Opening keynote: the room sets the agenda

Rhea Kulkarni opened by asking how many people had sat through a conference talk that was really a recruiting ad. Most hands went up. Her point was that a programme committee picks talks that look good on a poster, while the people in the room know which problems are actually hard right now.

An unconference flips that. Nobody is booked in advance; the room pitches topics in the morning and votes with its feet. She called it the most honest agenda you'll ever see, because empty rooms tell you what nobody cares about.

Her advice on pitching was blunt: bring the mess, not the case study. A half-formed problem with real constraints (a deadline, a budget, a stubborn stakeholder) makes a better session than a polished success story, because the room can actually help.

She suggested a simple test before pitching. If you could write it up as a blog post today, it's solved, so don't pitch it. If it's keeping you up at night, that's the session.

The middle of the talk was Northwind's own story. Two years ago they had a colour-coded quarterly roadmap that nobody believed, including the people who made it. They threw it out and moved to six-week bets, each with a single metric and a named owner.

The result surprised the leadership team. Northwind shipped about half as many launches last year, and retention went up. Rhea was clear she didn't think that was a coincidence: fewer, sharper bets meant each one got finished properly, and teams stopped shipping things just to hit a date.

An audience member asked whether agents were writing their specs now. Rhea said partly. Agents draft the first version of every spec at Northwind: the edge cases, the open questions and a test plan. That saves the PM most of a day.

But ownership doesn't move. A named PM reads every draft with a red pen, cuts what's wrong and signs the bottom of it. She said the failure she's seen elsewhere is teams treating the agent's draft as the decision, and nobody being able to explain why a call was made.

She closed with the logistics for the day: pitching at 10:30, the board filling by 11:00, and sessions running in every room after that. She reminded people of the law of two feet. If a session isn't working for you, walk out and find one that is. It isn't rude; it's the point.