About PCA34 (Un)conference
Join hundreds of product managers, designers, marketers, founders, and builders for PCA34, Austin’s 34th ProductCamp (Un)Conference.​
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Enjoy a full day of peer-led sessions, networking, and real-world insights—plus coffee, refreshments, and a boxed lunch, all provided.
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Learn from peers across product, marketing, design, engineering, and beyond
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Pitch your own session or vote for topics you want to hear
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Expand your skills and your network — whether you're a newcomer or a product veteran
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Sessions are just 30 minutes, giving you more chances to engage and connect​
About sessions
As a collaborative, user-organized (un)conference, ProductCamp Austin relies on product people like you to submit sessions and share product knowledge!
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Only ONE session proposal per presenter is permitted
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Sessions are limited to 30 minutes, including Q&A
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On the morning of the un-conference, you’ll have 30 seconds to pitch your session to voters
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After pitches, everyone will vote for their favorite sessions
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The top sessions with the most votes from the community will present throughout the day
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If you have questions, email sessions@productcampaustin.org
Submitted sessions
Product Quiz - Jeopardy Style
Category: Product Management, Product Marketing | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Workshop
As product management continues to evolve in the AI era, we present an engaging, interactive, fun, collaborative and educational product quiz in Jeopardy format. We will cover a range of topics and latest trends on product management, marketing, AI and more. Adhoc teams will be formed just before session start. Winning team grabs a cool prize!
The Human-AI Gap: Optimizing Humans, Not Just Outputs
By: Gillian Stolshek
Category: Product Management | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Workshop
AI is the most philosophical tool we've ever made. And we're building it backwards. Every AI product optimizes the output: faster drafts, better code, smarter recommendations. But no one's optimizing the human using the tool. The result? Cognitive overload, decision paralysis, and AI that makes us productive on paper but exhausted in practice. This session flips that. You'll see a live demonstration of AI infrastructure designed to meet humans where they actually are cognitively, not where they wish they were or where tools assume they should be. We'll build a personalized AI agent from scratch in real time with a volunteer from the audience. You'll walk away understanding what it looks like to build AI that augments human cognition instead of replacing it.
How Product Marketers Can Avoid AI-washing
By: Gina Rosenthal
Category: Product Marketing | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Presentation
Are you a product marketer responsible for bringing an AI-powered product to market? Are you worrying that you don't know what AI really is? This session will break down the basics of AI in plain English, so you won't have to rely on buzzwords to make your product pop. You'll walk away feeling more confident in your ability to differentiate your product and avoid AI-washing. It's a safe space for non-experts, all questions welcome! • Here's what we will talk about: • The three types of AI: Narrow AI, AGI, and ASI. Plus real world examples. • Key categories of Narrow AI: reactive, predictive, generative, descriptive, and diagnostic. • How to tell whether your product uses generative AI or traditional machine learning. • Is it truly AI, or just AI washing? • Practical tips and tools for product marketers. • Live Q&A.
Elevate your API game — bring the Swagger back
By: Adwait Joshi
Category: Product Management, Other | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Presentation
Build rock-solid API foundations. Orchestrate platforms. Power seamless integrations. Get your stack AI-ready with MCP.
Reverse Engineering Imagination
By: Stephen Schaefer
Category: Product Management, User Experience | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Presentation
Your roadmap gets built at your desk. Your brilliant pivot idea? That came in the shower. You know this frustration: breakthrough thinking never happens during sprint planning. It happens while you're driving, walking the dog, or zoning out in line for coffee. Why? After 25 years creating patented products, Stephen Schaefer reverse-engineered why the best ideas ambush us away from our desks—and discovered it's not random. Your brain has two modes: one builds features, the other invents them. Most of people live in mode one and wonder why they're stuck. In 30 minutes, Stephen reveals which mode generates the "Aha" moments, why your team's endless ideation sessions produce mediocre ideas, and the stupidly simple technique that lets you trigger breakthrough product thinking in your next coffee break. Stop scheduling creativity. Start engineering it.
