Kobi will close each day with a unique and surprising summary of the conference talks.

In today’s competitive landscape, building a “moat” around your product is more crucial (and tricky) than ever. In this talk, I’ll share practical strategies based on my personal experience to identify, build, and protect these moats, helping your product stand out and thrive in a constantly shifting market.

Deployment without formal authority is a significant challenge for Product Managers, and when it comes to AI, the complexity reaches new heights, almost like creating art in a scientific world. In this enlightening lecture, Julia will share valuable recipes from her career cooking book that pave the way to success and help prevent AI algorithm failures.
Join us as we explore practical strategies to get things done - the right way, empowering you to navigate the challenges of AI deployments with finesse.

In this session, I’ll take you on a journey through the real-world experience of building an auto-pilot product from the ground up. From deciding to actually pursue an auto-pilot solution, to defining a clear vision of success, and leveraging an operations team to execute efficiently—this session will provide an in-depth look at the key steps involved. I’ll share the challenges, lessons learned, and strategies that helped bring the product to life, offering actionable insights for anyone looking to build smarter, automated solutions.

As a product manager, how do you decide between refining the familiar or breaking the mold to create something entirely new? Join Idan Shaked, CPO of Tabit, as he takes you on a journey through his real-world experiences of building groundbreaking products. From transforming supermarket shopping to revolutionizing restaurant operations, Idan shares the highs, the challenges, and the lessons learned.

Discover when to embrace evolution to build on solid foundations and when to leap into revolution to redefine the game. Packed with actionable insights and compelling stories, this presentation will inspire you to make bold, impactful decisions in your product journey.

Are you ready to navigate the crossroads of innovation?

When we launched the first version of our product, we discovered that users were not interested, and churned. We had a long list of hypotheses, and a mission to improve fast. We needed a hack to reach our MVP. In this session I will share the methodology we developed, which combined competitive research and user research and led us to drive 3X growth in our key metrics.

We all know we need to pay close attention to our customers pains to build a great product... But today, more than ever, we live in an era of explosive growth and tremendous global competition. A great product is simply not enough to drive significant and sustained business results. We, as product managers, need to pay attention to a wide array of interfaces inside & outside of the company, to deeply understand their pains and their needs, and act to address them. Doing this will unlock new levels of cooperation, creativity & trust and deliver results beyond any expectations. In this session, I will share how, in eBay, a systematic method of practicing empathy, enabled us to take on new markets, grow our business, delight our customers, and experience personal growth. By the end of the session you will glimpse a connection between product management and The Wizard of OZ, and how to leverage our shared insights to start your own path of practicing Empathy.

An explosion of AI-driven Products is already here. The impact on our products is huge, sometimes even disruptive. However, reality has taught us that it is not trivial to create products addressing a variety of “out-of-the-lab” scenarios, on a large scale, that would also pass the test of time.

All the drama that occurs behind the scenes of various learning models and complexities should be transparent to our users. This will be a significant victory for both the products and the product manager.

 In this talk, Gadi will share some significant lessons he learned along his rich experience. Five major tips of how to approach designing and developing AI driven products and how to leverage the AI to increase your impact.

Alibaba Israel was founded 4 years ago, today we are working on products that are used by Chinese consumers on a daily basis. Our story tells about the practice and experience we gained on how to deliver products to a different culture, also when language is a barrier. It dives into learning how important it is to get to know your market and customers when you cannot rely on intuition, and how building trust is fundamental before you can start doing business. I will share examples that highlight the learnings and adaptations we had to do when working with the Chinese market, and reflect how any PM can adapt these to his/her day-to-day when working on a product for users in different countries.

Impact is an important aspect of what we do as product managers, we all know that. But knowing is not the same as doing. Noa Ganot hosts our board members for a discussion that will dive right into the challenges in implementing all the great advice that we received throughout the conference, with practical tips that will help you make the most out of it.

How I aligned the company around a flexible initiative-driven roadmap and stopped lying to everyone.

Many of us build annual or quarterly product roadmaps by prioritizing the backlog based on each feature’s value and estimated effort. But the reality is that this hardly ever ends up as planned. In this talk I will show you how I implemented a practical process of prioritizing customer problems rather than features, resulting in better alignment of the company around a flexible and strategic initiative-driven roadmap.   

DATA-DRIVEN and ANALYTICS are two of the most trending words in todays' PM talk. And yet the transition from discussion and being data-minded, to actually using data to truly influence our work is much harder than thought.

