Many hands and many brains are required to build for, introduce to and keep software products in the market. Software Product Managers are ultimately representing the product and are accountable for sustainable success of their products. Software Product Managers are information brokers, discoverers, prioritizers, communication hubs, subject matter experts and, yes, humans. Everyone in the software industry knows that it is already a challenge to manage all required activities and tasks for one product with one team. Learn how Timo introduced a software product management methodology at SAP that enables his product managers and the whole product teams to overcome the orchestration challenges which are coming at scale within a global enterprise like SAP.

Establishing a software product business in a professional service and consulting organization is always a significant challenge. Business model, KPIs, incentive systems, role definitions, processes, culture – all need to be different if the product business is to succeed. BearingPoint decided to “verticalize” the business in Q4 2017. After giving a first progress report at the SPMS2018 this presentation is the sequel how the journey continued in 2018 making the business even more independent. An exciting report on achievements, challenges and lessons learned.

ISPMA’s Software Product Management Framework is applied as a great tool to explain the different job titles that are frequently used for product management roles. The selection of job titles has correlations to the methodology used in Development, and to the organizational structure of a software organization. In agile environments, the relationship between product manager and product owner can be a challenge that needs clarification. This presentation will cover job titles Product Manager, Product Owner, Solution Manager, Commercial Product Manager, Technical Product Manager, Product Marketing Manager, Strategic Product Manager, e.a.

Startups by definition start very small and most often are barely staffed enough to manage. Do they need an SPM - how do they manage where there is no SPM and what are the implications? What are the challenges of founder playing the role of the SPM?

Since 1995 Lufthansa Systems develops software solutions for airlines worldwide. Back then the first products of the NetLine product line were created. Today NetLine serves more than 90 airlines are using NetLine to manage their aircraft and crew schedules. In the recent years, the speed of digital developments has increased, the airlines have to transform their IT landscape and their business models in order not to be left behind. In this presentation we want to share what we did and how we will continue renewing our product line and support our customers in their digital transformation.

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If you are in the software industry you also know full or multi-day workshops dealing with product planning.

These workshops can be the most boring useless event of the year or they can be a true source of inspiration and key pillar in product planning.

How to design, prepare, run product workshops in a way that will truly boost and professionalize your entire product planning is topic of this session.

Get inspired and learn from hands-on, real-world examples and best practices.

Selling a software as “standard software” or “software product” raises justified customer expectation concerning software quality and future releases, which – if not met – often end up hotly disputed in courts of law. This presentation will present typical court cases concerning software products, their technical root causes and the current guidelines for court appointed experts to assess these types of disputes. The presentation closes with specific advice to software product managers.

In many organization the decisions on what kind of product investments to make are the most important decision product managers are responsible for and often these are complex and very controversial decisions. We aim to provide a set of processes and tools resulting in a business case which makes this decision more rational and scientific and ultimately enables tech organizations to make better decisions.

It is a common illusion that Product Managers in the current reality, can continue working to define products, without thinking about security aspects, and that this can be done at a much later stage in the product lifecycle. How can we turn the Product Manager to be a real security ambassador?

After having worked as software product manager at various startups in the media industry, Simon Zsebök is now VP of Digital Innovation at ZDF Enterprises which is the commercial arm of the largest public broadcaster in Germany. He reports on the differences and similarities, the challenges of bringing agility and a digital mindset into an established organization with a traditional culture, and why it is still fun.

Components of the Microsoft Office suite have been used predominantly for product planning for decades. And this despite the existence of specialized tools. For example, requirements management and agile planning tools have extended their scope to higher level planning levels in the last ten years. Some of them enable the creation and management of roadmaps for products with detailed planning information included.

In recent years, however, a new category of tools has emerged. They are aimed directly at the needs of product managers. In particular, these tools support business planning, user research, road mapping, agile planning and execution.

Product managers need to understand the benefits of these different tools and how to leverage them in their multi-faceted jobs. 

In this session, you will gain insights into various tool offerings. Examples come from Strategyzer, Aha!, UserVoice, Version One, Jama, Jira, Trello and others.

Being in product management in AI/ML for sometime and most recently in Salesforce Einstein, I have seen first hand the lack of skills and awareness about what it takes to be a good product manager in this space. Product managers who are new in this field or aspiring can benefit a lot from this session. They can learn data nuances, how to define the AI problem, bias in AI, explainability of AI products etc which are applicable in the real world products leveraging AI and Machine Learning.

Customers of software and software-intensive products often expect options how they can adjust the software to their specific needs. Vendors usually offer configuration, composition and customization options. In this interactive session we introduce a classification of these options. For each class the technical and business implications and consequences are discussed from a vendor and a customer perspective.

Progress in ICT technologies and the potentials of value creation through software-intensive business simultaneously generate new challenges for non-it companies. Platforms could be a solution to address these challenges and this is why a platform approach receives an increasing attention in many industries, changing the traditional collaboration structures. The complexity to choose the right platform from the variety of the market-available solutions on the other hand, is a complex decision for non-IT companies, which is influenced by the variety of the specific functional characteristics offered by each platform or each hosting system and other characteristics.

UBS has begun the journey to fulfill the need of clients using their preferred app to handle communication and banking on-the-go with their respective bank or client advisor. This whilst in parallel staying compliant with regulatory requirements.

