Insights, Key Takeaways, and Highlights from the Product at Heart Leadership Event 2026
We know firsthand what it’s like to be a product leader. Every minute on your calendar is accounted for. You have pressure coming at you from the CEO, the teams that report up to you, and everyone in your organization who wants to share their latest idea about how to make your product better (whether it aligns to your roadmap or strategy is a whole other question!). Each day brings new excitement—and maybe some super tough questions and a fire or two that deserves your immediate attention.
Taking all that into account, we (event co-hosts Petra Wille and Arne Kittler) designed the Product at Heart Leadership Event in a very intentional way. The goal is to give you time and space away from the constant demands of your job, allowing you to break away from your usual patterns and see things in new ways.
And to really create that space for participants, this year we introduced a new and improved format. While in previous years, this was a half-day event that was folded into the main Product at Heart conference, the 2026 Leadership Event was extended and held on its own—a dedicated 1.5-day gathering at Netlight’s offices in Hamburg for 60 senior product leaders, including Heads of Product, Directors, VPs, and CPOs.
With the Leadership Event, we really like to take a “be there or be square” kind of approach, meaning that we encourage full participation and presence and don’t publicly share the recordings from the day. But at the same time, we do want to celebrate our incredible speakers and attendees, so we will be sharing a few high-level insights and key takeaways here.
A quick note on topic curation (and a nod to AI)
If you look at the event agenda or read through this recap, you may notice something that appears to be missing, or at least underrepresented. Why is it not full of topics related to AI? And the answer is: We made an intentional choice when it came to topic curation. We know that AI is on everyone’s minds already and conversations about it are going to happen anyway.
We chose not to highlight AI because there are so many other product leadership topics that deserve our attention. We wanted the agenda to be a subtle reminder that product leadership in the AI era is still product leadership. And as you’ll see, the topic of AI managed to pop up here and there throughout the day anyway—we just chose not to make it the sole focus.
Day 1
The morning sessions on Day 1 gathered all attendees for a series of keynotes. Here’s a peek at what they covered.
Build the tomorrow you want to see
In the opening keynote, critical futurist Johannes Kleske explored how product leaders can cut through received stories and build their own concrete future narratives that make tomorrow tangible and actionable for their teams. One key idea: If we don’t invent the future we want to see, someone else will do it for us.
Embrace the mess and friction of collaboration
You’ve probably heard the expression that “product is a team sport,” but what does that actually mean in the way you approach your day-to-day work as a product leader? Francesca Cortesi, CPO at Vend, shared an honest exploration of what collaboration looks like in the real world, revealing when it works, when it doesn't, and what you can do when it falls apart.
Francesca also reminded us that collaboration is messy—and that’s a good thing. She cautioned against letting AI remove all the friction and messy parts of your teams’ collaboration.
Rethink your goals to unlock real transformation
Most product transformations don’t fail because of the wrong framework, says VP of Product at Laerdal and host of the Scandinavian Product Podcast Afonso Malo Franco. They fail because of the wrong assumptions about how people and organizations actually behave. And nowhere does this become more visible than in how we set goals and measure progress.
In his talk, Afonso explored what he’s seen firsthand at Laerdal: why goal-setting often falls short because of deeper issues like how decisions are made, how progress is understood, and how much an organization is truly willing to change. But he also inspired us by sharing how stronger vision, context, and KPI-driven thinking can help organizations focus on real progress.
Cultivate your sense of self-belief
In product leadership, the pressure to perform, decide, and deliver never truly switches off. Behind every strategy and transformation sits something far more personal: self-belief.
In her honest and reflective keynote, Pippa Topp, CPO at giffgaff, explored how doubt quietly shapes decision-making, boundaries, and the environments we create for our teams. Her core thesis? Sustainable leadership comes not from doing more, but from strengthening the inner foundation that allows you to lead with clarity and conviction.
Choose your own offsite adventure
The Leadership Event is designed to shift your perspective and give you time to go deeper than you might in typical conference small talk conversations. That’s why this year we shook things up by offering participants the choice of three “field trips” throughout Hamburg in the afternoon:
A traditional Barkasse (boat cruise) through Hamburg’s harbor, past container ships, warehouses, and past the iconic Elbphilharmonie. We were blessed with a sunny day and some of Hamburg’s trademark "Steife Brise" (stiff breeze).
A farm-to-table outing at an organic farm on the outskirts of Hamburg. Owner Alina walked us through how they’ve built a direct-to-city sales model and divulged all the secrets about tomato lifecycle management.
An improvisation workshop with Chris Heimann, who used games to help us explore how we respond to uncertainty. This was a poignant reminder that no matter how good our plans are, reality shows up differently!
A brief interlude for dinner, drinks, and The Decision Stack
After the exhilarating adventures of the afternoon, we reconvened for dinner at drinks at Netlight along with André Hubert and his community of practice for Hamburg-based product leaders. Martin Eriksson—who debuted the Decision Stack concept at the very first Product Leadership event in Hamburg seven years ago—was also on hand to sign copies of his hot-off-the-press book, The Decision Stack.
Day 2
Bringing concepts to life in mini workshops
In case it’s not obvious by now, the Leadership Event is about much more than passively absorbing information—we’ve designed it to get participants talking, thinking, and doing. And the morning of Day 2 provided plenty of opportunities to do all that during a series of mini workshops.
There were six presenters and two rounds of 90-minute sessions, so every participant had the chance to select and attend their top two. Spots were limited to 8 to 12 attendees per session, keeping the groups intimate and interactive. Here’s what was on offer:
Björn Waide posed critical questions all product leaders should be asking today when it comes to product management in an AI native world: Where does the PM role end and engineering begin when AI handles implementation? How do you restructure teams when the bottleneck shifts from building to deciding? And what new skills do product leaders need to develop, in themselves and in their teams, to stay relevant?
