Miloš Rašković
Principal Product Manager Lead @ Microsoft
Demystifying ‘AI’ Product Management
Let’s talk about product management and AI. AI is a fantastic technology and frequent buzzword. AI powers some of the most fantastic user experiences today, from cars to accessible technologies, but it is sometimes also (wrongly) seen as the solution to any user problem deemed as ‘difficult’ one. What is AI really, when does a product need AI, and what is the role of product manager in the AI product development journey are the key topics that will be discussed. The goal is to demystify the AI product management by using specific examples and going through AI product development stages and the role of a product manager in them, including: user/scenario/data identification, data collection and labeling, building inclusive and responsible AI tech, designing user experiences tolerant to AI mistakes where user always feels in control.
Bio
Milos has been a Product Manager for Microsoft Office products for over a decade, working on strategies, user experiences, and technologies powering products like Word, PowerPoint, Sway, Office Mobile App (and also some other that didn’t make it :-)). Addressing user unmet needs and problems with document understanding and AI on a global scale has been one of the major focuses for Milos and team. Today, Milos is working on delivering the next generation of Microsoft Office productivity through AI-powered user experiences like Microsoft Editor and Microsoft Designer, and through platforms supporting both 1st party and 3rd party developers. Customer-first, perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good, learning-by-doing, and servant-leadership are some of his core mantras.
Yeah, Agile is cool, but have you ever tried true agility?
Good agile leaders know how to implement the chosen methodology. Great leaders know how to inspire mindset and develop skills in their teams so agile comes naturally. We’ll explore which soft skills you, as a leader of an agile team, should have and transfer to teammates to enhance team coherence, improve communication and increase productivity and efficiency. We’ll also discuss how to educate managers vertically and horizontally and create an environment where speed and adaptability are core principles lived every day across the organization. If you are an evangelist of agile in your organization, a team lead feeling a methodology you use feels a little bit “stiff” or you feel you do everything by the book, but it still feels “fake” and “forced” – this talk is for you.
Bio
Jack-of-all-trades and master of some. Relentless problem-solver. Passionate about building products that bring value and make people smile. In his 15+ years career, he was responsible for several products – building, selling, and supporting them in all the stages. Today, he’s using that experience to consult startups, SMBs, and corporations about which (hard) questions they should be asking themselves to get to the next level. And then, he helps them figure out answers.
Bojan Popić
Innovation and Business Consultant @ ICT Hub and self employeed
Ajla Omeragić
Service Delivery Manager @ Symphony
Superpower: Communication
If your day-to-day job includes talking with any type of stakeholders, you know the struggle behind getting their attention for products, services, or even yourself. Effective communication is the key, but is there a universal approach, a hack, a formula we can follow?
In this talk, we’ll cover why a story is such an important stakeholder engagement strategy and how to successfully guide our heroes through their challenges.
Bio
Ajla currently works as a Service Delivery Manager in Symphony, with years of experience in roles focused on clients’ success and growth. Holding positions that require constant listening, questioning, researching, and creating strategies ultimately led her to the world of product management. Ajla now leads agile teams focused on delivering high-quality products across different industries.
MVPs & Continuous Discovery
Let’s talk about the needs of the end-users, how the discovery phase should look like and what the key artifacts should be. Once the discovery is done, there’s a need to prioritize and make decisions, sometimes on the fly. So, how does all this translate into your MVP and into a Minimal Loveable Product – how to ensure that users get the best possible experience? We need to look beyond discovery, into delivery phase. If we want to keep doing the discovery on the same level while we’re deliverying, there has to be two tracks: one that works only Proofs-of-concept and focuses on research and improvements, and the other that develops core services.
Bio
I am a Product Manager specializing in MVP and Continuous Discovery with many years of experience in various roles from software engineering to product ownership. I am the founder of the initiative LazyBrain and one of the ambassadors of Deeplearning.ai and very active in the AI community, which inspired me to focus on metrics and a data-driven approach when it comes to product development.
Velimir Bulatović
Product Manager @ HTEC Group
Marko Pavlović
Head of Project Management Office @ HTEC Group
Staying on the roadmap in the HTEC hyper growth
Creating a roadmap in an organization such as HTEC that is growing at an incredible pace can be a challenging task. However, once done, it is more challenging to stay on the projected trajectory, i.e., readjust it if needed.
