London

June 28–29, 2027

New York

September 15–16, 2026

Berlin

November 9–10, 2026

Protecting innovation under pressure: A practical loop for product and engineering teams

The specific leadership moves that work when you're managing a crisis with no prior relationships, no system context, and a hard deadline, and why crisis leadership requires a different playbook entirely.

Speakers: Kabir Sikand

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September 29, 2026
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When teams are under pressure to deliver, innovation is often the first thing to disappear. Roadmaps fill up, urgent requests take over, and product and engineering teams can lose the space to explore better ways of solving important problems.

From a product manager’s vantage point across customer needs, business priorities, and engineering realities, this talk explores how leaders can create the conditions for innovation without losing momentum. We’ll outline in detail a loop your Engineering Leads can use in working with their Product Partner to find the right problems, build the space, time, and constraints needed to let innovation flow, and finally measure and share learnings + impact.

Rather than offering a rigid framework, the talk will share practical ideas for balancing delivery with discovery, and for helping product and engineering teams make better decisions together when priorities, constraints, and expectations keep changing.

What you’ll leave with:

  • A way to tell a real problem from a feature request, so you invest in the few that compound.
  • A method for setting constraints that open up exploration instead of shutting it down, plus a rule for keeping a backlog both flexible and calm.
  • A way to measure innovation work that earns you the space to keep doing it next quarter.