My personal story of how I transformed my product team into an independent empowered team, trusted by our management.

A one-year journey where we practiced extensive use of data, listening to the voice of the customer, and communicating effectively with executives. 

I'll share simple tools, techniques, and guidelines that any product manager can practice.

The product manager’s journey to find the product/market fit is akin to the Templars quest of the Holy Grail. Everyone wishes to find it, but nobody knows what exactly is it, where is it and how to start. Often this process is very “soft”, based on gut feeling, emotions, anecdotes, and a few conversations with customers. How then, in a world where PMs don’t decide what to have for breakfast without A/B testing their cereal, the decisions on the most crucial element of product strategy are made as a form of art?

In this session, we will discuss how the product/market fit can be discovered, measured, and improved upon using quantitative frameworks. How to use it to engage and convince stakeholders of the product strategy and specifically how to collaborate with the marketing, sales and customer success organizations to establish the required synergy to deliver a great product based on the newly-found and proven product/market fit.

Bringing value to users is the mission for any product manager, but what happens when you have a feature that brings value to the business but not to it's users? What do you do next? 

In the old waterfall days, product managers had to write very long and detailed requirements.

But even when we are working agile, many product managers spend too much time on managing the backlog and writing too detailed requirements, whether they call it PRDs, user stories, specifications or any other term.

Writing specifications and requirements should be a minimal task. Product managers should write as less as they can so they can spend more time on strategy, focusing the team, and making sure the product delivers the right value, while on the same time empowering development to come with new ideas.

Gong customers praise its product and give it high scores. In this talk, Eilon covers how the Gong team is executing towards high customer satisfaction and high user impact. Eilon reviews the main Gong product principles and team approaches to this end, and provides examples on how these principles come into play in practice

Though the concepts of machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms dates back to nearly 70 years ago it is mainly in the last 15 years that commercial applications of ML and AI started to appear with companies like Google and Facebook pioneering the use of ML for building products using speech recognition, image recognition and so on. Since then more and more products are being developed based on ML and AI algorithms and it is becoming more likely that product managers will face ML algorithms in their careers.

But what effect does this have, if at all, on our work as product managers? Is there anything different about being a PM for an ML product vs. any other product? How much should product managers know about these algorithms?

In this session I will take you through my own personal journey of being a PM launching an ML based product in taboola and will provide some personal takeaways on how to be more successful with your ML product.

A product which offers AI as a core business technology often triggers deep anxieties in our clients.

Suddenly, they are expected to trust a machine with tasks which were traditionally based on human experience and intuition.

In a world of rapidly evolving AI products, this "AI-anxiety" becomes a critical obstacle in the way to successful product adoption.

As product managers, we need to draw clearer boundaries between human and machine tasks, provide dedicated features for “anxiety relief”, and lead a conversation which will build

human-AI trust.

Most companies have a vision accompanied by a mission statement. "Bring the world closer together.” "Accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” "Change how the world works together." Did you ever incorporate these as practical tools in your product management methodology?

In times when we push our execution abilities to the limits, these mission statements transform from phrases to practical tools.  In this session, we’ll see how a vision, a mission statement, and company values can take an instrumental role in the inception, execution, and rollout of an ambitious product.

We are living in a hectic world, customers expect to get answers in seconds and the fact that we’ve got all the data in our “systems” can’t help us anymore, few of the shiniest stars in the software industry (Facebook, Youtube, Netflix) have one thing in common - that they know how to answer a question that you haven't asked yet, imagine that you are getting into a room and you have information and all the right answers about everyone at your fingertips – this is what I’ll present, an Innovative product that’s doing exactly this.

We keep trying to define our role as Product Managers, but shouldn’t we start with understanding the role of the Product in the company we work for, and then move on to what it means to Manage it? Let’s take 18 minutes to kick around a few suggestions and try to come up with an approach? I’ll bring along a case study from a recent chapter, and a hypothesis built around identity that goes with it.

As a Product Manager, it’s only reasonable that I believe this session will be engaging, valuable, and viral... but even if I’m wrong – what’s the risk in an 18-minute sprint, right?