From ROI to IOR: Aligning Inputs, Outputs, and Results for Product Managers in the AI Era
By: Ahmed Zouhair
Category: Product Management, Careers | Target Audience: Entrepreneurs | Format: Presentation
AI, shifting priorities, and constant feature pressure have made product leadership more complex than ever. Product Managers are expected to deliver faster outcomes while navigating uncertainty, competing priorities, and limited resources. Many organizations focus heavily on ROI after the fact—or chase vague "10x growth" ideas—without first creating alignment between the inputs, execution systems, and outcomes required to produce those results. This session introduces the IOR Framework — Inputs, Outputs, Results, a practical model that helps Product Managers create strategic alignment between product investments, team execution, and measurable business outcomes. Attendees will learn how to align product priorities (Inputs), cross-functional execution (Outputs), and measurable impact (Results) to drive stronger product performance. Participants will leave with a clear, actionable framework to improve prioritization, strengthen team alignment, and connect product decisions directly to customer value, adoption, and business growth in an AI-driven environment.
The 30 minute hackathon: redefining the product process with Vibe coding
By: JD Piquard
Category: Product Management, User Experience | Target Audience: Advanced | Format: Case Study
What happens when anyone on the product team can go from idea to working prototype in 30 minutes — without writing traditional code or waiting on engineering? We'll walk through a complete vibe coding workflow: from initial user research, to generating multiple UX concepts, to a functional prototype using tools like Claude Code and Replit/Bolt — all in a single sitting. Then we'll cover how to take that prototype into stakeholder alignment and engineering handover without losing momentum. This isn't theoretical. We'll share a process we use at our company, along with patterns we're seeing work across teams at startups and enterprises adopting AI-assisted product development. You'll leave with a clear framework you can try on your next project — and a realistic sense of where vibe coding fits (and doesn't) in your design and development process.
From Idea to Working Prototype in an Afternoon: AI-Powered Discovery
Category: Product Management, User Experience | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Presentation
What if your discovery phase didn't take weeks? AI tools have fundamentally changed the speed of product exploration. It's compressing research, prototyping, and requirements into a single loop you can run in an afternoon. In this session, I'll walk through a real AI-augmented SDLC workflow used in production: starting with Claude for R&D and synthesis, moving into Figma Make for rapid AI-generated prototypes, layering in your design system, and then using Figma MCP + Claude Code for a working prototype.
Leading From Where You Are
By: Paul Young
Category: Product Management, Careers | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Presentation
In a discussion dominated by AI, it's easy to lose sight of the human side of managing products. Your ability to succeed depends on your ability to inspire and move others to action. Exercising your leadership is key, but how do you get there? In "Leading From Where You Are," ProductCamp Austin Founder and Pragmatic Instructor Paul Young will share a framework for understanding leadership in a new way. You will understand and explore your leadership persona, and leave with actionable next-steps to improve your ability to act as a leader within your organization, regardless of your career tenure. Where do you fit? Are you a Visionary Architect or Grounded Operator? Maybe you are the Empathetic Coach? Learn how you can amplify your strengths to become the leader you want to be, and join to spend a few minutes reflecting on your most important asset: You!
Your Roadmap Heard It Through the Grapevine
By: Jake McKee
Category: Product Management, User Experience | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Workshop
Most product teams can name their personas, cite their NPS score, and quote their last user survey. Almost none can tell you the last time someone on the team had a real, unfiltered conversation with a customer. That gap is not a data problem. It is a debt problem, and it is quietly driving every roadmap fight, every missed launch, and every feature nobody uses. It is hard to build great products with secondhand insights, and most teams are running on exactly that. In this hands-on workshop, you will score your own team's Conversation Debt live, name the specific gap costing you the most right now, and leave with one real conversation committed to out loud before your next sprint. One lucky attendee also wins a free live mini-debt assessment session with me plus an exclusive t-shirt.
