Working Products 2022

In summary

With over 130 participants and speakers, 18 presentations and 6 workshops, we broke all Working Products records this year:-)
We are still quite euphoric about the good mood, the engagement and interactions of all participants and the great feedback we got.
Even though the weather luck let us down a bit for the first time this year, a lot still took place outside.
We were again in the Goldbekhaus in Hamburg and again with the catering of the production school Altona and the decoration of herbs and bee plants.
The special character of Working Products has worked live 2022 again extremely well: Familiar, intensive exchange of experiences between all participants. We are sure that in 2022, too, everyone talked to every other participant at some point.

The format

We went back to the old familiar format of 2 days. This year we held the OpenSpace only on Thursday afternoon and used the second day completely for presentations and workshops.

The lectures

This year, the 18 presentations were roughly divided into the two areas "Product and Team Culture" and "Product Management: Experiences, Tools and Methods". However, the focus was more on the culture topics. There, the interest of the participants was also very high. The presentations on conflict management, coaching attitude for product managers and empathy were definitely very well attended.
As always at Working Products, there was a Speakers Corner after each presentation. Here the participants could talk shop with the speaker for another 30 minutes, ask questions and share experiences. The Speakers Corner was again very well received. Every talk was full and we always had to end the discussion because the next talk was starting.

The workshops

Parallel to the lectures and the Openspace we had 6 workshops in the program. Participants could register in advance. There were so many registrations that we had to draw lots for the places. Especially for the workshop on Stakeholder Management the interest was huge.
The workshops covered the entire range of topics, from technical issues (product strategy, stakeholder management, customer value, event storming) to organizational/team issues (dragon dreaming, change through improv theater). In any case, the feedback from the workshop participants was very positive. Let's do it again next year :-)

OpenSpace

On Thursday afternoon we collected 7 topics for the OpenSpace sessions ranging from "Ethical products" to "Solutions for hybrid working environments". The participants worked in each session for 90 minutes and presented their results later in the afternoon. We got some good insights for each of the session topics. We publish those results in a (hopefully short) while. Stay tuned...

Meditation/Mindfulness

We started both days in the morning with meditation and mindfulness exercises. Plus movement exercises during the lunch break. Meditations and movement exercises were led by Beate Schulte Strathaus (Working Products). Beate co-founded Working Products in 2006 and is a co-organizer of the conference.

Sustainability

Climate protection and sustainability are close to our hearts and we tried to make the conference as sustainable as possible. This year, for example, the barbecue on Thursday evening was purely vegetarian.
On Friday morning, we also had a keynote by Ella Lagé from TheDive about the responsibility of product managers to promote the path to a renewable economy.