In this session, we use the opportunity to elaborate on ways to improve the user experience by applying AI/bots. I will also speak on both the road starting from the problem statement up to an initial product as well as the challenges that the team has faced along the way.

Product management in many companies is based on the opinions of customers and the product managers themselves. With the rapidly shortening feedback loops, it becomes increasingly feasible to shift from opinion- to data-driven decision making. In this keynote, Jan Bosch will discuss several techniques that have been developed in the context of Software Center (www.software-center.se) and that have been adopted by the partner companies. The concepts will be illustrated with several industrial examples and cases.

OKR (Objective and Key Results) is a goal setting framework that connects agile product management practices with organizations performance metrics. 
It started to be used by great companies such as Google, Oracle, Twitter, LinkedIn and Dropbox and currently OKRs are being applied worldwide from startups to large organizations. 
Defining moonshot is very important for a company to be one of the best companies on social innovation and digital transformation. OKRs are very powerful to bring forth this moonshot thanks to its core concepts: shorter cadence, alignment, transparency, focus and simplicity. 
Therefore, by using OKRs, we can set our direction to amplify motivation and unlock the ultimate human potential and growth the ground-breaking products.

The revenue forecast is a critical part of the P&L-style financial model which is needed for profitability analysis and as a sanity check for the pricing model.
For new products, or when key elements of the product strategy or the market have changed, we cannot build a credible revenue forecast by extrapolating from the past. In these cases, the revenue forecast needs to be built “bottom-up”. 

Diamant Software is a medium-sized standard software producer specialized on accounting and controlling software. With SAFe Diamant Software addresses various challenges in its organization. Among them is the need for a flexible and scalable organization with fast feedback cycles. Another important aspect is the employer empowerment. We have introduced the SAFe process within less than three months and already saw positive effects in the first cycle and learned from there. After 6 months, the process has stabilized and we see significant positive effects. One key success is a much higher transparency on all levels and in all areas, which helps us to identify improvement areas easily.

Scrum@Scale enables the transformation of every division, department, and service in any organization and can efficiently coordinate an unlimited number of Scrum teams through its use of a “scale-free” architecture. Scrum@Scale naturally extends the core Scrum framework and was created by Dr. Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum.

In this talk Peter addresses the major failing points in Scrum transformations on an organizational level.

Miscommunications between product management and software architecture can lead to incorrect implementations and/or reworking. Utrecht University has developed the so called Requirements Engineering for Software Architecture (RE4SA) model. An integrated method that helps to realize product ideas in software production, by relating requirements engineering to software architecture. The requirement engineering aspect focuses on Epic Stories and User Stories, which are to be transformed into Modules and Features in the software architecture respectively. In the light of this approach, the Product Domain Ontology links all artifacts of architecture and requirements through a domain ontology.

Traditionally, hardware and software product companies have been quite different with regard to processes, structures, product design, time-to-market, KPIs, pricing. With software turning into the number 1 value driver even for hardware companies in the era of IoT, a combined approach is needed. In this interactive session, we compare typical traditional models and an IoT approach based on servitization.

According to a recent study, 84% of users want access to analytics within the applications they work with. Product managers and developers therefore need to decide whether to build in their own analytics capabilities or use a third party. 

Tom Cahill & Adrian Randle from Logi Analytics will describe how Dossier, a competence management software company for the healthcare industry, saved time and money by embedding analytics. 

What does it mean to be successful in a world where 90% of the strategies fail? As a senior manager, how do you link strategic initiatives with execution on the team level? How do you know if you are doing the right thing? How do you know how far you've gotten? How do you manage risk in an Agile context?

When software products achieve a certain size in terms of revenue, many organizations struggle with scaling their product teams accordingly. This struggle often prevents them from maintaining or even improving their growth rates.

Adobe has a very strong track record of acquiring promising startups, which go on to develop market-dominating software products. This requires continued strong growth rates and ruthless customer focus.

This session will talk about how product teams can maintain and reinforce their customer-centricity as they scale for growth.

Are you sometimes feeling like an outlier in your organisation - because you are in charge of a software product or a software-intensive product, while the rest of the organisation is hardware-focused?
This workshop kicks off by looking at the differences in mindset and commonly used techniques that create a disconnect between software product managers and hardware-focused colleagues. There are hard economic reasons why software product management differs from management of physical products, for example regarding product life cycle, pricing and business models. 

Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) is the backbone of the portfolio level, which implements its responsibilities through a series of three collaborations: 1) strategy & investment funding, 2) Agile portfolio operations and 3) Lean governance. Of these three primary collaborations, strategy and investment funding is arguably the most important. In this talk, Thorsten Janning, SPCT at Kegon, AG shares his real-world experience and knowledge about the strategy and investment funding collaboration, focusing on the Portfolio Kanban, which defines the flow of portfolio epics, the largest and most important initiatives. He will present his findings and best practices that goes beyond the current guidance in the framework, which will enable participants to improve their strategic planning and budgeting, react faster to changing markets and make value based portfolio decisions without losing control and transparency.

Product management is awesome, but it’s also a relatively new discipline, so it can be quite daunting, full of icons and superheroes. We will dispel the mystery and reveal a few ugly truths about product management.

We start with a data-led piece of analysis into the current state of development methodologies, and our hypothesis that a lot of people are not in Agile any more. We’ll explore this concept of a post-Agile world and its consequences for product management.