The Fist 👊: Building High-Performing Product Teams
By: Ian Brand
Category: Product Management, Careers | Target Audience: Advanced | Format: Workshop
Marc Randolph, co-founder of Netflix, once said, "Stop telling me your company is like family... it's not. At Netflix, for example, we never thought of ourselves as a family. We always considered ourselves more like a sports team." Products more often die from suicide than murder. To succeed, teams need more than cross-functional collaboration. They need alignment and a shared mission. But that is easier said than done when functions, incentives, and egos collide. In this talk, I'll share the mechanisms I've used to build high-performing product teams, drawing from my experience as a former athlete and coach. I'll also show how I used these mechanisms to help turn around a team in a toxic environment. This talk is for anyone who leads or works on a team and wants that team to succeed.
Claude for Product Managers: Automate the Work. Elevate Your Impact
By: Dan Corbin & Pavan Valluri
Category: Product Management, Careers | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Presentation
Product Managers are buried in work that slows them down and limits their impact. AI is changing that. In this session, Dan Corbin and Pavan Valluri show how Claude helps PMs automate routine tasks, accelerate analysis, and focus on higher-value decisions. You will see how Claude Desktop, Cowork, Skills, and Claude Code support real PM workflows across discovery, planning, and execution. This session is practical and example-driven. You will leave with proven workflows and techniques you can apply immediately. PMs who adopt these approaches will move faster and increase their impact. These are the capabilities that will help you stand out in the job market and accelerate your career growth. TAKEAWAYS INCLUDE: - Automating routine PM work with Claude - Real workflows using Desktop, Cowork, Skills, and Code - Faster analysis and better decision-making - Shifting from doing the work to increasing your impact
Monetize What You Know: AI‑Powered Systems for Courses, Templates, and Automation Workflows
By: Chris Lopez
Category: Product Marketing, Careers | Target Audience: Entrepreneurs | Format: Workshop
Discover how to turn your professional expertise into a portfolio of profitable digital assets using AI. In this fast‑paced session, you'll learn practical systems for transforming what you already know into sellable courses, templates, and automation workflows—without needing to be a designer, creator, or full‑time entrepreneur. We'll break down a universal framework for extracting your knowledge, validating demand, and rapidly building high‑quality products using tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Notion, and Make.com. You'll see how AI acts as a creative partner to accelerate production, streamline workflows, and help you launch faster than ever. Whether you're a product manager, developer, academic, marketer, or entrepreneur, you'll walk away with clear pathways to monetize your skills and create scalable digital assets you can sell on platforms like Shopify, Gumroad, and more.
Shipping on Someone Else's Roadmap: Lessons from Platform Ecosystems
By: Katie Campbell
Category: Product Management, User Experience | Target Audience: Advanced | Format: Case Study
Building on platforms like Salesforce, Oracle, or Shopify changes everything about product management, yet most PM advice assumes you control your own roadmap and user experience. In this session, I'll share lessons from building products inside the Salesforce ecosystem across multiple companies, where some of the biggest adoption challenges came not from our product, but from the platform itself. We'll explore different strategies teams use to navigate platform dependency: from embracing the platform and turning customers into experts, to abstracting it away and rebuilding the experience outside of it. I'll share real examples, tradeoffs, and what actually works in practice. Let's discuss how product managers can create ownership, drive adoption, and make smart decisions when critical parts of the product are outside their control. If your roadmap depends on another company's roadmap, this session is for you.
Building a Software Startup in 7 days from 0 to Monetization
By: Matt McGuire
Category: Product Management, Other | Target Audience: Entrepreneurs | Format: Case Study
If you had the time, the know-how, and the skills to build and release the product during a period with the highest possible demand, would you do it? That's exactly what Matt McGuire did. Starting from 0, Matt built, shipped, and monetized BogeyBattle.com in a 7-day sprint during Masters Week 2026. Attend to learn more about how he did it, fell flat on his face in some areas, and exceeded in others. If you're curious about building, joining, or running a startup. Or just want to hear how he did it, this session is for you!