Marko will share valuable insight on how HTEC’s PM Office created its PM roadmap for 2021/2022, how we needed to adjust it mid-year, the frequency of tracking baseline vs actual roadmap, and what is the road ahead.
Bio
Marko Pavlović is a Project Manager with over 10 years of international project management experience (out of which the last 5 have been in the domestic IT industry).
He is a holder of CSM, PMI ACP, and SPS – Nexus certificates. Marko started as a project intern and gradually grew into the role of Project Manager. He is currently leading HTEC’s Project Management Office, counting nearly 90 Project Managers and Scrum Masters.His main points of action include supporting HTEC in the process of rapid scaling and growth on the one hand, and, on the other, supporting engineering teams to ensure exceptional delivery.
Create Strong Teams to Develop Great Products
Create Strong Teams to Develop Great Products focuses on the people aspect of product development. It explains why team communication, connection and understanding is important to develop great products. In addition, it shares practical tools and techniques that product managers can apply to improve team dynamics and get better results overall.
Bio
Snezana has been managing teams and projects for about 10 years. She spent most of her career in the mobile gaming industry before founding Snowation and focusing on management consulting, training and business coaching. Snezana loves personal and professional growth and enjoys sharing her knowledge with others.
Snežana Đurić
Founder @ Snowation
Nikola Vojtek
IT Project Manager @ Daon
Case study of novel biometrics product development
Importance of collaboration, coordination and organization of the work of multiple teams (research, devops, dev, qc, product) so that the organization could respond to a change in a timely manner. Case study will be related to the changes that we needed to introduce in our software for biometric recognition, because of the Corona and some other external factors.
Bio
A dedicated, resourceful and highly motivated IT Project Manager and Scrum Master, with a demonstrated history of working in the IT field in multiple industries. Skilled in project management, scrum framework, team coordination, web service architecture mapping, business requirements identification, business process development and product analysis. Starting as a business analyst, through project support and coordinator, and moving to the project manager role, a complete project life cycle is captured, from the customer requirements identification to the product deliverance. By ensuring that teams are following scrum, facilitating scrum events, the Scrum Master role is performed. Experienced in working with matrix teams in an international environment. PhD in the field of System Theory and Control, PMI-ACP, Certified Scrum Product Owner, ICAgile Certified Professional – Leading with Agility, Professional Scrum Master – PSM I
Applying Rocket Science to build software products
There is a huge body of knowledge about how to build huge and incredibly complicated systems like aircraft carriers, space rockets or nuclear power plants. And there we are – software product managers, using simple approaches to build a big range of different IT products – from photo filters apps to factory-management systems. Is there any way we could use this spaceship building methods to make our endeavours less difficult and more predictable?
Bio
Product manager with 8 years experience. Used to work mostly with IT and high-tech startups for B2B in Russia, have some experience with sales and marketing (3 yrs as head of growth).
Artem Ushanov
Senior Product Manager @ SIT Alemira
Igor Gašović
Division Head of Product @ HTEC Group
Engineering Services and Product Management – Career Options
Our IT market is predominantly made up of various subcontracting flavors. In such ecosystem, establishing yourself as a PM is not easy. Goal of the talk is to show PMs what are the options outside of product companies, and how to grow their career.
Bio
Igor is a technology enthusiast and a lifelong learner. Ten years of engineering and product experience taught him to use a more pragmatic, dogma-free, approach to product development. Currently, he is a Division Head of Product at HTEC Group, responsible for the product aspect of people growth, staffing, and sales, as well as nurturing the large internal product community.
How to validate idea before spending time and money?
How to validate the feasibility and viability of product ideas before spending time and money making them?
When you are in an unknown environment facing many assumptions, spending time and money making a product or solving a problem before validating your assumptions sounds immature. That’s where hypothesis validation comes into place. To put it simply, a hypothesis is an assumption that can be proven wrong. Utilize the hypothesis validation approach to validate your assumptions and continuously learn before you move to the development.
Bio
An experienced Product Manager/Owner with a Business Analysis background. A-CSPO certificate, working on over 20 projects and products in various industries such as Enterprise, InsurTech, HealthTech, and Entertainment. Worked on creating stand-alone applications, ERP, B2B, B2C products, and low-code no-code platform. Used Waterfall, Scrum, Kanban, Lean Startup, and many more with one goal in mind to create products that customers will love and that will be aligned with business objectives. Passionate about learning new things and solving problems.