In this talk, Yoav Yechiam, a globally recognized Analytics expert, will share with us his take on why most Analytics implementations fail to serve the Product needs.

It's not due to the platforms, tools or even the technical implementation gone wrong. In most cases it's on us, the PMs. When we define and implement our Analytics 'to cover everything' we're missing its true purpose - to understand user behavior IN ORDER TO TAKE ACTION.

It all starts with PMs needing to ask 'what do I need to understand?' as opposed to 'what do I need to measure?'. After hearing this lecture you'll understand why the difference is so crucial to being truly data-driven and analytics able.

One day early in 2020, the entire world was thrown into "chaos” due to a fast spreading global pandemic. Suddenly, the customers’ needs and product usage changed dramatically.

The question became: how can we continue and manage our products during this crisis in real-time?

In this talk I will depict how the PM team rapidly adapted to the situation, collected the flux of information from clients, monitored these changes, and identified the crucial market needs.

I will also demonstrate a series of actions and products that were implemented in order to fit the new market needs, show how the crisis was overcome, and share general insights on innovative and dynamic product management

Why does Netflix think Tiger King is what I’ll want to watch next? Will knowing the reasoning behind their technology make a difference in how likely I am to follow their recommendation? 
As a product manager, developing explainable products is difficult and will not always have a direct effect on your metrics, so why invest in it? At Riskified, our customers’ transaction approval rate depends on us, which means we have to be adept at explaining our decisioning process while making sure our standard of accuracy stays at top performance. But what exactly is the tradeoff between accuracy and explainability? Is there a tradeoff at all?

 In this session, I’ll share my experience dedicating a year of development to explainability, even while it wasn’t clear how it would be reflected in our KPIs. I’ll show you how this led me to understand that not only are accuracy and explainability not in conflict but .when done right, they feed into each other, resulting in an ever-evolving Flywheel Effect

When we saw that an agile approach pushed our breakthrough innovation further and further away, we realized that sometimes planning into the far future can make that future start happening tomorrow. In other words, we’ve brought innovation much sooner, by roadmapping for much later.So, how far ahead should you plan for?In this talk I’ll show the process we went through, and give some simple tips that helped me grow as a PM in building strategic roadmaps.

"A good PM uses empathy to get into their user's head and drive their experience in the direction maximizing the product goals". But are we really as good as we think we are? In this lightning lecture we'll challenge YOU to test your intuition and prove once and for all what the 'data-driven' approach is full of... Enter at your own risk of disappointment.

In this talk, Hadas will review Gmail from its launch till today, from a user and a PM perspective.

Some of the questions that will be addressed: Why do users love Gmail? Why do others hate it? What is the future of Email? How should Gmail build for this future?

No one knows how long the coronavirus pandemic will last, but it should be obvious by now that even after we will go back to our normal routines - our users’ behaviors and habits might never be quite the same.

 As product managers we often find ourselves defining our user personas in the early stages of the product, but in the post-COVID world – will our personas remain the same?

I’m excited to share with you some of my thoughts and help you to embrace and adapt to this new world by better understanding your users, their new needs, new behaviors, and their new goals.

 In this talk, I will focus on 4 important ways this might impact your product, and will share some examples of products that have already adapted to the new world, including Microsoft Teams which I’m working on.

About the difference between vendors and partners, the great value of strategic partnerships, and a few key pointers on your path to partnership execution.

A product manager who is also a startup founder is responsible for the success of the company before the success of the product.

Product decisions are derived not only from customer needs, but also from marketing goals, sales, unit economic, fundraising, HR, and more.

In a startup, the level of uncertainty is high and the activity is constantly evolving. In such a reality, the goals are short-term, the cost of delay is high, and the decision-making process is super agile and minimalistic.

 On the other hand, the founder’s toolset is wider, and the product is just one tool for fulfilling the company’s vision.

It seems like there’s never enough. Your company might have the resources for illustrated portraits of all the office dogs, but when you want to test that really cool feature you thought of last night, well—all the resources are already spoken for. Or maybe you don’t have a company or any dev resources. So you don’t even have those pretty dog portraits. But you have this idea you want to validate because you’re pretty sure it could be a billion-dollar product. 

Sounds familiar? Welcome to my world. In “Product on a shoestring”, I’ll talk about my experience as the poorest guy in the richest orgs, explore different techniques on how to push your product forward even when resources are scarce, and how to use the results to get more resources than the dog-portrait illustrator.  