From 3 Agents to Agentic Enterprise: How to lead AI Transformation Journey
By: Igor Bobryshev
Category: Product Management | Target Audience: Advanced | Format: Presentation
Most organizations have run AI pilots. Few have turned them into reliable, enterprise-grade operations. What separates the two? Agentic AI — AI that doesn't just respond, but plans, executes, and improves across complex workflows. In this session, we'll unpack SoftServe's Agentic Catalyst framework: a structured approach to moving enterprises from fragmented AI experiments to coordinated, autonomous agent systems. We'll cover how product and technology teams can identify the right processes for agentic automation, what it takes to build the AI foundation that supports it, and how to accelerate adoption without sacrificing control or governance. Whether you're a PM steering AI product strategy or a founder deciding where to place your bets, you'll leave with a clear mental model — and a practical lens for where agentic AI creates durable business value versus where it creates expensive noise.
Double Referrals By Improving Your Customer Experience
By: Karl Staib
Category: User Experience | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Workshop
Double Referrals By Improving Your Customer Experience shows leaders how to turn everyday customer interactions into a repeatable system for trust, loyalty, and word of mouth. Using Karl Staib's Magnetic Momentum Method, this session helps teams clarify what customers need, locate friction in the journey, simplify the experience, and build systems people will actually use. Karl also shows how AI can strengthen the customer experience by helping teams capture insights, personalize communication, and respond more consistently without losing the human touch. A key part of the session is learning how to gather meaningful customer feedback, use it to improve what matters most, and turn great experiences into stories customers naturally share with others. If you want more referrals, better retention, and a stronger reputation, this session gives you a practical way to build it.
From Big Tech (Amazon) to an AI Native Startup (Mia): Lessons I Learned Thus Far
By: Nick Ivanecky
Category: Product Management, Careers | Target Audience: Advanced | Format: Presentation
Big Tech gave me playbooks. A native AI startup threw them out the window. In this session, I'll share what it actually looks like to operate as a Senior PM inside an AI-native organization — where tasks are the atoms, speed kills roadmaps, and AI is your designer, your writer, and your sales enablement team. We'll cover how to structure your work from tasks to deliverables to projects, how to choose the right AI tools without a technical background, and how the PM relationship with engineering and design fundamentally shifts when the pace of change never slows down. Whether you're curious about making the leap or already in the thick of it, you'll walk away with a practical lens on what it takes to thrive — not just survive — in the AI era.
4 Keys to Embedding Innovation in your Team Culture
By: Scott Szenasi
Category: Careers, Other | Target Audience: Advanced | Format: Workshop
How do you get teams to work together better? To improve collaboration, innovation, and performance? A few years ago, my team delivered a full-day training class on improving collaboration. Afterwards, my mentor asked me, "Was your goal to show them that YOU are experts? Or help THEM become experts?" I learned, if you want performance improvement concepts to stick, the delivery is just as important as the content. Think about it: you have a great product, but you still have to get it to your customers. My workshops improve team innovation by creating better habits around trust, conflict, and leadership. The specific content will vary based on an assessment of each team's needs. But the delivery model will not change. In this talk, I will teach you principles I learned developing leadership training at NASA and UnitedHealth Group. These principles will help you achieve better team performance, productivity, and profitability.
How Personalized AI Can Transform Your First 90 Days on the Job
By: Jon Ulloa
Category: Product Management, Careers | Target Audience: Advanced | Format: Case Study
Remember your first week at a new job? You got a login, a Slack invite, and 150 things to figure out while somehow doing the actual job. Now add 40 AI tools, half of which will be obsolete before you finish onboarding. The fire hose just got a lot bigger. I spent months researching this problem and the data surprised me. Half of all enterprise salespeople identify as neurodiverse, and they're the team every company needs ramped up fastest. Yet every tool built to help them assumes they're not. What if AI could actually adapt to how someone's brain works instead of handing everyone the same playbook? This session walks through what I found in discovery, a personalized AI job coach prototype, and a bigger question for every PM, UX, and engineer in the room: who are we really building for?
The Product Management Collapse: The Rise of the AI Orchestrator
By: Mark Stephan
Category: Product Management, Careers | Target Audience: Entrepreneurs | Format: Workshop
AI is collapsing the cost and time required to build products—turning product managers into builders and entrepreneurs. This session explores the rise of the AI Orchestrator: a new type of product leader who can design, build, and launch products independently, and what this shift means for teams, companies, and careers.
