Conference Speakers 2023
John Cutler
John Cutler focuses on the messy overlaps and patterns of product—The Beautiful Mess (the title of his newsletter).
John was formerly a product evangelist and coach at Amplitude where he interacted with diverse product teams and product leaders from around the world. There are few people in the world that have this kind of exposure, and if you follow John's writing over the last couple years I'm sure you can see the influence of this perspective.
He has a background in product management and UX research, including B2B SaaS companies like Zendesk, Pendo, and AppFolio, and before that B2C, ad-tech, banking, and media. John is a prolific (or some might say obsessive) writer, with almost a thousand posts spread across various newsletters, blogs,and Medium.
Teresa Torres
Teresa Torres is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and coach.
She teaches a structured and sustainable approach to continuous discovery that helps product teams infuse their daily product decisions with customer input. She’s coached hundreds of teams at companies of all sizes, from early-stage start-ups to global enterprises, in a variety of industries.
She has taught over 12,000 product people discovery skills through the Product Talk Academy and is the author of Continuous Discovery Habits.
Jeff Gothelf
Jeff helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of the award-winning book Lean UX and the Harvard Business Review Press book Sense & Respond.
Starting off as a software designer, Jeff now works as a coach, consultant and keynote speaker helping companies bridge the gaps between business agility, digital transformation, product management and human-centred design.
Most recently Jeff co-founded Sense & Respond Press, a publishing house for practical business books for busy executives. His most recent book, Forever Employable, was published in June 2020.
Antonia Landi
Antonia got her first taste of Ops in the Berlin start-up scene where she introduced lean processes and set up departments from scratch. Today she is a professional Product nerd by trade, and one of the top voices in European Product Operations.
A leader in her field, she’s on a constant mission to enable Product teams to do their best work by providing them with the tools, frameworks, and methodologies they need to succeed. She's a community person at heart and loves bringing people together, encouraging them and inspiring them to strive for excellence
Sarah Reeves
Sarah has been working in Product Operations at StepStone for the past 18 months and has been responsible for growing better product practices and craft at scale across multiple business lines. This has included setting up a Product Chapter, focusing on building communities of practice, developing the global product competency toolkit and associated training and coaching programmes, and implementing frameworks and playbooks to drive a product-led and outcome-oriented mindset within the product teams.
She started her career as a front end developer and has subsequently worked across Product, Tech and UX in a variety of hands on and leadership roles. She’s eternally curious about user needs and happiest when solving user problems that leads to tangible change and growth; Product Operations is her dream job as it allows her to help other product people be the best at what they do.
Megan Murphy
Megan is the Cofounder and CEO of Ourspace, the team design platform that gives Product and Engineering organizations unparalleled views of their teams - you know, the cross-functional teams where work actually gets done across the Product & Tech stack.
Megan was previously the VP of Product at Hotjar, where she led the product, design, and data disciplines behind the company’s 1 million B2B SaaS accounts. Previously, she held the first Head of Product post at N26, as well as Product Leadership roles at Skyscanner and two early stage startups. She has lived and led product teams in San Francisco, Brazil, Spain, and in fully distributed environments.
Ourspace recently raised $2.4 million in pre-seed funding from London-based Seedcamp and Connect Ventures. Megan’s mission is to make it as easy for Product and Engineering Leaders to design high-performing teams as it is for anyone to design a fantasy sports team.
Lily Smith
Lily is CPO at BBC Maestro & 'The Product Experience' podcast co-host. She has worked with a variety of early stage and scaling startups across ecommerce, mobile and SaaS for the last 15 years.
Like many, she fell into Product Management along the way, desperately seeking purpose and impact within her work. In recent roles she led the Innovation Team at GoCompare and was Head of Product & Growth at the fast growing B-Corp Bower Collective.
Lily is a believer in the power of community for personal development and learning, which led her to start the Bristol chapter of ProductTank & ProductCamp and to join Randy Silver on Mind The Product's podcast 3 years ago.
Nesrine Changuel
Dr. Nesrine is a Product Manager at Google and formerly at Spotify, Microsoft and Nokia. She has managed highly visible consumer products for the past ten years such as Chrome, Meet, Spotify and Skype. Before turning into the Product role, Dr. Nesrine worked as a research engineer at Bell Labs Nokia.
