Before founding the Silicon Valley Product Group to pursue his interests in helping others create successful products through his writing, speaking, advising and coaching, Marty Cagan served as an executive responsible for defining and building products for some of the most successful companies in the world, including Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, and eBay.

Marty is the author of the essential product book INSPIRED: How To Create Tech Products Customers Love, as well as the newly released EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products.

Track: Keynote

Session Topic: Product Leadership is Hard

Mary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both a product champion and department manager.

Mary considered retirement 1998, but instead found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word “waterfall.” When Mary compared her experience in successful software and product development to the prevailing opinions about how to manage software projects, she decided the time had come for a new paradigm. She wrote the award-winning book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit in 2003 to explain how the lean principles from manufacturing offer a better approach to software development.

Over the past several years, Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and teaches classes with her husband Tom. Based on their on-going learning, they wrote a second book, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash in 2006, a third, Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point in 2009, and a fourth book, The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions in 2013. A popular writer and speaker, Mary continues to bring fresh perspectives to the world of software development.

Track: Keynote
Session Topic: Lessons from a Product Champion

Benedict Evans has spent 20 years analysing mobile, digital media and technology, in equity research, industry, and strategy consulting and most recently in venture capital, at Andreessen Horowitz in Silicon Valley. He is now an independent analyst based in London.

Track: Keynote
Session Topic: Tech and the New Normal

Cennydd Bowles is a designer and futurist with nearly two decades of experience advising companies including Twitter, Samsung, Accenture, and the BBC. He is the author of Future Ethics – ‘a must read for anyone who is inventing the future’ – and now runs ethical design and futures studio NowNext.

Cennydd has lectured on responsible innovation at Facebook, Stanford University, and Google. He is a frequent keynote speaker at technology and design events worldwide, and a regular commentator on ethical design and technology, quoted by The Guardian, Sky News, The Wall Street Journal, and WIRED.

Cennydd has been an invited futurist for the UN, a contributor to the BSI’s Responsible Innovation steering group, and a reviewer for MIT Press. He holds a Masters in Information Technology from the University of Nottingham, and studied Innovation & Future Thinking at IED Barcelona.

Track: Keynote

Session Topic: All These Worlds Are Yours

Asha has spent her career developing transformative products and experiences at the intersection of people, technology and education. Prior to launching Founders Academy, she was Chief Product Officer at SchoolApply, a platform to connect international students with study abroad opportunities around the world. She also spent nearly seven years working across a variety of leadership positions in tech, marketing, talent acquisition, and sales at EF Education First, the world leader in international education.

Asha is also a trustee with The Change Foundation, an award-winning charity that uses sport and dance to create transformational change in young people. Asha earned her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis and her MBA from Harvard Business School.

Track: Keynote

Session Topic: Anatomy of a Pivot

Adaora is a product & UX strategist and technology leader with ~15 years leading brand, product, and market growth for tech startups and social impact ventures across the globe.

Originally from Nigeria, she’s an MIT alum who’s lived and worked on five different continents; built several successful ventures from the ground up; and speaks regularly about product leadership, innovation culture, and the future of work.

She’s currently the VP of Product at PathCheck Foundation. Prior to that, she was VP of Product and Experience Design at MERGE, led the product & experience design strategy for Jumia Technologies, the largest e-commerce operator in Africa; Flywire, a market-leading in global payments; and Cogito, a disruptive AI conversational coaching platform. Outside her passion for strategy and UX, she enjoys building and mentoring cross-functional teams and partnering with executives to build organizational cultures that enable innovation at scale.

When Spectra isn’t working, she’s either planning events for her passion project Code Red (a community of tech leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors approaching workplace inclusion with an innovation lens); investing in early-stage entrepreneurs; or, spending time with her partner at their home in Boston.

Track: Keynote

Session Topic: Scaling Product Teams: In Defense of Process

Georgie is the Chief Product Officer at mobility company Tier in Berlin, and before that served as the CPO of challenger bank N26. With over 12 years experience in global digital and software companies such as Xero, News Ltd and Scout24, her leadership, strategic thinking and operational effectiveness has benefited from her breadth of experience. Leading large teams in multiple locations, Georgie leans into the challenges of scaling global businesses and believes that growth and change are always successful when done with high levels of communication (verbal and non verbal) and respect throughout an organisation.