STAR Isn't Just for Interviews: Using Structured Storytelling to Drive Alignment
By: Ross Weems
Category: Product Management | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Presentation
In this session, we'll explore how Situation-Task-Action-Result thinking can be applied to everyday product work: writing clearer PRDs, making the case for roadmap trade-offs, onboarding stakeholders to complex problems, and communicating decisions after the fact. When you lead with context before conclusions, something changes — people stop debating what you decided and start engaging with why. We'll use real examples from enterprise B2B environments where misalignment is expensive, stakeholders are numerous, and the "why" behind a decision matters as much as the decision itself. You'll leave with a simple habit shift that makes your communication more persuasive, your documentation more durable, and your stakeholder relationships stronger.
What Snacking in Star Trek Teaches Us About Building with Generative AI
By: Dan Zentgraf
Category: Product Management, User Experience | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Presentation
Why is building with Generative AI so often like ordering from a first-generation Star Trek replicator? Because you ask for a "perfect" feature, but could end up with a bland, generic commodity. In this session, we explore the intersection of 24th-century food synthesis and modern LLM product development. We'll dive into the "Flavor Problem," analyzing why most AI products fail to move beyond basic functionality toward a definitive "Good." By examining the molecular blueprints of Starfleet snacks, we'll uncover three critical lessons: the necessity of precision in human intent, the hidden biases of a model's training paradigm, and the art of engineering within strict resource constraints. Join us to learn how to move past "vibe coding" and start building AI products that people actually want to consume.
How I Vibe Coded the Voting & Scheduling App for ProductCamp Austin — And What Product Managers Can Learn
By: Tom Evans
Category: Product Management | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Case Study
At ProductCamp Austin, we faced a familiar problem: great sessions, messy scheduling. Voting worked (mostly), but turning that into a coherent schedule was painful. So I built a simple web app to handle both—capturing votes and automatically generating a session schedule. This session isn't about the tool—it's about the mindset behind building it. Using this real-world example, we'll explore "vibe coding" for product managers: rapidly translating intent into working solutions without over-engineering. You'll see how to frame problem, iterate quickly, and balance scrappy execution with meaningful outcomes. We'll cover what worked, what failed, and what I'd do differently—plus how non-engineering PMs can leverage modern tools to build, test, and deliver value faster. If you've ever been stuck between planning a product and doing, this session will help you close that gap.
From Enterprise PM to Solo Founder: What Translates, What Doesn't, and What Drove First Revenue
By: Russ Sadrieff
Category: Product Management, Product Marketing | Target Audience: Entrepreneurs | Format: Ask the Expert
This session covers the honest arc: what I unlearned from big tech, what I carried forward, and what finally drove first revenue — one year in. After 10+ years leading product at Dell and Visa, I left — no team, no safety net. My first startup with co-founders failed. That failure became my real technical education: shipping solo, finding early customers, validating ideas faster than any sprint cycle I'd run. But enterprise PM wasn't dead weight. Structured problem framing, market and persona identification, and customer conversations translated directly into sharper positioning and better research — keeping me out of the "building for nobody" trap. This session isn't about the tool—it's about the mindset behind building it. Using this real-world example, we'll explore "vibe coding" for product managers: rapidly translating intent into working solutions without over-engineering. You'll see how to frame problem, iterate quickly, and balance scrappy execution with meaningful outcomes. We'll cover what worked, what failed, and what I'd do differently—plus how non-engineering PMs can leverage modern tools to build, test, and deliver value faster. If you've ever been stuck between planning a product and doing, this session will help you close that gap.
Landing a PM role in 2026
Category: Product Management, Careers | Target Audience: Essentials | Format: Panel Discussion
This will be a hybrid presentation/panel focusing on navigating the PM job market in 2026. Edwin has built skills and a workflow between Claude, Notion and others that automates a lot of the job discovery process through to networking- he'll spend the first few minutes talking through what he created and is sharing for the PM community. Then, we'll move to focus the majority of time on a panel.
All are welcome! Whether you are trying to break into the product world (product, ux, ui, data, dev, marketing, etc.) or are a seasoned veteran, we can all learn from one another!
