My Thoughts on Product at Heart 2025
Woohoo! We’ve just wrapped up the third annual Product at Heart conference. In case you’re new here and haven’t heard, Product at Heart is the annual conference for curious product people I co-organize here in Hamburg with Arne Kittler.
If you’d like to learn more about the event and its programming, you can explore the blog post recaps, video archives, and the photo stream over on the official Product at Heart website.
But here on my blog, I’d like to share my perspective as a product leadership coach and active part of the worldwide product community and as a conference organizer/curator. You can read more about my thoughts on the inaugural event here.
The intense pressure—and reward—of creating an event of this scale
Impressions of the Leadership Event to give you a sense of the intimacy and good vibes. And yes, Arne and I have made it a bit of a tradition to stand on the counter to welcome everyone to the opening lunch.
As you might imagine, organizing a three-day event (including the Leadership Event, a day of workshops, and the main conference) for 1,000 global attendees in my home city of Hamburg brings its share of stresses. I can’t help feeling nervous because I know that the pressure is on to deliver a great experience to everyone—attendees, speakers, sponsors, vendors, and our team.
This means being a host for so many people for so many days. Some speakers arrive a week before the event and some extend their time in Hamburg for a few days after. So it’s essentially like celebrating a wedding—just bigger, longer, and with many more events, venues, and guests who have paid to be there!
But the thrill of being able to pull it off and seeing the magic that happens on stage, behind the scenes, and between attendees makes it all worth it.
Speaking of behind the scenes: This is a backstage view of our main stage, giving you a little glimpse of the team who helps make the speakers look and sound their best.
The call to be a curator…
When Arne and I began to imagine the potential of Product at Heart, one value that was non-negotiable for us was curation. We knew that we didn’t want to put out an open call for speaker applications or simply rely on a copy and paste approach to creating the agenda—our goal was always to select the themes and speakers that we felt were most meaningful to our audience. We were directly inspired by Martin Eriksson, who took this approach when he was curating Mind the Product Conference (#mtpcon).
This year’s conference themes were based on what we think the product community cares about right now. They were:
True Change: Case Studies in Product Transformation
AI in Practice: Insights for the Road Ahead
Vision to Value: Strategy in Action
Metrics to Meaning: Data-Driven Product Decisions
And for the Leadership Event, we focused on resilience, transformation, and leading with your heart and soul.
Once we decide on the event themes, we don’t accept traditional speaker pitches or calls for papers. Instead we get to know potential speakers over time, either from following them on social media or meeting them within the larger product community. This means we have a pretty good idea of their speaker personality before we even consider adding them to the lineup. If you’re curious to learn more about this process, check out the “Speaker” section on our event FAQ page.
But once we’ve selected the lineup, we put a lot of faith in our speakers. We trust that they will show up and deliver a great talk that is valuable to our audience. We don’t review their talks ahead of time (unless they ask us to). This means we’re never fully sure what to expect before people step on stage. But we believe a lot of beauty arises from that uncertainty, and that was especially the case this year. Among the 2025 speakers, we saw a group that connected really well and almost immediately formed their own Community of Practice.
And the challenge of knowing when to say no
Arne and I on the main stage delivering our opening remarks and introducing the conference’s overarching topic of curation. And a glimpse of the hustle and bustle of the main conference hall between sessions.
For 2025, curation was not only our task in preparation for the conference, but at some point we realized it was important enough to become a recurring topic for the conference itself. In our opening remarks, Arne and I shared that curation is based on how we choose, what we create, and, importantly, what we leave out. When we curate—whether as conference organizers or product people—we make a choice about what kind of world we want to help build, what we want to amplify, and what we refuse to normalize.
Product at Heart keynote speaker, author, and host of the House of Beautiful Business (another wonderfully curated conference I had the honor of attending earlier this year) Tim Leberecht also illustrated this concept beautifully as he introduced us to the five personas of the curator: the cleaner, the bouncer, the renegade, the fan, and the algorithm.
This talk was one that resonated with me personally. I find it really hard to take on the bouncer persona because I want to please everyone, but of course that’s not how you curate an amazing event. So it was a perfect reminder that saying no to people who aren’t a good fit because of the topic or vibe that they’d bring—even if I like them and don’t want to hurt their feelings—is a critical part of my job as a curator.
I’m brimming with gratitude
Finally, I’m full of gratitude for all the attendees who came with their curiosity and open minds, all the volunteers who helped the event run smoothly (and even made sure I had throat lozenges when my voice was threatening to give out the morning of the main conference!), and everyone else who made the event what it was. After three years of running the event on our own, Arne and I can really feel how the mix of attendees has changed and we’ve begun to attract more of the people who are coming specifically for the Product at Heart vibe.
Here I am with community friends and our moderation team—I’m grateful to all of them!
If you’d like to join us, we’ll be doing it all again from June 24–26, 2026. Tickets will go on sale this autumn. If you’d like to stay informed of future Product at Heart updates, make sure to follow us on LinkedIn for all the latest news.