Programme Gent
Hosted by
Generously sponsored by
Co-organised by
09:30 - 10:00
Foyer4
WELCOME DRINK
Claim your spot for the break-outs
10:00 - 10:15
AuditoRium4
WELCOME TALK
SIRRIS
Johan De Geyter
Business Unit Manager Digital at Sirris
THE PRODUCT CONSORTIUM
Bjorn Vuylsteker
Co-Founder and CPO at WeGroup
10:15 - 12:00
AuditoRium4
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT IN DIFFERENT STAGES OF A COMPANY
3 speakers share their product experiences in different growth stages + Q&A
10:15 - 10:45
GROWTH STAGE
MBRELLA
Quinten Vandermeulen
Co-founder & CPO
Mbrella is the first corporate mobility solution that is designed to empower employees and unburden HR professionals completely. They offer software that helps you manage mobility budgets, commuting allowances, public transport subscriptions and much more.
10:50 - 11:20
SCALING STAGE
LIGHTHOUSE
Niki Van den Broeck
Senior Product Manager Distribution Solutions
Lighthouse is the leading commercial platform for the travel & hospitality industry They transform complexity into confidence by providing actionable market insights, business intelligence, and pricing tools that maximize revenue growth.
11:25 - 12:00
MATURITY STAGE
MICROSOFT
Pieter Vanhove
Senior Program Manager Security & Governance
Go behind the scenes with Microsoft’s Azure Data Platform Security team to see how product managers drive security-focused features from concept to general availability. This session highlights how we collaborate across disciplines, prioritize customer needs on security compliance and deliver innovations.
12:00 - 13:00
AuditoRium4
LUNCH & NETWORKING
13:00 - 16:00
INTERACTIVE SESSIONS
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
X MASTERY
Dive deep into the essential techniques and strategies every product manager needs. From gathering actionable feedback to crafting crystal-clear user stories, prioritizing features, and more. This track covers all the classic, must-know methods to excel in your role.
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
X THE REAL WORLD
Explore the intersections where digital product management collides with other domains. Whether it's the hardware-software clash, project vs. product mindset, or integrating established businesses with groundbreaking ideas. Hear real-world testimonials on navigating these challenges, adapting strategies, and identifying key obstacles.
PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
X AI
Discover how AI is revolutionizing the role of product managers. Will AI tools like ChatGPT write our Jira tickets? Can generative AI automatically translate user feedback into new features? Learn how to adapt your approach as AI becomes an integral part of our products and processes.
Zaal: AuditoRium 4
13:55 - 14:40
■ Product Management as a sales person
Roeland Delrue, CRO & COO at Aikido Security
Aikido Security went from 0 to €10M ARR in under 18 months. Yes, if you’re impressed - we are too! They are a developer-friendly software security platform. It scans your code, containers & cloud in 10 different ways, showing you which security issues and vulnerabilities are actually important to solve. We speed up triaging massively by cutting out the false-positives, and making things human-readable.
13:00 - 13:45
■ Cut clutter, increase impact: deprecating with confidence
Judith Straetemans, Product Manager, ex-Stripe
Feature bloat confuses users and dilutes impact, yet most PMs struggle to remove anything. In this session, you'll learn why fearless deprecation is an essential PM skill, how to identify what's dragging your product down, and how to win over skeptical stakeholders (yes, even Sales). Walk away ready to deprecate safely, communicate with confidence, and keep your product focused on what truly drives value.
15:15 - 16:00
■ The Blind Spot: How to Detect and Overcome Product Bias
Servaas Strobbe, Head of Product at Tekst
Servaas, former Senior Product Manager at Teamleader, will share all the insights he’s gathered over the years.
Zaal: Multimediazaal
13:55 - 14:40
■ The Hidden Price Tag: How Product Management Shapes your Pricing
Maarten Laruelle, Growth Engineer Consultant at Sirris
Maarten is specialised in pricing strategy for growth scale-ups. He helps companies transform pricing and packaging into growth levers by empowering founders and teams to master value-based pricing.
15:15 - 16:00
■ High Impact Roadmaps: Get more from every bet
Matti Desmet, Head of Product at Peripass
Bio to be announced.
13:00 - 13:45
■ Topic to be announced
Pontus Gifvas, CEO at Nalvin
Pontus will share the product journey of Nalvin. Nalvin helps product teams focus on impact by automating repetitive tasks. Their AI-powered agent integrates with the tools you already use, keeping stakeholders aligned, customer success informed, and insights collected—so PMs can spend less time on updates and more time driving product success.
Zaal: CouR4
13:00 - 13:45
■ From Luck to Certainty: The Science of Making Adoption Predictable
Kaat Declerck, Behavior Director | Co-founder at Human Eyes
Ever launched something great… that no one used? We’ve all been there: you build, you launch, you hope. And sometimes, it sticks… but too often, it doesn’t.
In this talk I’ll show how behavior science can turn guesswork into certainty. And make adoption predictable.
If you’re a product owner, marketer or UX designer who’s tired of “hoping” users will engage, this one’s for you.
13:55 - 14:40
■ No Strategy? No Problem! Real-world tacticts to do product work when your boss didn’t do theirs
Isa Verschraegen, Product Manager at Smooth Sailing
LinkedIn makes us dream of clear strategies, outcome-based roadmaps, aligned stakeholders, and empowered teams. Reality check: most PMs work in the opposite. So what do you do when leadership is still ‘figuring things out’? In this talk, Isa shares battle-tested tactics from the messy middle.
15:15 - 16:00
■ Security-by-Design: PM, it’s your role to design for Trust
Nick Boucart, Sr. Advisor software engineering at Sirris
This talk will present an anonymized real world case where a security issue turned out to be a product management oversight. We'll discuss how, next to understanding what customers value, product management should also educate their team in what customers fear, and how to win their trust.
16:10 - 16:40
■ KEYNOTE
Challenging the product culture in an established organisation: learnings from the trenches
Alexandre Torreele, Energy Solutions & Consumer Centricity at Elia
AuditoRium4
16:40 - 17:10
KEYNOTE
■ Navigating the AI bubble
and what it really means for product builders
Koen Boncquet, Group Product Manager at HubSpot
Bio to be announced
AuditoRium4
17:10 - 17:30
CLOSING REMARKS
TBC
AuditoRium4
17:30 - 19:3O
NETWORKING DRINK WITH FINGERFOOD
AuditoRium4