ProductWorld 2026 Workshop

The AI Enhanced Product Manager

Last week, I spoke on the Main Stage at the ProductWorld 2026 conference. My spot was on the first day of the conference which means I get to chat with the attendees all week when they see me in the halls.

Though nominally a Product, Dev, and Cloud conference, it was absolutely an AI conference. Most every speaking slot covered AI from my talk to one tracking your agents token spend to using the psychology of human memory to simulate "memory" for agents.

My talk, “Toys to Tools,” covered the trend of using AI in your personal productivity and how that will expand to become organizational productivity in 2026.

It was exciting to see so many people try to make sense of this AI technology wave. I have had the privilege of seeing this frothy excitement a couple times in my career...most notably of course the rise of the Internet and the rise of mobile phones.

I loved the talk by Chris Butler about using AI in different ways at various steps in the idea development process to create much better and thoughtful specs. Chris is the one of the professors of product. He's so thoughtful and exploratory. I learn something knew every time we hang out.

I thought the talk by Heather Samarin and Katherine Morris was an insightful reflection on how we product people perceive our own adoption of AI vs how our bosses and stakeholders perceive our adoption of AI.

And the talk by Ajita Ananth schooled me how Technical Program Managers at Google accelerate and coordinate how complex products with complex dependencies get created then launched. Her story and role has analogies all over the tech world especially for larger companies bringing products to market.

Thanks to the professional ProductWorld team led by Haley Miranda.

See you next year!