This talk outlines the disruptions, both positive and negative, that are brought about by our immersion in the digital. The scope and depth of aspects of impacted individual and collective activities, range from our privacy to our education, and from our livelihood to our security. One can form dystopian or utopian views of the direction in which we are marching. This talk aims to inform the discussion.

The product manager’s journey to find the product/market fit is akin to the Templars quest of the Holy Grail. Everyone wishes to find it, but nobody knows what exactly is it, where is it and how to start. Often this process is very “soft”, based on gut feeling, emotions, anecdotes, and a few conversations with customers. How then, in a world where PMs don’t decide what to have for breakfast without A/B testing their cereal, the decisions on the most crucial element of product strategy are made as a form of art?

In this session, we will discuss how the product/market fit can be discovered, measured, and improved upon using quantitative frameworks. How to use it to engage and convince stakeholders of the product strategy and specifically how to collaborate with the marketing, sales and customer success organizations to establish the required synergy to deliver a great product based on the newly-found and proven product/market fit.

Collaboration with internal stakeholders is crucial to the success of any new product or feature, but how does one engage team members who aren’t under their purview. The challenge becomes much harder when the company grows quickly from 30 to 300 people. In this lecture we will try to analyze a few behaviors which can help in such a situation. 

Collaboration with internal stakeholders is crucial to the success of any new product or feature, but how does one engage team members who aren’t under their purview. The challenge becomes much harder when the company grows quickly from 30 to 300 people. In this lecture we will try to analyze a few behaviors which can help in such a situation. 

Many companies have designed their codes and developed their products over five years ago, when AI was still associated with Spielberg’s “Artificial Intelligence”. To adapt with today’s growing demand for cost-effective data-driven products, these companies need to take their “old” product and augment it with AI and ML capabilities. This journey is a hell of a ride, which won’t leave the company with technological enhancements alone. Adding these capabilities requires a fundamental change in the mindset of people, their skills, and the way they manage their product, while bearing immense impact on the overall business and its value proposition.

I've worked in both product and marketing, and I've seen friction and tension between product at marketing at every single company that I've worked at. But it doesn't have to be that way! Product and marketing can get along and even make magic together - the key is very specific communication and alignment. During my talk I'll provide several examples that show how miscommunications and lack of alignment led to big problems, and how they could have been easily solved. 

There can be many reasons to drastically change a product: outdated or patchy code that needs rewriting, a UX that doesn't satisfy the users, product pivot - and many more. When we approach that kind of change, some essential decision making is in order.

These decisions will have long-term strategic implications on the product and company. In this talk, Anna will tell you all about 3 practical tools which the team at Uniq UI uses to assist customers' product teams in making these decisions.

Yaron’s product-centric career journey spanned through engineering, product management and finally landed in general management. Making a personal choice of supporting an equal opportunity for his wife’s career, the personal journey meant taking a 3 years career pause to focus on the family. The impact of these changes on one’s career and subsequently the products they built will be at the core of this talk.

If at first you don't succeed, try again. In this talk, Yair Zehavi, a serial entrepreneur, and corporate executive will discuss why product managers should not fear failure and leverage it to achieve success

The Google Design Sprint is a methodology for effectively upgrading an existing product, kickstarting the development of a new product or quickly examining new ideas. The method’s main idea is to follow five steps in five days: (1) Analyze the problem, (2) Suggest solutions (3) Select the winning idea (4) Create a prototype (5) Perform usability testing.

In this talk I’ll discuss the theory in detail, some real life stories of its application, especially among Israeli participants. We’ll discuss the adaptations we did in UI and its pros and cons against other approaches.

As a living organism we all have instincts, our natural reaction to a situation and as product managers, our instincts guide us to ask questions and validate our hypothesis, but in many cases, we are so guided by our intuition that we don’t use it in an effective way. 

How to find the balance between trusting your instincts but letting go when needed?

For that, we will learn a framework.

 In this session, Adi will share her insights from her long experience working on Fiverr’s quality domain and how managing your instincts is a key factor in succeeding. 