Track: Leadership

Session Topic: Product Tetris – The Ultimate Game of Leadership (more here)

Sara Wood is the CEO of Kaluza, an OVO company and the leader in intelligent energy platforms. She has over 20 years’ experience creating and scaling industry-transforming technology products. Prior to Kaluza, Sara was Executive VP of Product at Farfetch, where she helped lead the company to a $9 billion IPO and was a torchbearer for platforms as key enablers, speaking on multiple international stages.

Sara has served in executive roles in organisations as diverse as Gap Inc, Flickr, Wikipedia, and the World Health Organization, and has consulted companies such as Slack and Kayak. She has experience at all stages of a company’s growth, from seed stage through to IPO and F500. Under her leadership, Kaluza’s award-winning platform is powering the future of energy and driving decarbonisation.

Track: Leadership

Session Topic: Embracing Change as a Career Advantage (more here)

Roman Pichler is a product management author, consultant, and trainer. He has more than 15 years experience in teaching product managers and product owners, advising product leaders, and helping companies build successful product management organisations.​

Roman is the author of three books on product management, including How to Lead in Product Management. Roman writes a popular blog for product professionals, he hosts his own product management podcast, and he has created a range of product management tools.​

Track: Leadership

Session Topic: Structuring & Scaling Product Teams (more here)

Ibrahim Bashir has been building and shipping software for over 20 years. He is currently an executive at Box, where he serves as the VP of product and GM of platform. Before that, he scaled Twitter’s service infrastructure and Amazon’s Kindle business. And in past lives, he studied computer science, taught algorithms courses, wrote radiology software, built e-commerce platforms, and served as a technology consultant.

Ibrahim is also a prolific creator of content around the discipline of product management and craft of cross-functional leadership. You can consume his latest musings via his Substack newsletter Run the Business.

Track: Leadership

Session Topic: Bootstrapping a Product Team (more here)

Cheryl Platz is an internationally-renowned interaction designer best known for her work on a wide variety of emerging technologies and products – including Amazon’s Alexa voice platform and the Echo Look, Microsoft’s Cortana and the Azure platform, and groundbreaking early titles for the Nintendo DS. Her professional passions include natural user interfaces, design for constraint and complexity, systems design, and storytelling for product design.

Cheryl’s past employers include Microsoft, Amazon, Electronic Arts, Griptonite Games, MAYA Design and Disney Parks. Cheryl is currently a Principal UX Designer at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, focused on improving digital collaboration. In her spare time, as owner of design education firm Ideaplatz, LLC, she travels the world sharing her experience designing for new technology (and applying improvisation to design) with other technologists.

Cheryl holds a degree in computer science and human-computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon University. In addition to her design work, Cheryl has been a professional improvisor and performer for well over a decade. She’s most frequently seen in Seattle as an ensemble member and teacher at Unexpected Productions, or featured in the hit improvised parody of Star Trek “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Her other hobbies include travel, writing and video gaming.

Track: Breakout Sessions

Session Topic: Capturing Customer Context for Cross-Channel Experiences (more here)

As the co-founder and CEO of Remote, Job works to enables companies to employ talent globally in minutes. Before starting Remote, he was part of the early team at GitLab and as VP of Product there, he helped scale the company from a small team into the largest all-remote company in the world.

Track: Breakout Sessions

Session Topic: Building Products Asynchronously With a Distributed Team (more here)

Berlin-based Product Coach Shaun Russell was always destined to work in Product. He co-founded Audiobubble while still in school and gave himself all the responsibilities of a Product Manager years before ever hearing of the title. Since then he’s racked up considerable experience as a product manager at Net Media Planet, Adthena, Lyst, and Outfittery. In the years since he’s put a lot of thought into the development of his coaching practice and has spoken about it at a number of conferences. He is also the co-organiser of ProductTank Berlin.

