Embedded Files
Presentation Proposal Summaries
for ProductCamp 2026 Twin Cities
Proposals are listed in alphabetical order to ease searching during the voting process. Voting will run from September 6th through September 15th. To vote, you must be a registered attendee. Become one at Eventbrite.
You can download a copy of these Proposal Summaries. And if you want more detailed information about the various proposals, here is a Google Doc to read or download with details about the proposals, and bios and linked-in links for the presenters.
There are 41 proposals for the 17 available presentation slots. On the 2026 Voting Form page, registered attendees can vote for up to 15 sessions they'd most like to attend.
12 Risks of Poor Social Media Security - Sue Serna - Launching a product is more than just R&D. A social media security issue can devastate your brand, cause real communication crises or bring an entire company to its knees. Learn about the top 12 risk of poor social media security, and learn how to stay one step ahead of the hackers.
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.
Burnt Toast & Breakthroughs: How NotebookLM Transforms Chaotic Product Data into Instant Strategy - Becky Amble - "What if you could turn stacks of messy customer feedback, market research, and technical specs into a grounded product strategy in seconds?" Standard AI tools often give generic advice or invent facts out of thin air. NotebookLM changes the approach by grounding AI intelligence strictly within your own trusted project documents. In this fast-paced, interactive session, we’ll take a chaotic product scenario and turn it into an actionable strategy live on stage. You’ll learn how to navigate information overload, uncover hidden user insights, and generate executive-ready deliverables without the usual research drag.
Can You Afford to Ignore the $390B World of Licensing and Collaborations? - Leigh Ann Schwarzkopf and Danna Dueck - Licensing is growing in nearly every product sector. Learn which are doing best and fundamental reasons for that success. We will look at the latest industry data, combined with best practice do's and don'ts and you will come away with a roadmap to consider as you and your teams look to accelerate growth.
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.
Deliver Value to the Market Predictably - Joe Bloom - Capacity is more than Story Points and Velocity. This simple approach unlocks the power of "aligning software engineering capacity to product outcomes" so that you can more effectively capture market moments as you deliver on your roadmap.
Design First/Patent Second OR The Other Way Around - Fred Sklenar, Tom Kramer, and Ernest Grumbles - This panel includes Tom Kramer, Founder of Kablooe Design; Ernest Grumbles, Managing Partner at Grumbles Law, and Fred Sklenar, current President & CEO of Kablooe Design. In a panel presentation moderated by Fred, they will discuss early stage development and draw important considerations for when to act on a patent application.
Fast, but Not Alone: Technology as a Collaboration Amplifier - Tim Welle - Product and technology teams are being asked to deliver quickly, and we are all for that! But in the rush, we can create new risks: ignoring problems, missing key technical details, or solving the wrong problem. This session shares lessons learned on product teams using AI a collaboration tool, not just a shortcut. It covers how to make sure everyone is heard, surfacing where a team agrees and disagrees, and working through ideas on shared, interactive artifacts.
From Complexity to Clarity - Rosa Hermoza - Driving Simplification, Visibility, and Speed in Supply Chain Transformation. We embarked on a supply chain transformation initiative aimed at enhancing visibility, streamlining processes, and preparing for a smooth SAP S/4HANA migration. We enabled standardized and data-driven decision-making directly within SAP. This strategic approach increased process consistency, reduced time-consuming tasks, and simplified material master data management—laying the groundwork for a seamless transition to SAP S/4HANA.
From Idea to Insight in a Day: Synthetic Audiences for Fast-Moving Product Teams - Cody Roemhildt, Caitlin Shea, and 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.
From Stuck to Shipping: A Mini-Workshop on Your Team's Growth Journey - Chris von Dohlen - Every product team hits the same wall: the strategy is sound, the roadmap is clear, and yet the team can get stuck. In this hands-on mini-workshop, you'll map a real challenge your team is facing onto the oldest framework humans use to navigate change — story. You'll leave with a fresh lens on where your team actually is on their journey, and one concrete move to make on your path to growth.
