If you’ve been to a Product Camp before, you know we run an ‘unconference’. This means the majority of the talks are voted on by the attendees during the day. What talks will you be voting on? Below is a listing of who’s pre-submitted BUT anyone can get up & pitch on the day.
Have a read of Speaker Info and then submit what you’d like to pitch!
2026 Potential Talks
Operationalising Strategy at the ABC (without SAFe!) – Brendan Marsh
Big bloated ‘Agile’ frameworks are out, but how do we coordinate 10s or 100s of teams towards a central portfolio level product strategy? Using the ABC as a case study, I’ll demonstrate a simple model for aligning teams to strategy without the need of big frameworks like SAFe. – Brendan is a Product & Org Advisor and Director at Organa, where he helps organisations strengthen product strategy, org design and execution at scale. Past clients include Lyka, ABC, Queensland Health, IBM and Atlassian to name a few.
What the f**k do customers actually want? – Ash Pegram
I’ve been surveying and interviewing customers for years on their frustrations, desires and needs when it comes to digital products. This talk will give you a framework to ask your customers what they want in a way that actually gives you a feasible roadmap of product features to work with. – Ash is a digital and product leader who has worked with Australia’s largest brands on how to best plan for customer experience and product roadmaps.
The responsibility of Product Manager’s to our industry – Craig Brown
If claude & friends shift the bottleneck to product managers… And you don’t want to be responsible for mass layoffs you’d better find a way to keep the engineers busy. Fortunately that’s all part of the industry disruption Playbook. The frontier for competition changes. And so how we operate needs to elevate to this next level.
This isn’t a ‘how to accelerate’ or ‘how to be more efficient’ talk. It’s a framework for how to be more competitive, to absolutely win in your segment, and to be faster better, more adaptive etc.And at the same time keep the engineers as busy as hell and help Australia and the world navigate automation and mitigate layoffs.
Leverage Your Worst Nightmare To Make Your Dreams Come True – Max Kalis
An account of how a subversive technique helped a traditional old business to change. And how it’ll help you too.
Product Marketing cant be an afterthought – Sindhu Vijaya Prasanna
Engineering builds the rocket. Product builds the flight plan. Product Marketing makes sure people actually want to go on the journey. So as a Product Manager how do you contribute to Product Marketing?
Why I haven’t quit product mgmt. Yet. – Liz Blink
This is not an AI talk. and yet, maybe it is. Having found myself out of a job thanks to AI, apparently, I’ve been soul-searching the reasons why I’d want to continue to put myself back in the ring. And it’s not the $$$.
There will be some anecdotes about what looking for a PM role in the market right now is like, and why each time I have a conversation about being a PM, I consider rage quitting. Thus, I keep returning to my mantra of why I haven’t quit. yet. And I’ll spend more time on the the joys of the job during this talk and why the mutual search for the right place to work needs to tell me I’m going to get those things. Some side heckles might appear as it relates to how the job role + title + description and the like are a clusterf**k. (aka confusing).
I Solved “What Should I Eat?” Forever — By Doing User Research on Myself – Pratishtha Nahata (Pari)
In the AI age, the scarce skill isn’t building — it’s knowing what you actually want. PMs already have the tools to uncover this: user research. I applied my UXR tools along with some curious and empathy to my own life ans solved ‘what should I eat?’ for good. Not with willpower or an app, but by gathering the data my own life was already giving me and a one-time use of AI. In this talk I’ll walk you through how and distill the underlying steps so you can apply these skills to any area in life.
The Hitchhikers Guide to Redundancy – Alex Clarke
What do you do when your career is unexpectedly demolished to make way for a corporate bypass? Too many professionals treat redundancy like the end of the universe, spiralling into the bureaucratic nebula of unemployment without a map. This session chronicles a six-month odyssey through the unknown, transforming a vulnerable period of professional upheaval into a practical, comedic survival guide.
The talk: How not to panic: How to steady your ship when the corporate ground disappears beneath you. What to pack: Cultivating the core resilience and mindsets needed to navigate sudden career transitions. Deploying your networking Babel Fish: Translating your experience into a language the market actually understands. Navigating the bureaucratic nebula: Managing the identity shift, the job search logistics, and the administrative void without losing your sanity. Embarking on your next chapter: Turning an unexpected full stop into a launching pad for a career that actually fits your trajectory. As long as you’re packing resilience to brace the knocks (and your sense of humour), you’ll never truly be lost in space. A vulnerable, funny, and no-BS roadmap to surviving the void and finding your way back to solid ground.
Why Spec-Driven Development fails and how to get it right – Josh Centner
Spec-driven development is the right approach for any team doing complex work. When it disappoints, the practice isn’t the problem. The process around it is. Teams reach for SDD without the upstream thinking that makes a specification good, then blame the spec when misalignment and rework show up anyway.
Over the last six months, across eight different teams, I’ve worked through what it actually takes to make SDD deliver on its promise. The approach starts well before the spec, at solution concept, and pairs effective process with SDD practice to produce strong specifications in far less time, with a measurable reduction in misalignment, rework, and time to value.
This session covers what that looks like in practice: where the work actually begins, what separates a specification that holds from a document that drifts, and what the process around the spec needs to look like for the practice to pay off rather than add ceremony. We’ll also look at where this leads, and the steps teams and organisations can take to level up from here once the fundamentals are working.