Track: Breakout Sessions

Session Topic: How Successful Product People Develop (more here)

Julian is a Designer and Strategist committed to making significant progress on social challenges. He has 10 years experience creating services and solutions at the intersection of local communities and Government. Julian is the Founder and Design Lead of Rooted by Design, the UK’s first Social Design Lab centering UK Black experiences and exploring the role design plays in addressing racial inequalities. Rooted’s work spans across futures thinking, equity-centred design and designing for systems change. Julian is also the national Service Design Lead at Citizens Advice (UK largest Government funded charity) leading a team of Designers creating digital services used by millions of people every year.

Track: Breakout Sessions

Session Topic: Is Inclusive Design Enough? (more here)

Susana is a Director of Product at Onfido, looking after the Biometrics Line of Business.

She’s seasoned B2B Product Manager with over 7 years of individual contributor experience. Susana now splits her time between managing and coaching product managers, working on new value propositions and long term strategy.

A Bioengineer by training and proud data nerd with a MEng from Imperial College London, Susana is into kickboxing, bouldering and gardening.

Track: Breakout Sessions

Session Topic: Minimum Viable Product Manager (more here)

Adrian Howard helps great teams & products get better. Coaching & training where Product, UX, and Agile overlap. With more than 25 years experience you’ll find him working with companies of all sizes — combining coaching & training with hands-on product & research work. Find out more at quietstars.com and adrianhoward.com.

Track: Breakout Sessions

Session Topic: Communicating Research with Pace Layer Mapping (more here)

Amy is a consumer-focused product manager with several years’ experience in the product trenches — from early-stage startups, to media orgs, to large consumer tech companies. She’s currently a Principal Product Manager at Spotify, working on the future of the consumer mobile apps. She received a BA in English from Goldsmiths, and is a qualified wine geek.

Track: Breakout Sessions

Session Topic: How to Create a Product Strategy (more here)

Arne is a VP of Product Management at XING in Hamburg, Germany. Before joining the company in 2011 he worked as Consulting Director at creative digital agency Fork Unstable Media.

Arne is a curious networker and has spoken at most product events across Europe as well as at SXSW. He first became involved with Mind the Product as one of organizers of ProductTank Hamburg in 2013.

In 2017 he and his co-organizer Petra Wille pioneered Mind the Product Engage in Hamburg which they continue to curate & host as an annual event. They are excited to explore ways to develop MTP Engage Hamburg in ways that not only provide top content, but also give the audience new ways to interact and grow their regional network.

Track: Breakout Sessions

Session Topic: OKRs in the Wild (more here)

Megan is a product leader who has led product teams in San Francisco, Brazil, China, Spain, and in fully distributed environments. Her product background includes big tech players like Microsoft and Skyscanner, as well as both young and late-stage startups. Megan’s work spans a cross-section of product maturities, from building fresh MVPs with founders at seed stage to experimenting at scale on 80million MAU products, and most steps in between.

In addition to her work in product management and leadership, Megan is both an Intrapreneur and an Entrepreneur. As an Intrapreneur, she launched an internal incubator at Skyscanner, and as an Entrepreneur, she owns a direct-to-consumer women’s apparel company.

Megan currently leads the product org at Hotjar, the global leader in the behavior analytics space.

Track: Breakout Sessions

Session Topic: OKRs in the Wild (more here)

Timm teaches and consults on leadership, organizational development and culture. He founded his own company, NEO Culture, that offers an online company culture diagnosis. The method is licensed by kununu, the Glassdoor competitor in German speaking countries.

Prior to that, Timm served as the chief product officer at XING and had various senior leadership positions in the last 20 years. He holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of management and studied mathematics and computer science.

Track: Breakout Sessions

Session Topic: OKRs in the Wild (more here)

Flavia’s career has been dedicated to building products and growing companies. She is currently VP of Product at Free Now, a ride hailing marketplace operating across Europe and Latam, and responsible for the company’s Tech Hub in Barcelona.

Her globetrotter spirit has led her to work in 4 countries and work in multiple verticals, including being CPO of a Silicon Valley startup.

Throughout her career, she has also been responsible for large scale user acquisition efforts and helped companies worldwide with their complex growth challenges.

Track: Breakout Sessions

Session Topic: OKRs in the Wild (more here)