Simply’s (formerly Joytunes) strategy is creating a single household subscription (similar to Netflix or Spotify) that helps people with their creative hobbies and passions. We started with teaching piano and guitar but are expanding to more and more domains. At the heart of our competitive advantage is the “secret sauce” of building amazing products that users love and discuss. Products that have a deep emotional and magical core, making complex things (like learning to play) simple. The presentation will share key elements of our “secret sauce” through the story of launching Simply Sing: our new singing app, which was done in record time, and is delivering great value. The app helps people who like to sing by adapting songs to their voice and giving them feedback and guidance on how to sing better.

We completed the initial discovery within ~6 weeks and identified a new innovative opening in the market with limited competition.  A team of 5 people launched the app within three months after discovery and then continued to evolve the app at a rapid pace. The app received extremely high user ratings (in the store, through surveys and interviews). It achieved “hot app” status within three months and was featured by apple. We improved our core KPI (D2 retention) by 50% and got 150K downloads with almost no marketing.

When we think of execution, we often think of resources, but it’s not always the case. When we wanted to build our Gantt chart, we had a huge opportunity and a very small team — so it was time for us to get creative. Sound familiar? 

In this lecture, we’ll cover practical tools we picked up that helped us motivate our team, bring real business impact early into the project, and create a culture of fast delivery. 

How can we deliver more value in a shorter time frame? While it sounds counterintuitive, you should stop considering time estimates and deadlines.

With over 20 years of experience both on the development side as well as the product side, I've seen teams spending too much time on time estimations and deadlines. Sprint planning, estimating features, creating Gantt charts, commitments to customers, and building feature-based roadmaps. Too much time is wasted on the planning and less on the actual work.

In this lecture, I'll talk about what we can do as product managers, in collaboration with the dev team, to get value out of the door quicker.  It's not the deadlines; it’s your product thinking. 

Since 2010, I’ve been practicing product management as a product manager, a leader of PMs, and a VP of Product. Previously, I worked as a developer for seven years. One could say I’ve had a very intimate view of the creation and evolution of the PM role, particularly in Israel.  

Product management initially evolved from various roles, including project managers and system analysts. In fact, for many years, product management positions were part of the engineering organization. Over time, the role evolved beyond an engineering execution role to the business side.

Generally speaking, many organizations divide their product management practice into two types of PMs: Inbound and Outbound. Inbound PMs were responsible for the technical execution, with titles such as Technical PM, Product Owner, Program Manager, etc. In contrast, outbound PMs spent most of their time with sales teams, customers, support, etc. Many companies also adopted hybrid models, such as the Full-Stack Product model, which designates the responsibility of a particular part of a product to a PM but with a more balanced investment of inbound and outbound work.  

The approach we’ve adopted at Torq, which is becoming more commonplace industry-wide, leans heavily towards the outbound approach. Most product management resources are invested in the strategic challenges of building a company and its product, leaving the engineering execution to software engineers. The approach one chooses impacts how to build both product and engineering teams and, more or less, the entire company. In my session, I will demonstrate the essence of this approach, what I call “Strategic Product Management”, and explain how it enabled Torq to quickly reach product-market-fit.

In the past, I worked as a PI (private investigator), and in the last few years, I realized that product management is quite similar in obtaining data about your users/suspects.

In both cases, you must perform out-of-the-box thinking to reach the relevant people and data.
Because it can take time to discover, research, and digest data, there is always a conflict between trying to move fast and making a data-driven decision.
In my talk, I will give practical tips and showcase examples of how I was able to gather data in less time to make the right decisions.

Product managers & sales relationships may have inherent challenges. In this talk, we'll see why some of the common failures are actually opportunities that we, as product managers, and our product can benefit from. Relevant to any startup/ company with a sales organization, both in B2B and B2B2C products.

Being a user of your product can be a huge business upside and a great advantage for Product Managers. The more you can use your product regularly and experience it as a user, the better. But what if this is a hard target to achieve? How can you be in tune with your users and design the best product and journeys when you cannot put yourself in your user’s shoes?

In this case, relying on very close communication with your users is the next best thing.

How do you embed a customer insight approach in your product decision-making processes?

How can you adopt a customer ‘closeness’ mindset within a business?

How can you use customer insight to win in product?

In this session, Roee Peled, 888 VP Product, will take us through the journey towards a customer insight led organization and the tools Product Manager can adopt to become more attentive to their customers’ needs.

