Built to Flex: PM Waterloo Annual Conference 2026
The product landscape changed more in the last year than in the five before it. Scopes widened. Teams shrank. AI flooded the work with infinite output. And through all of it, the operators who thrived didn't out-tool anyone — they kept their fundamentals and found the signal in the noise.
Built to Flex is a one-day conference about exactly that: the durable principles and hard-won judgment that let products — and the people who build them — flex under pressure without losing their core. The tools flex. The fundamentals don't.
Expect a full day of talks, honest practitioner stories, and community, organized around three threads:
The Core — the fundamentals that got more valuable: discovery, problem framing, first principles.
The Shift — adapting to AI, expanding scope, and doing more with less on purpose.
The Signal — judgment, prioritization, and taste in an age of infinite output.
Our keynote, Signal Over Noise, sets the frame for the day: when producing everything is free, knowing what matters is the scarce skill.
Whether your role just doubled, your team just halved, or you're rethinking what product management even means right now — this is the room for product people who bend the plan without breaking the craft.
📍 Catalyst Commons, Waterloo · 🗓 Saturday, September 12, 2026, 9:30 AM – 4:30 PM · $75 · part of Waterloo Tech Week 2026. Ticket includes coffee and lunch. The day will include several networking breaks.
SPEAKER LINE UP:
KEYNOTE
Joseph Fung · Founder · Waterloo Region Entrepreneur Hall of Fame 2023
Signal Over Noise — The cost of building dropped to zero. The cost of picking the wrong direction did not.
TALKS
Jeff Fedor · Founder, Factory Twelve
Put the Whole Problem in the Room — Sales, engineering, and the CEO are each solving a different problem, and each one assumes theirs is the whole thing.
Geoff MacGillivray · Chief Product Officer, Atreides
The Part That Didn't Get Cheaper — "Ship it and iterate" reads differently when a wrong answer misleads an analyst or collapses a case in court.
Chioma Ukariaku · VP Product Management, JPMorgan Chase Paymentech
Building WayFur: When AI Makes Execution Easy, Judgment Becomes the Work — AI got her to a working product fast. Then customer conversations showed the real need was never speed.
Sally Niu · Head of Product, Braintrust · Fireside
Building Your Product Org in the AI Era — She survived an AI-driven layoff that halved her EPD team, rebuilt it, and had to justify every seat to leadership.
Karthik Manoharan · Founder, Loci
Agents Don't Pause — A year building with agents and no engineering team. The surprise wasn't the speed. It was the pause he stopped getting.
Gwen Darling · Senior Product Manager, Fluxon
Flexing to the Job Market — Laid off in May alongside 249 other people. Re-employed in half the time Statistics Canada says it takes. What she actually did.
Kanwar Anand · Product, Strategy & Effectiveness, Sun Life
"So, What?" — Measuring the Benefits of AI — How to walk into the room and build the business case for AI spend, and what tends to work and what doesn't.
LIGHTNING TALKS
Megan Walker · AI Strategy Consultant, Roots to Rise
Brain Fry: The Hidden Cost of Outsourcing the Easy Stuff — AI erased the low-stakes work, and the small mental breaks that came with it. Why your output is up and you're more tired than ever.
Oluwasekemi Oyeniyi · Senior Product Manager, ProductCentered Consulting
The Hidden Cost of AI — Being "AI-ready" takes more than opening a free chatbot. What it actually costs in subscriptions, tools, and learning time.
ONE MORE
Julian Whiting · Fireside — Hiring AI-native teams, and what's already breaking in orgs building fast without guardrails. Title and details coming shortly.
Questions?
heathergawel@gmail.com · pmwaterloo.ca