Susanne Kaiser asked participants to bring their specific challenges related to team topology—an org structure that feels misaligned, business change that’s blocked by team boundaries, or dependencies that can’t be untangled. During the session, she offered a diagnosis of where structure was going wrong and shared tips on how to align team topology with strategic direction and technical reality.
Martin Eriksson, founder of ProductTank and co-founder of Mind The Product, invited participants to bring their messiest strategic challenges to the table. Using his Decision Stack as a diagnostic tool, he guided participants to work through them to pinpoint exactly where their stack was breaking down and what to do about it.
Lisa Kolbe and André Hubert called out some of the contradictions that product leaders often present—even if they don’t intend to. Things like saying that you empower your team, when really you end up giving in to pressure from stakeholders or internal friction. But this session wasn’t about judgment—it was designed to help attendees move beyond the “say–do” gap and navigate these challenges with integrity and less stress.
Product at Heart regulars and long-time product coaches Shaun Russell and Tobias Freudenreich are well-versed in the power of asking good questions. But they also recognize that knowing what to ask—and how to ask it—is not always easy. During this session, they shared practical coaching tools related to focus, curiosity, and intuition and gave participants the chance to test them out so they’d have the confidence to apply them with their teams.
Finally, our very own co-organizer Petra Wille brought her Product Leadership Wheel to the table (her first time introducing this tool to a German audience!). Petra provided an overview of how to use the PLwheel to conduct an in-depth self-assessment to shape direction and growth as a product leader.
A series of invitations
Bringing the group back together for closing remarks, Arne and Petra shared a series of invitations:
To make the ideas from the event more actionable, they asked participants to think about one thing they’d heard or learned and want to explore further and one thing they wanted to try to implement in the next week. Participants then had a few minutes to write their ideas down on Post-its and put them on a board, giving everyone a chance to see what their peers had written and potentially walk away with another key takeaway or two!
To come back again in June for the main Product at Heart conference and workshops, a gathering of 750+ curious product people. (A few tickets still remain, and you can grab yours here.)
To share their thoughts and feedback about the event, both through official feedback forms and on their social media platform of choice. You’ll find a few highlights from LinkedIn below.
Check out the attendees’ highlights and stories
One of our personal highlights is hearing directly from attendees about their experiences. Which concepts and moments stood out? Here are a few excerpts from what they shared on LinkedIn.
“Petra Wille and Arne Kittler are masters at curating thoughtful product events. From the thread they weaved throughout the speaker line-up, the subtle facilitation and invisible structure in place to support the networking, right down to the delicious plant-based food keeping us energised and alert throughout. Thank you so much for inviting me, it was an absolute privilege to be part of it.” – Pippa Topp
"As product leaders, we are often the ones on stage. We share frameworks, lessons learned, battle scars, and sometimes even polished success stories. But we rarely find the right events to put ourselves in the seat of a learner. This time was different - the Product at Heart team made a deliberate choice: quality over noise, learning over selling, substance over performance. No one was chasing the spotlight, people were chasing growth." – Dorra Mlouhi
"I'm still trying to comprehend all the wisdom. From Johannes I'll reflect how I communicate any future vision. Francesca reminded all of us how interconnected trust and aligned goals within the leadership team are. Pippa sharing important deep personal reflections, that we as leaders need to take care of our 'inner cups' to manage self-belief above all else. Thanks to Dr Chris Heimann for the improv workshop. I never thought about how improv can make us more present and improve the way we lead, and that this works best without shoes." – Lars Haßler
“‘The lifecycle of tomatoes’ and ‘(developing) faster but in the wrong direction’ became my favourite quotes in the Product at Heart leadership forum this year. The signature moment of Petra Wille and Arne Kittler giving the opening note standing on the bar table was replaced, but with a reinvented event that I’ve got so much to take home with.” – Eva Hongyan G.
“What happens when you bring 60+ product leaders into one room and let curiosity take over? Netlight partnered with Product at Heart for our shared passion about product leadership and knowledge sharing. We hosted the Product at Heart Leadership Event yesterday and today in our offices. I’m still digesting all the conversations, inspiring keynotes, encounters and workshops!” – André Hubert
“Insightful couple of days reflecting, sharing, connecting, and learning about product leadership in Hamburg at Product at Heart Leadership Summit in a group with 60 leaders, very well organised by Petra Wille, Arne Kittler and team with great talks, experiences and workshops.” – Roosevelt Santos
“I went to Hamburg with a question. The answer was not a tool. Arne Kittler and Petra Wille even curated the excursion to the product-related nursery at the Product at Heart Leadership Event. In the middle of tractors and fresh soil, I got to know the Tomato Lifecycle. My question, which I started with: What makes me successful as a product leader? The answer is a triad of impulses. Not a single one of them was "better prioritization." – Stefan Hennig (auto-translated from German, so please forgive any inaccuracies or errors!)
“I'm at Product at Heart Leadership conference right now, which is a real full-circle moment. Ten years ago, I had dinner with Petra Wille and Arne Kittler as they hatched the plans that would eventually become this event. Seven years ago, it was where The Decision Stack debuted, and it's the conference I credit in the opening of the book as the place where it all started. Petra and Arne are two of Europe's sharpest product coaches. Together, they run one of its finest product conferences. Doing either well is hard. Doing both, for years on end, is rare.” – Martin Eriksson
Explore the event in your favorite format
For a more visual experience, browse through the full photo album on Flickr.
Don’t forget that you can come join us at the Product at Heart workshops and conference from June 25–26, 2026. Get your ticket here while they’re still available! Finally, check out our blog and video archive to dive deeper into past content and follow us on LinkedIn for all the latest updates!