The most expensive sentence in software delivery – Rowan Gobey
Think about the phrase your team says most when something gets hard. ‘Let’s decide that later.’ ‘Let’s take it offline.’ I reckon those few words cost you more than any bug ever has. Come along – no slides, just your team’s worst habits and your worst backlog – and I’ll show you the one sentence that’s actually slowing your delivery, and a fifteen-minute test to catch it. I’m Rowan, I wrote the book on this. It’s called Decision Debt-The Real Bottleneck in Software Delivery
What Nobody Tells You About Becoming Head of Product – Aakanksha Chhikara
Six months ago I stepped into a Head of Product role for the first time, and quickly learned the real job and the role on paper aren’t quite the same thing, in ways both harder and more rewarding than I expected. I’m at a company investing seriously in product as a discipline, modernising decades of legacy software and building the practice, process, and team capability to match genuinely ambitious goals.
This session is the version nobody tells you about: the shift from influencing without authority to actually having it, and learning what to do with that, navigating stakeholder politics no induction prepares you for, and the moments that actually test you as a leader versus the ones that just feel hard. If you’re stepping into leadership soon, just have, or want the honest version before you say yes, what would you want to know?
Win the Product Year-From Possibility to Personal Best in Product Leadership – Penelope Barr
Product leaders are expected to create clarity in uncertainty, inspire teams, deliver customer value and make decisions with imperfect information. But winning in product isn’t about doing more, it’s about intentionally designing the year ahead. This talk explores how product leaders can turn possibilities into progress through better planning, purposeful choices and practical rhythms that help teams achieve their personal and product best.
Our teams have the best AI tools but nothing changed – Josh Centner
Most organisations now have AI tooling across their product and engineering teams. Most of them are moving just a little faster then they were two years ago. The tools aren’t the problem. The operating model underneath them is.
Build is no longer the bottleneck. The new constraint is coordination: how teams align on what to build, how functions like legal, security, and design stay genuinely involved without becoming the gate everything stalls behind, and how leaders shift from approving decisions to setting the conditions that let good decisions happen without them.
This session draws on a live transformation across a large technology organisation, redesigning not just how teams build, but the entire system from idea to customer impact. We’ll cover the three things that actually have to change for AI tooling to translate into speed:
– how work gets defined before it’s built
– how specialist functions engage without creating queues
– and how the PM role changes when coordination overhead drops and intent has to survive further and faster than ever before.
This isn’t a talk about tools. It’s about what your organisation needs to look like for the tools to matter.
Leadership that lasts – what should a leader leave behind? – Amir Ansari
Attributes and conversations about leadership often centre on scale and efficiency: growing headcount, enabling company growth, introducing streamlined practices and systems, refining operating models, and driving transformation. Across 25+ years of leading design in startups, agencies, enterprises, and government, I’ve done all of that. I’ve taken on those roles believing I could create meaningful, lasting impact – leaving each organisation stronger than when I joined. But in environments shaped by restructures, mergers and acquisitions, pivots, and strategy resets, many of those visible markers of leadership prove to be fragile and short-lived.
Over time, I’ve come to realise that only one aspect of leadership truly endures beyond tenure. In this talk, I’ll reflect on both the successes and missteps from my journey as a design leader and share what I believe is the one ingredient that outlasts growth strategies, frameworks, and org charts – and what leaders should focus on if they want their impact to genuinely travel beyond them.
Landing a PM Role: The Unexpected Crash Course – Silvia Cosentino
New Country? No Job? No Network? No worries, I’ve got you! This year I arrived in Melbourne with a suitcase, zero network, a healthy dose of impostor syndrome and one goal: land a Product Manager role.Stressful? Hell, yeah. But it also became an unexpected crash course in networking, job hunting, and putting myself out there.
In this talk, I’ll share the unconventional strategies that helped me land a Product role in just two months, the mistakes I’d avoid if I had to do it again, and the lessons I wish I’d known from day one. Whether you’ve just moved to Australia, you’re looking to break into Product, changing industries, or simply building your network from scratch, you’ll leave with practical ideas you can apply immediately.
From Naive Bayes to Silicon Gaze; congrats! Your new AI feature just caused the end of days – Nigel Pereira
Is that new AI feature you’ve just shipped carrying bias into user-facing outcomes? This session is an open discussion about using the mechanics of LLM ‘thinking’ to detect and surface bias, and some starting frameworks to implement trust and control in AI products so that you (and your stakeholders) can be sure your AI implementation is as ethical as it can be.
Your AI Transformation is going to fail: Lessons from the Agile transformation era – Josh Centner
Fifteen years ago I was a junior consultant on Agile rollouts across some of the largest organisations in Australia. I watched the same failure play out everywhere. Two coaches hired, a launch ceremony run, posters on the walls, a new way of working declared. Then nothing changed. Worse than nothing: Agile theatre. The rigour of the old way thrown out, money spent clawing back to where we started, and people walking away saying Agile doesn’t work. I could see it happening. I was too junior to be heard. I’m watching it happen again.
The pattern is identical and the cause is the same. It was never a tools problem. It was never a strategy problem. It was a people and process problem. Organisations bought the methodology, skipped the investment in their people, replaced genuine process change work with a launch ceremony, and called it done. The result was the appearance of the new way of working with none of the substance. We are doing exactly the same thing with AI.
This session maps the failure patterns from the Agile era, shows exactly where they are already appearing in AI transformation, and gives you concrete things to do inside your organisation right now to invest properly, coach effectively, and change the process underneath, not just the tools on top.
I interviewed 500 fake users before lunch. They all lied about the same thing – Harry Liu
You can now generate a synthetic user panel before your coffee goes cold, and every discovery budget is being pitched one. Before becoming a Proptech PM, I spent a year and half as a data scientist building exactly these panels for market research, and validating them against real people who answered the same questions. The fake users weren’t useless, but they failed in ways that were consistent, predictable, and exactly where product decisions get expensive. This session covers what synthetic respondents can and can’t tell you, explained for a business audience, plus a practical blueprint for using them safely in product discovery. Just some field notes from someone who built the thing.