She holds a Ph.D. Degree and a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering. She has spoken at a variety of international conferences and held multiple tech patents in her name for her inventions.
She is active among product communities and passionate about sharing her experience and promoting Product Management career.
Dominique Jost
Dominique is the Head of Product at Doist, makers of Todoist and Twist, where he is building a world-class, remote and async-first product organization. He started out writing code for web applications but quickly gravitated toward the people and process aspects of creating great products.
This interest in all things product, and his appetite for sharing and learning new ways of working, inspired him to take on different leadership roles throughout his 20-year career in engineering and product.
His ultimate goal is to create empowering environments where teams can create value for customers and the business — all while having fun and staying sane.
Francesca Cortesi
Francesca is a passionate product leader who gets inspired by creating products that can bring some good in people's lives, and doing it together with a team of people from whom she can learn from. She has been working with product management for more than 10 years and in the journey, she has learned the good, the bad, and the ugly of product development.
She loves building great products and product organizations, scaling them up, and creating a product-centered culture that can power business growth. She is also a great fan of sharing product practices and she often talks and writes about her hands-on product work.
Janet Bumpas
Janet comes from Silicon Valley where she was part of three startups: one went public, one was acquired by eBay, and one crashed and burned hard. So she has seen all sides of growing and building a product - some less fun than others.
Currently, Janet is an independent product advisor where she helps large companies and entrepreneurs to launch and scale their business ideas. Janet also has delivered over 100 workshops - either when she was running accelerator programs for entrepreneurs and intrapraneurs or with clients who bring her in to help out a team that is stuck.
Alicia Shao
Alicia Shao, senior service designer at Lego, external lecturer at Köln International School of Design, mentor at Amazing Design People List, and most importantly, a Futurist at heart.
As a zealous advocator, Alicia has trained over 1000+ people in design thinking and service design, currently teaching in the area of future thinking and system thinking at KISD. She has also taught at Bauhaus University Weimar and China Academy of Art on the topics of circular design and sustainability, as well as speaking at various conferences on the importance of futures and people-driven innovation.
She is passionate about increasing future literacy and democratizing the future through discursive design, and making futures a tangible playground for all.
Simon Cross
Simon is Chief Product Office at Soundwide (the company behind Native Instruments, iZotope and Brainworx) where recently joined to lead the teams building cutting edge digital instruments, effects, and music production hardware.
Before that, he spent 12 years at Meta working on trust and safety, enterprise communication, and online identity products used by hundreds of millions of people.
Emily Tate
Emily brings more than 15 years of product management experience to her role as Managing Director for Mind the Product, which was acquired by Pendo in 2022.
While she has worked across a variety of industries, she will always have a soft spot for the travel industry where she spent most of her early career building software for airlines and developing a leading consumer travel app, TripCase. Emily is passionate about the craft of product management and loves talking about new ways to make products people love.
Karin Schoefegger
Karin is a Mathematician turned product advisor and coach, working primarily with teams building AI products.
She has 15+ years of professional experience at companies from big to small: At Google, she built an ML platform and led AI Governance efforts at YouTube, and led new product initiatives at Google Research. Prior to that, she was at startups N26 (for smarter banking) and Pixsy (finding and fighting copyright violations).
She is passionate about principled AI development and cares deeply about educating others on the topic in order to bring the greatest benefit to society.
Chris Compston
Chris is working in Product Operations at Bumble where, as with his previous roles at Farfetch, ThoughtWorks and Sky, his goal is to help teams to build better products.
He believes that Product Ops should be seen as a force multiplier, unlocking the superpowers of the product organisation. And that the most successful Product Ops people are experimental and collaborative by nature.
His time is currently spent working with product leadership (Product Management, Design, Analytics etc) on defining and rolling out product experimentation processes and building a stronger product development operational cadence.
Shaun Russell
Shaun is a Product and Leadership Coach who specialises in real-world applications of Product Management: where the theory doesn’t always apply, people are complicated, and things get in the way.
Shaun was inspired to become a coach by his own first-hand experiences building products, first as a young founder, then later at startups in London and Berlin. There he saw the wide gap between practice and theory, and the often untapped potential of many product people to influence organisations from the bottom-up.
He became a full-time coach in 2018, working since then with organisations across Europe, from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, in numerous industries, including Education, Energy, Healthcare, Retail, and Travel.
