Programme Ghent
Hosted by
Co-organised by
Generously sponsored by
09:30 - 10:00
Foyer4
WELCOME DRINK
Claim your spot for the break-outs
10:00 - 10:15
Aula4
WELCOME TALK
SIRRIS
Ludwig De Locht
Business Unit Manager Digital at Sirris
THE PRODUCT CONSORTIUM
Bjorn Vuylsteker
Co-Founder and CPO at WeGroup
MODERATOR
SIRRIS
Karl Verhelst
Business Development and Innovation at Sirris
10:15 - 12:00
Aula4
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
BIZZY
Hendrik Keeris
Co-Founder & CEO
Finding Product-Market Fit on Moving Ground
Three years ago, product market fit was hard. Today it feels like trying to hit a moving target. We started Bizzy to help sales teams find the right companies to sell to. Then AI happened. Agents happened. So we built — fast, and always toward the future. Until we realized we'd stopped asking why customers came to us in the first place. The hardest product decision isn't what to build next. It's what to stop chasing.
10:50 - 11:20
SCALING STAGE
PERIPASS
Matti Desmet
Co-Founder & VP Product
Scaling sideways: launching a second product line
After years of building a single product, we launched a second one, which in many ways meant starting from zero again. I'll tell the story, from the first internal argument about whether to do it at all, through six months of building, to our first 10,000 users. Including the good, the bad and the ugly.
11:25 - 12:00
MATURITY STAGE
LANSWEEPER
Maarten Saeys
Chief Product Officer
Continued Growth Through Choosing and Changing
Growing past your first product-market fit comes down to a handful of choices, and each one forces change far beyond the product. Lansweeper was ten years old and already loved when a change of ownership put us on a much longer clock. What followed was scale, then new motions on the same core technology. We walk through the good calls and the bad ones, and how owning the technology, IP and data underneath meant AI became a tailwind instead of a threat.
12:00 - 13:00
Foyer4
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 - Physical 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: Aula4
13:00 - 13:45
When software starts doing the work
Philipp Pohlmann - CPO at ML6
AI is changing more than how products are built. It is rewriting the product company. Product management is collapsing as a translation layer while engineers, designers, and product leaders converge into product builders. Enterprise AI cannot be sold and onboarded; deployment moves closer to the core, pulling software companies towards service and outcome-based economics. As systems become more autonomous, the interface to work moves from tasks and workflows towards objectives. Drawing on what we are learning building AI systems at ML6, Philipp Pohlmann will explore three contrarian views on how AI changes our teams, business models, and nature of work.
13:55 - 14:40
Kill the Billable Hour Before Someone Kills It for You
Sara Larsson - Head of Product at AZETS (Sweden)
What a 500-year-old industry taught me about product, AI, and what a human is actually worth.
No one pays for a film by the hour. A brilliant two-hour film and a terrible one cost the same — you're paying for whether it was good, not how long it took. And yet accountants, payroll consultants and advisors still sell their work on a model that's barely moved in 500 years.
Six months ago, Sara walked into Azets, 9,000 people, no engineers, no sprints, to build product where the people are the product, and AI is automating away the exact hours the business bills for.
This is the story from inside the transition, while it's still happening: what's already cracking, what she got wrong, and why the billable hour is finished — with or without your permission.
15:15 - 16:00
From two wrong turns to a #1 Product Launch
Simon Logghe - Co Founder & CEO at ADOMATE
Before starting Adomate two years ago, he was Managing Director at ML6. The Ghent-based platform that turns performance data, competitor ads, and consumer signals into on-brand ad creative at scale — combining generative AI with supervised machine learning. Simon will take you through the full journey from day one to today: the wins, the fails, and the learnings he wishes someone had handed him at the start.
Zaal: Multimediazaal
13:00 - 13:45
Feeding the Dragon: Product Management in a Looped Development World
Petra Tant - VP Product Strategy, Content Operations & DAM at APRIMO
Development is shifting to continuous loops — and feeding that process is like feeding a hungry dragon: it changes everything about how you work and how you organise your teams. At Aprimo, we are in the middle of figuring this out. In this session, Petra shares what they are learning right now: where old PM practices break down, the organisational friction points they are hitting, and how they are navigating the chaos. Not a playbook — a real-time look at what it takes when the pace of development changes everything.
