2026 ProductCamp Agenda

The Presentations are Set

for ProductCamp 2026 Twin Cities

Product Camp presents a full day of presentations and workshops.  The below list gives the course of events for the day.

8:00 Opening Session

Kickoff, Welcome, & Sponsors Introduction

Keynote Address:  Scott Olson, Innovator of Rollerblades, the Rowbike, and SkyRide

9:15 Break-out Sessions

From Idea to Insight in a Day: Synthetic Audiences for Fast-Moving Product Teams - Cody Roemhildt, Caitlin Shea, Sam Caffentzis - AI-powered "synthetic users" promise instant customer feedback without the wait for recruiting and scheduling real interviews. They're powerful for early ideation and rapid hypothesis testing, and they work best as a complement to, not a replacement for, real human research on high-stakes decisions. This session unpacks what synthetic users actually are and how the underlying models generate their "responses," then gives product managers and product-adjacent roles (design, research, product marketing, product ops) a practical framework for matching research method to the decision in front of them.

Impossible to Overlook: How to Stand Out in an AI-Driven World - Kurt Schmidt - Is your job still here in five years? I think it is, though being sure of that is harder.  AI made output cheap. The work that used to prove you were good now takes seconds, so what counts is your judgment, and nobody sees your judgment unless you show it.  I spent years deciding who got promoted and who got the biggest accounts. Somebody is always deciding whether to bet on you. This is what moved those calls.

So you want to be a product consultant, lessons learned from going out on my own - Kevin Palmstein - After twenty years of managing products and building product teams, I took the leap to be a 100% independent, fractional product consultant. Building a client portfolio and figuring out how to monetize your value are the first challenges you will face, but there is so much more. In this session, I'll give you an eyes wide open insights into what it takes.

Manufacturing Time: How to Design Your Product’s Launch Window (Not Just Find One) - Jason Voiovich - In the high-stakes world of innovation, we obsess over the 'who' (the customer), the ‘what’ (product), and the ‘how’ (execution). Yet, billions of dollars are incinerated annually because we ignore the ‘when.’ The reality is that bad timing is the single biggest killer of new ideas. More than bad strategy. More than mismatched talent. More than inadequate funding. In this session, you'll learn how to start designing time, not just watching the clock.

10:15 Break-out Sessions

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of AI in Product - Allison Herbert, Matt Pacyga, Dave Mathias - Almost every AI session on a product agenda in the last two years has been a demo, a use case, or a reassurance. Very few have been someone saying: I read that wrong. Three of us build with these tools at different scales. We are each bringing a real problem we tried to solve with AI. What we were actually trying to do, what we did, what worked, and what we got wrong. Some of them are still open. That is the honest state of it, and it is the part that usually gets cleaned up before anyone talks about it. 

Neither Cheerleader Nor Holdout: The Third Way on AI - Kasey Ross - Faced with AI, most of us fake enthusiasm or dig in and fight it. Both quietly cost you credibility. This session makes the case for a third move — engaged, specific, on your own terms — and gives you the tools to pull it off. No tech background required.

Six ways good teams fund bad products - Rolf Biernath- Bad products rarely get funded by accident. They get funded by six recognizable patterns, and most of us have been in the room for at least three of them. This session names all six, shows what each one looks like from the inside, and gives you language to stop one without becoming the person who says no to everything.

Prototypes as Invitations: Co-Creating Better Products With Customers - Carlye Lauff - Stop asking customers, “What do you think?” and start using prototypes to invite meaningful participation. In this hands-on session, participants will explore how what a prototype shows, and intentionally leaves open, shapes the feedback, ideas, and decisions that follow. Through practical examples and a guided activity, participants will redesign a prototype interaction to help customers question, reshape, and build on an emerging idea. They will leave with a practical framework for turning prototypes from show-and-tell artifacts into invitations to co-create and learn.

11:15 Spotlight Session

Adapting Human-Centered Product Design for Today's Realities  - Kat Morgan -Learn about a new framework for responsive, adaptable, rapid user research that will help you rapidly uncover user needs and validate your product ideas and designs.