Technology is developing faster than we can keep up with. Both consumers and businesses continue to expect products to better fit their specific needs. In order for technology companies to stay ahead of the curve, an innovation lab can help them to develop disruptive products at lightning speed, in parallel to their current company’s product roadmap and launches.

Nir Levy, Head of Product and Professional Service at Credorax, will share his insights on:

• Why your company should create a separate innovation lab

• How can your company create an innovation lab

• How to decide which products to invest in developing at your innovation lab
• Key Innovation success criteria

We are privileged, as product managers, to have a fascinating, challenging and diverse role. One that holds a lot of responsibility, that enables us to create something greater than ourselves, to give love and attention, make an impact. If you think about it, we actually act as parents - nurturing and taking care of whatever our product needs - to survive, grow and flourish, deal with the world, perhaps even take over the world one day..
I’m excited to share with you some of my thoughts about this so important role that we have as.. mothers and fathers to products! 

As product managers we often find ourselves in the epicenter of changes. Sometimes we initiate them, sometimes they happen to us. In both cases the PM has to have the courage and the passion to make the right calls, even if they are widely unpopular or questionable.

This presentation will cover the case study of AutoCAD Mobile that had to undergo a monumental strategic shift during its highest business success and describe how our PM team is embracing the change and setting the product up for success in the long term.

This lecture deals with Game Theory and Psychology of Decision Making.

In this lecture we will:

• Meet the Nobel Prize laureate John F Nash and familiarize ourselves with his celebrated equilibrium
• Learn the basic ideas of the Art of Negotiation
• Learn about the importance of cooperation
• Introduce the world champion in strategic thinking
• Learn how statistics bolster lies
• Partake in John Maynard Keynes’s "Beauty Contest" Competition and study its association with stock trading

As PMs, we are often swamped with product requests and some are harder to say no to than others. In my lecture I will share how I learned to say no to my manager, which helped me grow both professionally and as a person.

We, product people, are usually trying to change or redesign our product.

But there’s a point in time, when you need to reorganize the structure and redefine the workflow of your Product-R&D teams and potentially the entire company.

• Why and when to make a change?
• How should this sensitive change be made?
• What is the product manager’s role in leading this change?

I will share the story of the profound changes (which are still being) made in eToro, a fast growing FinTech startup with more than 500 employees… 

Oh boy, it's got a life of it's own. We've built an AI-based fully-autonomous system that plans marketing campaigns on its own, builds and executes on its own, continuously analyzing data, extracts info and takes action on behalf of its customers in the open-ended world of marketing.

This presentation will cover insights from the journey we went through to build Albert, from product strategy through product and dev methodologies, to internal operations - and the product guidelines that allow us to build Albert and (try to) control it.

Product managers engages in many tasks and leads people around them to accomplish a common goal.

While their skills and competences are very important, their leadership capability is determined by something deeper.

Something so foundational, which drives and dictates the effectiveness of every action and has huge impact on results.

What is this unseen force? Mindset.

Mindset is about how we see other people, how we perceive our work and how we focus on our objectives.

Imagine what would happen if every person operated with a mindset that focus on the success of everyone around them.

What would happen to collaboration? What would happen to performance? What would happen to results?

This talk will present the Outward Mindset and how it can help you to lead and manage more effectively.

This talk will increase your self-awareness of your own mindset and provide you a tool to start implement an outward mindset in your role.

I've started my PM career almost 13 years ago, as intuitive driven PM. My career path since then took me into a personal process and changed my point of view, from a intuitive driven, to data-driven and during the last 4 years - business and goals driven. In my session, I will give you a sneak peek to my current way of thinking and some tools to make this change as well.|

Booking.com is one of the world's largest online companies where 150+ product teams help millions of daily visitors to choose the right accommodations among one of our 29M+ listings in 200+ countries. By working autonomously in every part of the customer journey, the teams can quickly react and adapt to customer needs. 

At any given time point, millions of users from all over the world are exposed to 1000+ concurrently running experiments.

Join us to hear more about how to avoid the typical A/B testing mistakes, learn why allocating the right experiment traffic and running experiments in parallel is so essential for your product success.