15:15 - 16:00
Building your first AI product: Lessons on what not to do and what finally worked
Sonal Aggarwal - Head of AI at TEAMLEADER
What does it really take to build an AI product. What does AI product strategy even mean and how do you know if you are setup for success. I will give a very honest view of what does not work and how did we get to a successful AI product with 86% adoption and above 50% stickiness in less than 6 months.
13:55 - 14:40
Positioning a Monitoring Portfolio: How Supplier Analysis Connects Go-to-Market to Product Needs
Simon De Rijcke - Portfolio Lead at FLUVES
A merger of two start-ups delivered the critical mass to scale — but scaling demands a disciplined view of where to play and what to build. For three families of distributed monitoring solutions for critical infrastructure, Simon designed an analysis framework spanning market sizing, competitive positioning and monetisation. In markets where suppliers double as competitors, supplier analysis becomes the hinge between positioning, go-to-market and product requirements. A practitioner's account of structuring the work and letting it land across a multi-product portfolio — mistakes and all.
Zaal: Cour4/Jardin4
13:00 - 13:45
When Intelligence Becomes Buyable — What to sell when AI sells thinking
Wim Codenie & Nick Boucart - Senior Advisors Digital Business & Software Engineering and ICT at SIRRIS
AI makes reasoning and intelligence a cheap, buyable commodity , impacting both the product and the services revenue of scaleups at once. In this talk we show why adopting AI is necessary but can never differentiate you. We discuss what becomes scarce when intelligence is abundant: governed data, accountability, unique cross-customer insight, and trust. We show where your company is exposed, sketch possible futures, and end with a capability model for AI adaptation.
13:55 - 14:40
Great product managers burn out first (and why it's built that way)
Edita Dermontaité - Founder at New North, Fractional Chief Product Officer at TurnUp, Product Strategist at StarApps
The product managers who burn out aren't the weak ones. They're the ones who care deeply, drive through ambiguity and take full ownership. In other words: the good ones.
Edita burned out twice. Both times she read it as personal failure, until she found the research showing that roles where high demands meet more accountability than authority are the most reliable burnout generators we know of. Product management fits that description almost perfectly.
This talk is about what burnout looks like from the inside, the patterns she only recognised afterwards, and why the qualities that get you hired are the ones that break you. And what you can actually do about it, as a team and as a PM.
15:15 - 16:00
AI Just Made Your Feature Factory Faster — Why faster product development needs deeper discovery
Guy Van Wijmeersch - Strategic Designer / Partner at SWEETSPOT
AI didn't create the Build Trap. It removed the speed limit.
Teams can now prototype a request before anyone questions it. Building the wrong thing is as fast as building the right thing — and with Physical AI, a weak assumption doesn't just waste a sprint. It moves machines.
Guy makes the case for design thinking as the counterweight: judgment before development.
16:15 - 17:10
Aula4
KEYNOTE
No Roadmap, No Problem
Less structure. more product.
Maarten De Schuymer, VP Product at Aikido Security
Rigid roadmaps are a bet that you know the future. Aikido bets on reading the signals and moving on them faster than anyone else. I'll unpack what "flexible over rigid" looks like day to day: the calls we made to keep shipping at startup speed while scaling. And what that speed means for building developer-first security, in an age where software itself is changing faster than any roadmap can track.
Maarten De Schuymer is VP Product at Aikido Security, a cybersecurity unicorn helping development teams secure their code, cloud and workstations. He joined Aikido at the very beginning, when it was just a handful of people, and has helped scale the product and team ever since, proving that the same flexible, low-process approach that works for five people can still work past a unicorn valuation. With 10+ years of experience spanning product management and UX design, and a background in neuropsychology, he cuts straight through the noise to find the core problem worth solving.
17:10 - 17:15
Aula4
CLOSING REMARKS
SIRRIS
Ludwig De Locht
Business Unit Manager Digital at Sirris
THE PRODUCT CONSORTIUM
Bjorn Vuylsteker
Co-Founder and CPO at WeGroup
17:15 - 18:00
NETWORKING DRINK WITH FINGERFOOD
Foyer4