Hidden in Plain Sight: Product Discovery with Opposing Forces - David Quimby - Product discovery usually begins after the product is identified. This session works upstream -- finding the opposing forces that your product resolves. Three illustrations. An adhesive that is strong enough to hold paper and weak enough to release it cleanly, repeatedly, without damage. A skate with the maneuverability of ice, on pavement, in July. A computer that you operate by pointing at what you want rather than typing what you want. Each sounds impossible stated plainly. Each opened a category. Bring a product that you're developing and we'll identify its opposing forces.
How Design Thinking Threads Through Product Design; Design-Firm-Management; and Musical Improvisation - Fred Sklenar - Fred Sklenar, BID, MBA, MS–Medical Device Innovation—industrial designer, business leader, innovator, entrepreneur, and jazz musician—shares how design thinking has shaped his approach to business, creativity, and life. Drawing from his experience as CEO of Kablooe Design, Fred explores real-world successes, challenges, and lessons learned through a design-driven mindset.
How do I manage 33 software products?!! A portfolio lifecycle case study - Darin Rasmussen and Sandi Gordon - Sandi and Darin led a process to wrangle a bunch of software products that they inherited from 8 legacy companies. This presentation will take you through what it took to build a plan, including assessing the market potential for each of these products, rallying a cross-functional coalition, and making smart investment choices. This presentation gives you practical frameworks and tips on finding the opportunity in the chaos. Hint #1: You can’t do everything. Hint #2: AI can help, but the PMs make the hard choices.
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.
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.
Innovation Culture: Bold Teams & Big Ideas - Philip Hague - Most innovation-culture talk stays abstract. This session doesn't. I've spent 20+ years tracking innovation outcomes, both as a consultant and most recently as an innovation leader at 3M. In this session, we'll get concrete about the six barriers killing innovation in legacy businesses and how to push through each one. Please come ready to share your thoughts - we'll build our ideal culture together!
Innovation: Where do the Ideas Come From? - Michael Wynblatt - Many innovation programs fall down on the first step: coming up with a new idea in the first place. Particularly with mature products and services, coming up with something genuinely new can be daunting. In this presentation we’ll cover the three crucial kinds of idea collection: scouting (find good ideas other people have), idea generation activities (develop new ideas of your own), and using AI (yep, AI can do that too). For each approach, we’ll discuss the underlying principles of successful ideation, and also give specific, concrete tools and methods you can use right away.
Manufacturing Time: How to Design Your Product’s Launch Window (Not Just Find One) - Jason Voiovich - Innovation doesn't just happen on it's own. Companies that excel and grow through innovation do it systematically. We'll talk about the guidance ISO 56001 provides to create, maintain, and improve that system.
More Than Skin Deep: Practical Design and UX Fundamentals - Tim Armato - It's getting easier to create software that has a great-looking UI. But just because something looks good at a glance, doesn’t mean it makes sense to your users. There can be a host of usability issues lurking in the corners and shadows. In addition to quality visuals, a good user experience requires consistent patterns, and an understanding of how people perceive and process information. Whether you're vibe-coding solo or directing a team of front-end developers; whether you have a live product or are just getting started, this session will introduce some fundamental UX and design concepts that can help you avoid common pitfalls that create friction for end users.
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.
Offload the Plan, Keep the Friction - Allison Herbert - Most of us need two things we rarely get together: room to experiment with what AI actually does for our understanding of a problem, and time to reflect on what we're seeing. I finished Virginia's Trail Quest as a Master Hiker in 2024, a hike in every state park. This fall I start the bigger version: every trail in every park, a longer timeline with an unknown completion date. I'll show you how I'm working it: what I hand over to an AI tool, what I refuse to, and how to decide which is which. Experimentation is how the uncertainty gets smaller.
One Chart That Can Save Product Delivery - Brian Eshult - Red, Yellow, or Green? Percent Complete? Come see why the Burnup Chart is the key to understanding and communicating REAL project delivery dates. In this session, we will review: - What is a burnup chart? How any team and any project can use a burnup chart. How burnup charts help you understand & control: delivery dates, capacity/budget, scope. How to start building your own burnup charts
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.
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.
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.