Nikolina Belić
Product Manager/Owner @ VegaIT
Predrag Rajković
Head of Product Management and Operations @ United Cloud
Implementing Opportunity Solution Tree, Challenges and Benefits
Have you already heard of Continuous Discovery and Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) by Teresa Torres? This might be the thing that will help you create and improve your products with features customers actually need. In addition, this framework will help you systematize your discovery activities, focus all ideas you have for product improvement, and lead you toward product goal achievement. At this session, you will hear about the good sides, and also about the challenges of using OST. The speakers will bring up their views based on the experience in implementing the framework in their every-day work. No previous knowledge, apart from general product management vocabulary, is required.
Bio
Experienced People and Product Manager, expert in Product Development. Agile practitioner and Agile Coach. Predrag is certified facilitator of the Design Sprint framework, through which he helps teams discover problem that needs to be solved for users, propose solution, create prototype, and validate the solution with end-users, in order to put the best products in front of their customers. Predrag is currently implementing latest product development techniques in United Cloud, helping the company shape products through rational, data based and consumer validated approach. He is experienced and engaging storyteller keeping audience active even in after-lunch sessions. Hands-on experience gives him ability to speak of the challenges lively with numerous real-life examples.
Ivan Pavlović
Director of Product Development @ United Cloud
Bio
Ivan as an experienced business leader inspired by crafting technology-based products which solve customer pains and at the same time achieve business goals for the company. With background in math and with plenty of years as a developer during the first part of his career, Ivan still finds immense pleasure in coding as part of working on his hobby projects. As the saying goes – once a developer, always a developer. After being a developer, Ivan has worked in different positions to learn the ins and outs of how a company works – from doing business development work, strategizing with company founders, to operations to improve processes inside a company. However, the biggest excitement for Ivan comes from challenges in product discovery, working with (and usually leading) a team of talented people eager to solve customer problems and build products which will make them proud in the end. Because of that, he is always looking forward to trying different methods and approaches in uncovering the problem worth solving for people. One of ways to do that is by using the continuous discovery approach, for which he would like to share his experience and findings.
How PO can manage biases?
While making decisions PO employs mental models. Those are thought processes of how something works in the real world. The world is a big place, a very complex one, and all mental models use reduction and simplification to be applicable. While creating shortcuts, we unconsciously leave room for the emergence of systematic errors in thinking, which are called biases.
Bio
Associated Certified Coach (ACC-ICF) helps people, teams, and organizations achieve their goals. Skilled in Team Growing, Business Value Add, Lean Startup, Scrum, Kanban, Product Ownership, Scaling, and Project Management with a demonstrated 15 years of work experience in an international environment including Fintech, Mobility, Blockchain, Airline, and Travel industry.
Bojan Smuđa
Agile Coach @ Kinto
Matija Stanić
Product Owner @ Raiffeisen bank Serbia
Development for uncharted markets
Where to start when you are developing products that don’t exist on the market. How to choose the right MVP to maximise the number of insights, and how everything in the product discovery phase should influence the roadmap.
If you are launching a new product, you probably know that there is the need for it. But can you be certain? And can you be certain that it will be profitable? The bigger the idea, the bigger are the costs of the solution, meaning there is the greater need to be certain your product is what clients need. The only real proof is to launch and see how clients react. The goal is to learn about the market early and have the right product as soon as possible. In this session, an example of the launch will be shown, with focus on all difficult choices you have to make, how to get as many insights as possible and how those insights should influence the future development of the product.
Bio
Matija is the Product Owner in the team that is responsible for all digital SME lending products and business bank accounts in Serbia. After being selected as one of the first Product Owners in Serbian banking, and part of the agile transformation in one of the biggest banks in Serbia, he started working on digital lending products for SME clients. While in charge of the vision and strategic roadmap for digital lending, he released the completely online loan and bank account opening processes for SMEs for the first time in Serbian market.
Outcompete your product competitors with Wardley Maps
Can you outcompete Amazon? Product development in a world brimming with competition and constant change is becoming exponentially demanding. How do you determine the right feature to develop? Which direction to invest in? How do you know if your strategy is right? What if your competitor just copies it? How do we understand where we’re going and where we need to go? Does strategy even exist or is it just creative story telling?