In the realm of AI and Neural Networks, a new art is born: a product manager that leads stochastic products where features work randomly. Product management of “inconsistent done criteria”; Release dates defined by the “learning AI Model” and not engineers; and delivery of amazing features - as long as customers use the same data that “The Model” used.

Today, almost every product should add AI capabilities, and this is not yet another technology and engineering problem but rather a new way of product management:

From managing teams, people, tasks, requirements, stories, and customer satisfaction – the new product manager now needs to manage an artificial intelligent creature.

In this presentation, we will discuss how to work with our new AI colleague (aka “The Model”), where the solution is probably: to develop an AI (Neural Network) stochastic product management methodology.

This is an exclusive fireside chat hosted by Ariel Kedem, Splitty.com VP Product & co-founder of the Israeli Product Managers community and John Cutler, a product evangelist, Twitter influencer and the Head of Product Research & Education at Amplitude. John loves wrangling complex problems and answering the "why" with qualitative and quantitative data. Prior to his current role, he was a Senior Product Manager at Zendesk and Pendo.io.

John & Ariel will discuss the differences between measurements and signals, why numbers are important but not enough and how teams should use data in order to make a real impact.

MVP, we have all used the word. Most of us have participated in one. But what makes an MVP successful? And if product managers know how to MVP, why do 95% of new products fail every year? In my talk I will explore the MVP journey through the lenses of my personal experience failing and succeeding to launch new products to market in different countries. At Payoneer, we believe its key to put experimentation at the core of our product development to maximize impact, and In this talk I will outline how to:

·    Detect and avoid death traps (did we change from discovery to delivery too early?)

·    Set the right tools and feedback loops that will cement your journey to the top

Collaboration and relationship with the sales team help our product improve. In order to work effectively with Sales, it's important to understand the differences in our incentives and KPIs. Sales teams need ammo to close the sale, and our part in enabling sales is increasing the team's product knowledge and providing them with competitive analysis, preparing them for the hard questions prospects ask.

In this talk, I will present two highly impactful resources we added to the sales enablement toolbox. We will examine the implementation process and effective utilization of competitive & Win-loss analysis for Product managers:

- Learn how better understanding our losses helps us increase revenue (hint: it's not always the product)

- Learn how to collect valuable information on the competition, and make the information more accessible to internal stakeholders

Do fitness apps track muscle mass gained or BMI pre and post subscription? Does Dualingo know if you've really made it a week in Paris without speaking English?

Most companies' mission statement revolves around value to their customers, users, if they're really ambitious - doing good in the world.

But does that mission translate into measuring product teams and product performance?

As the product managers we need goals and metrics to drive decisions on product functionality - what to build, what NOT to build, how to prioritize - and how to evaluate our work and the impact on our company's mission.

 It's easy to make the KPI tunnel vision mistake. And you can avoid that trap by measuring the farthest reaching metric associated with value to your consumers and customers.

DayTwo develops a digital healthcare solution based on gut microbiome sequencing and health data to personalize nutrition and care for chronic disease.  

 As a company committed to helping people on a way to metabolic disease remission, we tie product performance to ultimately making our users healthier. 

In this lecture I will outline a way to avoid having KPI tunnel vision and instead distill that one clear measure of value and work your way from there.

As PMs we are expected to be data-driven and base decisions on user usage data. In this talk I will suggest a different approach of being data-informed, meaning that user usage data is only 1 source of input out of many to base product decisions on.

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.

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? 

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

As product managers, we rely heavily on gathering data in order to make product and business-related decisions. But even with the best intentions at heart, many times our decision-making is affected by inherent biases and preconceived notions - not by empirical data.

This is a universal pain across organizations. 

In this talk, we will reveal the most prominent cognitive biases and explore mitigation tips to make better data-driven decisions. From Sales to Marketing and from Support to Dev we'll dive into each stakeholder, cover the most painful bias, explore how it affects the product, and how to deal with them.

Product Managers are required to manage multiple stakeholders, across functions yet sometimes apply a "one size" fits all to influencing. We will go through a basic stakeholder mapping framework, generalize about personas in an org and walk through how to apply different type of influencing skills to different types of stakeholders.

The common PM would say the the PM is responsible for the "What" and the UXer is responsible for the How.

Reut think that this attitude is no longer correct. PM and US should collaborate on both: What and How.

She will present more advance model for the relationship.

In order to do so, she will explain the difference between a UX\UI expert and a classical UX expert.

By the end of the talk you will know how to use better the UX in order to achieve a better product and better product market fit.

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.

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.

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.