrates how current software development practices (e.g. Scrum) are no longer keeping up with today's software development environment. Ultimately crippling our ability to provide continuous delivery without compromising software quality. To counter this, Peter introduces Pace, a radical yet proven method that successfully brings planning and development into alignment with the speed of modern development cycles and finally delivers on the promises that Agile has been making for decades. No fluff, no nonsense, just a revolutionary process that reboots software development so management can plan, implement and deploy at a faster rate with fewer risks and greater potential for growth.

Whether you’re in e-commerce or food delivery, it’s imperative to keep customers informed and connect them with the right resource when they’re seeking answers. With online purchasing increasing and more people working from home, buyers are engaging with brands digitally across multiple channels. As a result, e-commerce needs to go omnichannel. What’s more, context, real-time communications, AI, social chatbots and robust contact centers are all necessary to meet rising customer demands in this growing space.

In this session, Brian Gilman, VP of Solutions Marketing at Vonage will discuss key trends within the retail space that has prompted the need for putting customer communications at the center and how APIs have been able to meet these demands. This includes:
- Increased focus to create in-store experiences online: With limitations in physical interactions, retailers are looking to bring the in-store experience online with personalized virtual appointments and experiential content through live streaming. This creates a huge opportunity to use video to build on customer acquisition, engagement and loyalty.

- IT teams are looking to move to the cloud: IDC notes that the demand for cloud-based contact center solutions is outpacing the demand for on-premises solutions, and with good reason. By moving your communications from legacy, on-premises systems to cloud-based software, you can experience greater reliability, global carrier connectivity and robust security.

- Customers expect more: Existing online retailers and brick-and-mortars, looking to transition into the e-commerce space, need to bring context, real-time updates and transparency to fulfill the modern shopper’s expectations. Fortunately, communications APIs have become easily accessible with robust omnichannel capabilities that allow brands to easily build unique and satisfying customer journeys to make shoppers come back for more.

I am going to describe my journey in building a "working backward" product envisioning and delivery framework for a large financial services firm, and aligning our product strategy with the company-wide OKRs.

This was part of our transformation from project delivery to a customer-centric product-driven innovation enterprise. I will provide specific examples, describe failures and learnings, and share the outcomes.

A discussion on how usage of different cloud technologies and vendors has changed over the past two years, and how industry and company size affects this.

Customer experience is customers’ perception of how your company treats them. These perceptions affect their behaviors, build memories and feelings to drive their loyalty.
Customers are willing to pay a price premium of up to 13% to 18% for luxury and indulgence services, simply by receiving a great customer experience. Empathy, trust & loyalty are key factors affecting the consumer retention & ultimately business. User experience with product is not sufficient, 360-degree experience of a consumer is the need.

In other words, if they like you and continue to like you, they are going to do business with you and recommend you to the others.

Empathising with customers not only helps in identifying the various touch points but also helps in analysing the business potential at each interaction stage. To target the overall 360 degree customer experience, business has to move away from only-product strategy to end to end customer journey strategy. This essential means ‘Organizations & teams needs to focus on the ‘Customer Experience Vision’.
“Make UX driven strategies across different touchpoints”

In this talk I would like to present the key important aspects of crafting the 360 degree experience for consumer and identifying the user journeys.


Topics to be covered
• Product vs Overall experience
• Why it is important to focus on overall ecosystem
• Crafting 360 degree experience through journey mapping
• Journey mapping
• Key Ingredients of Journey mapping
• Process to prepare the journey mapping
• Case studies
• UX Culture and process in organisations


Key takeaways
• Value of targeting experience at overall level
• User Research for identifying Journey mapping
• Customer Experience vision for organizations

Voice-enabled devices like Alexa and Google Home are fundamentally transforming the way we interact with products and have become a household staple. While 75% of households in the U.S. are predicted to own an in-home voice technology device by 2025, the current challenge with these different conversational UIs is that they don’t play nice together. How can UX and product teams design products to account for this challenge and the massive shift towards voice-activated technology? Having designed one of the first audio technologies to bridge multiple voice-activated devices together seamlessly, Brendon will share his expertise in how to design products for a voice-activated future.

We need a strategy to embrace, evolve and innovate product practices through collective engagement

This talk proposes an enterprise level Gamification strategy and eventually highlights the Convergence of Gamification and Machine Learning to build next-generation products

The Enterprise level Strategy for gamification lays the foundation for -
- Introduce culture of experimentation
- Measuring innovation by integration of scores
- Engage End-User in Gamification, mock-up..
- Introduce researchers in the process
- Creating Open-Source Projects
- Map the Road to Organized innovation

First steps in this journey understanding "Gamification" - integration of game elements like point systems, leaderboards, badges, or other elements to build collective thinking on complex problems of future

Second step to identify critical business question for future & next-generation product portfolio
- Non Linear products & Features
- New security threats
- New Data Sources & Data Protection
- Optimal level of Agility
- People Driven Compliance
- Hyper- Automation

Third Step onboard to a Gamification Strategy to answer critical business Questions of future
- Shortest lead-time ( How fast )
- Smallest number of errors
- Hyper-Automation challenges for complex task
- Ranking based “Toil” removal
- Loyalty points where customer redeem points

If an Agile team is self-managing, then what's the manager supposed to do?

When a leader stops micro-managing, and truly empowers and trusts the team, they will have ample time to do what an Agile leader should be doing.

A high-performing Agile leader:
1. Understands and works to continually improve the system
2. Hires awesome people and then mentors and coaches them to assist them with their career goals.
3. Provides the tools, training, and environment the teams need to be successful
4. Shields the team from unnecessary outside distractions
5. Removes roadblocks

This session explains these 5 Agile Leadership responsibilities, with specific examples and concrete ways to successful carry out each one on a daily basis.

Technology Product Management is a highly coveted job- sitting at the cusp of product definition, product marketing, business development and customer engagement. However, it is challenging too- with a variety of issues related to people, cross-functional alignment, fast paced market, changing customer requirements, and so on. Product Management is as much a skill acquired by experience, as it is an art refined with passion and natural inclination. In this session, we will explore what makes women handle this job skillfully and artistically.
And please don't mistake this session to be a comparison of Women's skills with other professionals. It is about the special skills Women can leverage to be successful at the product management discipline.

Think about a company. Engineers build the product. Designers make sure it has a great user experience and looks good. Marketing makes sure customers know about the product. Sales get potential customers to open their wallets to buy the product. What more does a company need? What does a product manager do? Through this session we will answer that question, as well as navigate the different paths to break into product. We will explore the many roles within Product Management and discuss all the best practices, practical advice, and expert tips key for succeeding

The people that know our business best, are our business people and the people that know our products best are the people that use them everyday. Building a champion network of employees from your business can not only help you boost engagement and adoption but can also be a great way to get real feedback and build a roadmap that continually drives value for your users.

This session will discuss the importance of building a champion network, where to start and who to select.