Product managers spend tremendous energy/time in product planning: developing product strategies, ranking features, defining releases, and managing backlogs.  But our internal stakeholders rarely agree on with each other – or with us – about priorities or trade-offs.  We often change our priorities to satisfy internal stakeholders rather than external customer markets.  How do we understand stakeholder behavior and get more of the right thinks into our releases?

Product Management role has evolved with the paradigm shift from Waterfall to Agile methodology approach in the software development industry. Two different roles which are requiring specific skills have really emerged with (1) Product Manager delivery - focussing on the relation with IT and (2) Product Manager Commercial - focussing on the relation with Sales and owing the P&L. During this session, Pierre Blum, head of Software Product Management at SWIFT will share his experience on how the split has been done. 

For decades components of the Microsoft Office Suite dominated the tools used for planning and monitoring product development. And they still continue to do so in most cases. For example painting roadmaps with PowerPoint allows many degrees of freedom and therefore is pretty convenient. Well established and more rigourous tools like requirements management and agile planning tools have expanded their scope to higher level planning levels in the last decade. Some of them allow to create and manage roadmaps for products with detailed planning information underneath. In recent years however a new category of tools emerged. They directly target the needs of product managers. Those tools support specifically business planning, user research, roadmapping, agile planning, and execution. Product manager need to understand what kind of benefits are provided by those different tools and how to leverage them in their multi-faceted jobs. The session will provide insights about various tool offerings. Examples are taken from Strategyzer, Aha!, UserVoice, Version One, Jama, JIRA, Trello and others.

Portfolio management is about allocating resources among competing investment proposals, e.g. among all requests for funding initiatives within a business unit. However, when competing in fast-moving, constantly changing markets, as many software products do, portfolio management serves a second purpose: it becomes an important tool for innovation management.

Cyber attacks are becoming commonplace and a weapon that might be used even by your competitors. Cyber attacks do not only target big corporations. Today, more than 60% of the companies suffering from attacks are small and medium enterprises (SMEs). SMEs tend to lack training and do not have the means deployed to fight cybercrime. This situation is problematic because customers and individuals get exposed by compromised digital products, and as a vendor, you risk uncomfortable litigations. In this talk, we introduce four SMEs, Worldsensing, GridPocket, Scytl, and a startup from the University of Patras, their challenges, what they learned, and how they now harden their digital products. By participating in this talk, you will benefit from the SMEs' stories and the consolidated experience of the cybersecurity leaders Atos, Citrix, IBM, and Bitdefender who joined us in making cybersecurity so lightweight that even startups and small companies can embrace and utilize it to their business advantage.

The Product Sound Track™ Session gives you hands-on guidance in how to manage products and drive toward success. It will give you a new perspective on Product Management and how you create a number 1 hit. It will get you geared up for the challenging and changing world with a Product Sound Track™ - creating a journey to believe in.

Due to the development of new technologies and the increasing connectivity of manufacturing, non-it sectors face new challenges. An increasing amount of software-based components also affects the revenue distribution between the product-based and digital revenues. Hence, today´s non-it companies have to face it-related challenges and thus require software product management. In particular, platforms could enable
customers and partners to be involved in value creation more closely. Platforms are no longer indispensable in different fields, e.g. mobile devices, connected cars or enterprise software. This development is also expected for manufacturing companies in Europe.
That is why platforms become more and more important for non-it companies, as the production no longer stops at the company´s borders.

Design Thinking is a method for addressing complex problems and finding innovative solutions. It is a structured iterative method that could be applied in startups as well as in enterprises to gain more understanding of user problems and validate potential solutions. More and more companies integrate Design Thinking into their product development to achieve customer focus and bring desirable, viable and feasible products into the market.

Impact Mapping is a tool for Agile release planning. 
It can help:
- mapping every epic and activity to overall product strategy
- setting the priorities
- adapting roadmap and plans during execution

I will describe how we've implemented Impact Mapping for quarter planning of Yandex Realty product (one of largest classified for realty in Russia), explain benefits and difficulties.

A practitioners’ view of the opportunities and challenges of large and small product
companies: Small and large software product companies differ on multiple factors like
funding/investments, process maturity, vintage of the product suite, depth and width of
competencies, business / numbers’ rigor, customer base etc. However, there surely are many good software product management practices which are worth learning from each other. This session is to explore some of these from a business leader / practitioner’s point of view.

Establishing a software product business in a professional service and consulting organization is always a significant challenge. Business models, KPIs, incentive systems, role definitions, processes, culture – all need to be different if the product business is to succeed. BearingPoint is in the middle of this change process. This is a report on achievements and challenges.

The software product manager needs to manage the product to achieve sustainable profits. Especially in a fast-paced environment such as the software industry, it is necessary to differentiate significantly from competition. The Blue Ocean Strategy is a model to shape market boundaries or even create new markets by changing the product definition and value proposition. It provides a conceptual framework and as well a 7 Step Method how to approach this (see Kim and Mauborgne (2017): Blue Ocean Shift). This presentation provides a brief introduction in Blue Ocean Strategy and the 7 Step Framework to support the software product manager coming up with radically product innovations.

The presentation will provide an overview of the regulations of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) relevant for companies and put a particular focus on new developments for software-as-a-service offerings and new regulations for software (privacy by design and privacy by default).

Building a world class Product Management organization requires objective decision making. Learn how using an end to end toolchain (with a-ha! and Jira) to support scoring based on impact to the company ultimately creates value for our customers.