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Want to level up your engineering career? Product management and ownership skills will help you showcase the business value of IT investments and align technical solutions with company goals. Learn how modern engineering teams—regardless of size or industry—can thrive by adopting a product thinking mindset.
Join Stéphane (Cloud Engineer applying product thinking) and Cat (once engineer, now Product Manager) as they share actionable insights from their journey. You'll discover how embracing product management principles can help your team deliver more impactful results and gain greater ownership of what you build.
What you'll learn:
- How to use product discovery techniques to better understand user needs
- Which metrics matter most when measuring product success
- Practical frameworks for identifying real problems before jumping to solutions
- Tips for bringing product thinking to your engineering role
Interview:
What is your session about, and why is it important for senior software developers? Why should attendees prioritize your session?
Cat: Teams that directly serve end-customers often have a much easier time explaining the value they've delivered in business terms than those focusing on internal users. This is particularly true for Devops, SRE, Cloud or Platform teams where the internal users are developers. Product thinking is all about understanding what will deliver the most value to your users and the business, This talk is "Product thinking 101" for any developer who wants to learn about how to better express their work in terms of the value it delivers, instead of as lines of code!
What are the common challenges developers and architects face in this area?
Cat: There are two really common challenges I see on teams of engineers that are building products for other teams:
- Immediately building the most obvious solution to the first problem we find. This do-something energy is why I love working with DevOps and Platform teams, but it also means you could be missing the forest for the trees! There are so many possible problems to solve, product thinking helps us identify the highest value problem to solve, for not only our users but also the wider business
- Assuming that because we are also engineers, we know what the user experience of our products and solutions should be for our engineering users. People are unique, they have different experiences, skills and preferences and by assuming we know the right way to build something without involving the people who are actually going to use the product, we risk building a UX that they will reject!
What's one thing you hope attendees will implement immediately after your talk?
Cat: I call it out a few times in the talk, but shadowing! This involves going to one of your users or customers, and physically sitting with them as they use your product. You learn so much about their behaviour, which features they rely on, which ones they don't even know exist, and most importantly, why they do things. In a remote world, this is still possible, with all the video tech having incredibly effective screen sharing. I've successfully run shadowing sessions with teams all over the world while sitting in my office!
What makes InfoQ Dev Summit stand out as a conference for senior software professionals?
Cat: InfoQ is one of the best sites to find out what is happening in the world of tech, and has been for a long, long time. Their conferences are no different, and InfoQ Dev Summit is stuffed full of practitioner-led, real-world experiences and examples that are (hopefully!) really relevant to the attendees. It won't just be theorists hand-waving about ideas!
Speaker
Cat Morris
Staff Product Manager @Syntasso | Previously Platform and Enterprise Modernization Specialist @ThoughtWorks
Cat is the Product Manager at Syntasso delivering Kratix, an open-source cloud-native framework for building internal platforms. She has worked in tech for over 10 years, the last 6 have been in Platform Engineering across all kinds of domains. She specialises in bringing Product Mindset to technical teams that serve developers and other internal users - their user experience matters too!
Away from her work endeavours, Cat is an avid plant enthusiast with dozens of houseplants. She also shares her home with Opal, her equally adored and occasionally demanding feline companion.
Find Cat Morris at:
Speaker
Stéphane Di Cesare
Senior Platform Engineer, Platform Experience @DKB | Aspiring Platform-as-Product Specialist | Previously @Accenture and @VMware
Stéphane Di Cesare is a Senior Platform Engineer in the Platform Experience team at the German online bank DKB, where he is helping to increase the adoption of the bank's cloud native platform.
Stéphane is focusing on bridging the gap between engineering and users by making the value of technology clear, and helping bringing a product mindset to the platform.
He has background with technology consulting at Accenture, infrastructure engineering at VMware, and in Sales Engineer, Support Engineer and QA Engineer roles.