12:00 Lunch

1:00 Innovation Panel Discussion 

2:00 Break-out Sessions

Real Talk: AI in a Large Enterprise - Lisa Ofstedal, Ken Nelson, Brenda Lamkin - AI is everywhere, but what does it actually look like to use it inside a large, complex enterprise? Join three product managers for a discussion about the opportunities, challenges, and lessons learned from applying AI across a landscape of legacy systems, modern platforms, massive datasets, governance requirements, and cross-functional teams. Through real examples and audience discussion, we'll explore what has worked, what hasn't, and what we're still figuring out as AI continues to reshape how product teams work.

You Were Wrong. Now What?- Dave Mathias - Every product talk tells you it is okay to fail, and then goes quiet on the part that actually matters: what you do the morning after a bad call. This session skips the permission slip and goes straight to the recovery playbook. We start by separating two things product teams constantly confuse, a bad decision and a bad outcome, because you can decide well and still lose, and you can luck into a win off a terrible call. Then we do it live. Four famous decisions (Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, the Beatles, and Google Glass), shown as they looked at the time, with the room voting on each one before the reveal.   We close with the loop nobody teaches: how to detect you were wrong, diagnose whether it was the decision or the world that changed, and decide what to keep versus reverse.

Product Rescue - Jason Scherschligt - Many product teams inherit or drift into products that feel stuck. They're plagued by unclear strategy, misaligned backlogs, disengaged stakeholders, frustrated users, and missed business goals. Despite talented teams and good intentions, momentum fades and opportunity is lost. This session explores a practical approach to “product rescue”: using sound judgment to diagnose what went wrong and guide struggling products back to relevance and impact.  The result: a renewed focus on shipping the right product while navigating your enterprise's real-world constraints.

Create and Sell Your Vision with Stories - Jean Storlie - This experiential workshop explores story-based techniques for developing a vision and getting others excited about it. Participants will experience how Appreciative Inquiry paired with Snowball Pair and Share can help a team develop a shared vision in a simulated exercise.

3:00 Break-out Sessions

You Can’t Just Install a Product Operating Model: Transforming a Product and Tech team in 6 months - Kevin Palmstein, Jarin Schmidt - This isn't a session about the "right" product operating model. It's about how to move an organization from the model it has today toward one that works better—without pretending you're starting from scratch. This year, we got the opportunity to help an established technology organization actually change to a product operating model. There was no clean-sheet redesign: the team had existing roles, processes, technology constraints, stakeholders, deadlines, and work already in flight. In this session, we’ll walk through the practical steps we took.  We’ll share what worked, what changed along the way, and the lessons we learned about making organizational change stick.

How to Be Useful Before You're the Expert - Marion Cholieu - I went from firefighter in France to product manager in industrial cybersecurity — and learned they're the same job: walking into a system you don't fully understand and becoming useful fast, without being the smartest person in the room. Using the four-word protocol French firefighters use on arrival — je suis, je vois, je fais, je demande (I am, I see, I do, I ask)— I'll give you a repeatable way to get useful in any domain you don't own yet, whether that's a new product, a new industry, or AI. If you've ever felt behind walking into a room full of experts, this one's for you.

We Stopped Talking About the Customer Journey and Started Walking It - Jakki Wernlund, Doug Eisenlohr - What happens when you put an entire customer journey on the wall and invite the organization to react? In this real-world case study, learn how a cross-functional team mapped three complex repair journeys, gathered about 200 pieces of feedback, and turned a wall of observations into clear themes and actionable roadmap recommendations. You'll leave with a practical approach for finding patterns, aligning stakeholders, and moving from feedback to focused product decisions.

Play School: A Crash Course in Adding Playful Elements to Your Work - AnnMarie Thomas - This workshop will present a recipe for play, and give suggestions on how to incorporate these ingredients into the workplace.

4:00 Closing Session

Presentation of the Inaugural Art Fry Product Innovation Award

Feedback session on ProductCamp to PDMA-MN board members