These Turing Fest tech minds will teach you how to build better products

Building great products is hard. Scaling them is even harder.

That’s why our Build talks at Turing Fest 2025 (7th-8th May, Edinburgh) are designed to give you the practical insights you need to work through challenges head-on- from real leaders who’ve developed the tactics for tackling messy metrics, built smarter AI solutions, and connected digital products with the real world.

Let us introduce you to your BUILD speakers:

🛠️ From Prototypes to Production: Unlocking High-Value AI Use Cases

🎙 Dr. Sharon Zhou, Founder & CEO**, Lamini**

AI adoption is still in its early stages for most organizations. Teams are experimenting with prototypes, but struggling to unlock high-value use cases that will drive measurable business impact. In this keynote, Sharon will discuss how enterprises are moving beyond proof-of-concept to production-ready AI systems. Through real-world examples—ranging from Text-to-SQL and factual reasoning to function calling and code analysis—she will demonstrate how AI is democratizing access to data, enabling automation, and transforming decision-making across industries

🛠️ Get your product team unstuck: how to get technical and non-technical people making the right decisions together

🎙**Ryan Singer,** Author of Shape Up

At the scale-up stage, after engineering and product have grown into separate teams, we find ourselves moving much slower than we want. From product’s perspective, engineering is always log-jammed on things that don’t lead to growth, like bug fixes, infrastructure projects, and rewrites. Engineers would like to build and ship things that move the needle, but product presents ideas as if they’re already solved, without taking technical realities into account.

In this talk, Ryan will identify key moments in the lifecycle of a project where product and engineering can come together and get unblocked. From the first moments, when we need to carve out engineering time to pursue an idea. To the shaping phase, where we surface experience and implementation problems before committing to the wrong approach. And in the building phase, where instead of getting lost in the weeds with hundreds of tickets, we look up and orient ourselves within the same big picture.

🛠️ The End of Software As We Know It

🎙**Paul Adams,** Chief Product Officer**, Intercom**

“Throughout the last decade, we made a name for ourselves at Intercom by sharing our methods for repeatedly delivering successful products. Over the last 12 months, we’ve blown up the entire thing. Our tried and tested ways of working don’t exist anymore. Our org design is fluid. Our product development process is flexible. And yet Fin, our AI Agent, is our fastest ever growing product. We realised that we had to risk it all to survive, and we think you all do too.

It’s a new world. Continuing tried and tested ways of building successful products will lead to inevitable failure. You might not think that makes sense, but it’s the truth. AI isn’t ‘another new technology’. It’s the invention of electricity. Electricity led to a reimagination of every product, and the creation of brand new products and product categories that were previously impossible. Not enough people are truly getting this, and as a result we’re going to see products and companies we love disappear. We’re also going to see new, wonderful, magical products emerge.

Join me in learning how to do this, by learning how to change.”

🛠️ Radically Rethinking Metrics: How Goal-Setting and OKRs are Harmful and What to Do Instead

🎙 Radhika Dutt, Author of Radical Product Thinking

Methodologies for goal-setting including SMART goals and OKRs are so deeply ingrained in our corporate culture and psyche that we never question if they actually work – like a religious concept, we take it on faith that goals are essential for growing a business.

In this thought-provoking talk by the author of Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter, you’ll learn to recognize patterns of how goal-setting goes wrong. But without goals and OKRs, will you and your team be as ambitious, driven, or motivated in what you’re trying to achieve? Spoiler alert: Yes, yes, and yes! You’ll learn about OHLs, a powerful alternative to goal-setting: a framework so you can measure what matters, encourage experimentation and curiosity to drive better results, and ultimately help every team member take ownership of making progress toward your shared vision.

🛠️ Bridging Digital and Physical Products: Vinted’s Journey into Logistics

🎙 Aiste Miskuniene, Senior Director of Product & Engineering**, Vinted Go**

This talk covers Vinted’s journey into logistics and the creation of Vinted Go. Key challenges included delivery speed and engineering innovations: developing carrier tech in four months, addressing warehouse automation issues due C2C specifics, and overcoming the challenges of the physical world (like weather conditions) for building lockers. As a technology-first carrier, we prioritized innovation to overcome these logistics hurdles effectively.

🛠️ Look Ma, No hands! How LLMs Transformed Text to Autonomous Action

🎙 Jonny Brooks-Bartlett, Senior Machine Learning Engineer**, Spotify**

Join ‘Look Ma, No Hands! How LLMs Transformed Text to Autonomous Action,’ a journey through the fascinating evolution of Language Models. Starting with “what actually is a language model?” Jonny will demystify the ‘black box’, tracing the path from the early days of bag of words to the powerful, code-generating agents of today. Discover how these advancements are shaking up industries, with glimpses into real-world applications and the his very own use cases. You’ll explore the practical side of working with LLMs, including a flavour of prompt optimisation and cost considerations, giving you insight into the key factors at play. Get ready for a fun and engaging exploration of more recent LLM capabilities, and learn how we went from ‘bag of words’ to ‘no hands’ coding!

Top tech minds will be speaking at Turing Fest this May, coming to you from across the product, growth, leadership and investment world including:

🎙Head of Forward Deployed Engineering @OpenAI

🎙Chief Product Officer @Intercom

🎙Senior Machine Learning Engineer @Spotify

🎙Chief Marketing Officer @Paddle

🎙Senior Director of Product and Engineering @Vinted Go

🎙Ex-CFO @Shopify

🎙Chief Customer & Revenue Officer @Mixpanel

🎙Chief Product Officer @Picsart

🎙Founder @Stride.VC

🎙Founder & CEO @Lamini

🎙Co-Founder @Ember

🎙Chief Executive Officer @Elliptic

🎙General Partner @Angular Ventures

🎙General Manager @Zoe

🎙Author @Shape Up

🎙Author @Radical Product Thinking

🎙Founder @Aperture

🎙General Manager @Agent.ai

🎙Chief Commercial Officer @Resourcify

🎙CEO & Co-Founder @KOOS.io

🎙Co-Founder @SYSTM

🎙Chief Operating Officer @Simple Online Healthcare

🎙Partner @ Octopus Ventures

🎙Co-Founding Partner @Ada Ventures