Putting the Beast to Bed: Learnings from Replacing a Major System - Ryan Wold and Vanessa East - Retiring and replacing a high-traffic, high-visibility product can feel like facing down a behemoth: it takes strategy, it takes agility, and it takes a village. Hear the tale of lessons learned from the successful replacement of the state of Minnesota’s labor exchange system in June 2026, told by the product owners of the team that got it done.
Real Talk: AI in a Large Enterprise - Lisa Ofstedal, Ken Nelson, and 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.
Send in the Clones! - Becky Amble - Send in the Clones: Your AI Clone Needs Your VIBE. What if your expertise could be in two places at once? In this fun, practical session, discover how an AI clone can help you explain ideas, share knowledge, support training, and communicate new products more efficiently. Becky Amble introduces the memorable VIBE framework—Voice, Image, Brain, and Expression—and shows what it takes to create a digital version of you that looks, sounds, and communicates like you. No lab coat 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.
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.
Stop Paying for the Same Product Decision Twice- Dave Mathias - Your team is debating the roadmap, target customer, or platform choice. Again. This session names the hidden cost of those repeated debates—the amnesia tax—and gives product leaders a practical way to distinguish healthy reconsideration from costly relitigation, calculate the bill, and stop making the same decision from scratch.
Story-Based Leadership ... Told in Six Words - Jean Storlie - Six-word stories pique curiosity, leaving audiences intrigued to learn more. In this interactive session, you will identify 5-6 core leadership values and the stories behind them. Then craft six-word versions of these stories. These core leadership stories can be used in job interviews, networking events, ice breaker exercises, and the next time you find yourself in an elevator with someone you want to impress. Story-based leadership can enhance effectiveness in coaching and mentoring others, public speaking and advocacy, and persuading and influencing others—skills that leaders use every day.
The 1 Person GTM Machine: Building No-Code Agent Stacks That Launch for You - Lucy Bichakhchyan - The 2026 AI shift is to orchestrate autonomous agents that run pieces of your go-to-market loop for you — and wire them into your actual data so the output reflects your reality, not generic filler. In this hands-on workshop, you'll build a live no-code agent stack that operates like a GTM team of ten. We'll chain agents that hand off to each other — research feeds positioning feeds asset creation — connect them to real data sources, and set up autonomous loops that monitor, draft, and queue work on a schedule. You'll walk out with a workflow you built, the prompts and architecture behind it, and a 12-month view of where agentic GTM is heading.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of AI in Product - Matt Pacyga, Allison Herbert, and 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.
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.
What a Minnesota Twins Stats App Taught Me About Trusting AI at Work - Ken Nelson - For over a year, I've been building and rebuilding a Minnesota Twins stats app using Claude and other AI tools, purely because I love the sport. What started as a fun side project became something more valuable: a safe place to find out what AI tools can and can't do, watch them get better over time, and build real confidence before bringing any of it into my day job. In this talk, I'll share that project's actual arc, including where these tools got things wrong, walk through a simple starter kit for picking your own low-stakes arena and getting moving in a weekend, and make the case that this is the fastest path to genuine AI fluency, especially if these tools still feel intimidating.
What Product Managers Can Learn from the Art of Standup Comedy - Atul Patel - Comedians and product managers do the same core job: develop something an audience actually appreciates. In this talk, I'll pull from my years as a standup comic and comedy producer to show what comics do that can make product managers more effective. Expect a practical list of takeaways you can apply immediately, real comedy bits pulled from my own sets, and a fun group exercise. You'll leave with a new mindset for approaching product work, and hopefully have a few laughs along the way.
Where Innovation Actually Pays Off - Kasey Ross - A great idea, funded and launched, still has to earn its place in daily work before it counts as a true innovation. When innovations fail in businesses, it’s often because nobody owns operationalizing them, much less what happens after that. This session is for anyone trying to innovate inside their own organizations: bring a real initiative that stalled after launch, diagnose why, and leave with a concrete next move toward full adoption.
You Can’t Just Install a Product Operating Model: Transforming a Product and Tech team in 6 months - Kevin Palmstein and 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.
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.
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