Bio
Creative engineer at heart. Currently a serverless engineer at Stedi. Coauthor of two books – “Realtime GraphQL Applications with AppSync” and also of “Serverless Applications with Node.js” published by Manning. Co-organizer of JS Belgrade Meetup, Wardley Maps Meetup Belgrade and Serverless Belgrade. AWS Serverless Hero.
Aleksandar Simović
Serverless Engineer @ Stedi
Milica Lubinić
Enterprise Agile Coach @ Bryter Gmbh
Brave Leadership in Complex World
Diving into changes that this complex world has brought us and keep bringing us, I want us to reflect on how should the Leadership in this world look like, so that we can call it Brave. What does that bring us within our organisations, teams and individuals and how does it affect our development in a human centric way.
Bio
Enthusiastic Agile Coach, with high passion for significant organizational changes. Creation of safe places, trust and engagement while setting a stage for teal-like organisation and human-centered approaches is my biggest focus. While helping everyone understand complex adaptive systems and their nature, I’m striving to always learn more on how to handle them. After so many years in PM, Sales and (digital) Marketing, I found the final destination in Agile, Cynefin and Emergent, People oriented Leadership.
Matthias Kirchner
Director of Product Management @ ProGlove GmbH
From Hardware Start-Up to Software Scale-Up
In this session, we’ll take a look at ProGlove from Day 0, the chaos in the beginning and how we used prototyping and design-thinking to validate our Product-Market-Fit.
We dive deep into our product wins and product fails to understand how we became a leader in highly integrated hardware and software products, integration layers and process analytics solutions for enterprise clients like Porsche, BMW, DHL or Lufthansa.
Join this session if you want to get an unpolished view at building products from scratch to how we focus now on becoming a role model in product & engineering for the next growth phase.
Bio
Matthias Kirchner is the Director of Product Management at ProGlove.
With a background in industrial engineering and design-thinking, he helped scaling the organisation from 15 to 300 people within 5 years, building a product-lead, global leader of wearable IoT devices.
Today, Matthias leads a team of product professionals across Germany, Serbia, and USA, building the next generation devices, integration products, and business analytics solutions to help solve real-world problems for ProGloves’ enterprise clients.
Milan Lisica
Project/Product Manager @ Zesium Mobile
Boost efficiency and solve team problems through Jira automatization
Bring a smile to your teammates, by taking boring repetitive routine Jira tasks from their back. By introducing Jira automatization you can provide a very efficient set of processes that would otherwise be time-consuming. They allow people to spend more time on the task at hand and ease the complication of certain aspects of the process. Automation speeds up your work and frees up resources, and reduces the chances of any mismanagement in the project lifecycle. Jira Automation is a “no-code” feature meaning anyone can create automation rules in Jira irrespective of their technical or coding knowledge. You can automate almost all, apart from coding itself. During the lecture, you will be able to see automation examples and be inspired to bring a change to your project. This is ideal for product and project managers, as once you create every Jira automation feature, in a short period you will get feedback from the team. This is Product management at its core.
Bio
Milan works as a Project Manager on product development within lottery industry. Large part of his time is spent on defining the product together with clients and his team. In the last 5 years he has worked on different project in IT and visual effects.
Become a domain expert as a PM in the new industry
A product manager’s career will usually span several industries, and they will need to traverse multiple domains. This means serving different users, as well as navigating different contexts such as markets, regulations, and technologies. As software products exist in virtually every sector, this means that at a time you may be building a fitness app – but soon after an R&D platform for pharma, or a team collaboration tool. In the case of freelance/consultancy work, this domain switching can happen within weeks. Switching industries can be a challenge, but it is beneficial for product professionals as they seek to expand their experience, as well as for organizations: a professional who worked in multiple domains can apply their experiences in a new context, thus bringing innovative perspectives and improvements from one domain into another. Being a fast and curious learner becomes one of the most important assets you can have as a product professional. And the good news is that learning is a skill like any other: you can learn to learn. It will help you onboard faster, hit the ground running and deliver value from the very start.
Bio
Highly adept product specialist with 6+ years of proven experience serving diverse stakeholders and finding creative solutions to achieve product and company goals. Helped build, re-shape and scale numerous digital products, solving different challenges. As a freelance product specialist, I worked spearheading distributed teams in B2B and B2C – from innovative startups spun from MIT, to multinational corporations. Before focusing on product, he served as the COO of a market research startup and focused on developing a B2B2C platform empowering online market research through targeted surveys in 15+ countries. Currently working for Clarivate as Product Owner, and as freelance Product Manager on Toptal.
Miloš Belčević
Product Owner & Product Manager @ Clarivate & Toptal
Monika Jović
Product Marketing Manager @ Schneider Electric DMS NS
Nebojša Kurjakov
Product Marketing Specialist @ Schneider Electric DMS NS
We have a lift off
We are living in a world where everything is digitized and almost every action, such as paying a telephone or electrical bill, has some software behind it. In the world of different digitized systems, one might ask how to be different? What steps one company should implement to become loved by the market?
In this session, you will hear more about launching B2B enterprise products from an idea to realisation, and the role of the product marketing team in it.
Bio
Monika Jović started the career in Schneider Electrci exactly 10 years ago as a part of the team in chare of developing software for managing distributed energy sources. After gaining experience and domain knowledge as a software engineer, she decidet to change her career path and join the project delivery sector in Schneider Electric. New position brought new challenges, mainly regarding the cooperation with existing and potential clients, software solution design, and solving client’s everyday problems. In parallel, Monika also took the role of assistant professor at the Faculty of Technical sciences in Novi Sad, with the desire to help the future engineers in gaining real-worl knowledge in power systems. Her next step in the career was becoming a member of Product Marketing team where she now has a chance to closly collaborate with clients, perform various researches and contributes to positioning Schneider Electric’s products in the best way possible.
Bio
Nebojša Kurjakov is Product Marketing manager in Schneider Electric covering the portfolio for the Grid Operations line of business. It all started as an internship in Schneider Electric which had grown into full-time deployment as a software engineer. After 6 years of software engineering, came another 5 years in the role of a Product Owner, which was a perfect entry point for his current position. Althoug from time to time he still does some coding on his own time, since last year he is focused on product marketing activities within Schneider Electric, making sure that their products and services are positioned in a best possible way and have a clear marketing strategy behind them.
What OKR methodology has to offer to your Product Team
One of Product Managers responsibilities is to align product development teams, customers, stakeholders and companies objectives. Now, imagine a Roadmap with all those information, all those different objectives, written in a different formats, in a different (technical or business) language… And it is Product Managers responsibility to make that kind of Roadmap transparent, aligned, prioritized and understandable to all.
In recent years PMs started using Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) goal setting framework in order to improve their processes. OKRs have been well known for decades. John Doerr’s book on “Measuring What Matters” became a hit immediately after it was published. However, while OKRs as a concept seems logical and pretty much straightforward, many companies struggle with implementing this concept in an aligned and inspirational way.
During this talk, I will point out several possible places where Product Management can benefit from using an OKR framework, in a reasonably practical way, in order to improve transparency and alignment with all involved parties.
Bio
Bojan Milutinović is an Agility Coach with 15 years of experience in IT industry and 5 years experience as a trainer.
Bojan is a SAFe Program Consultant, Kanban Management Professional, one of handfull Certified Scrum Professionals in Serbia. He’s a holder of Management 3.0, LeSS and other Agile Project Management certificates. Coaching is his passion, along with gamification, OKRs and Agile metrics. Bojan has a vast applied knowledge in Lean and Agile company wide transformations.
There have been over 150 people prepared for different SAFe certifications by Bojan and over 70 gamified workshops held covering a wide range of team related and product development topics.
Bojan Milutinović
Agile Coach @ TomTom
Agneš Asodi
Senior Product Owner @ Hooloovoo
Understanding emotional intelligence in product management
Understanding emotional intelligence in product management is a topic that has been a focus for Agnes for several years now. It’s become apparent that a focused project and product management cannot exist without consciously using tools and methods that are far outside the traditional understanding of intelligence. Emotional intelligence has become the most important prerequisites for any kind of success in this modern, team-centered business world. Being able to recognize the difference between the traditional and modern approaches to the topic of intelligence in a company will help you quickly navigate complex organizational structures and be a better leader in your team.
Bio
Agnes is a professional with a highly diverse background. Agnes started out as a German language and literature teacher but has changed careers two times – the first 8 years of management was in the non-governmental sector, and the latest career is project and product management in IT. During these changes, Agnes has been searching for commonalities in different positions and learning about the transferability of professional competencies to different domains using emotional intelligence as a starting point for building yourself up from junior to senior level. Agnes was the first Product owner to arrive at Hooloovoo, where she has been working since 2018.