Sessions for Marble Hall on 2026-05-27
10:00 - 10:20 (20 mins)
Amit Paunikar
The silent rewrite: How AI rewrote the PM job while nobody was looking
While the industry debates whether AI will rewrite the product manager's job, the best already moved on. The rewrite happened, quietly, through practitioners porting human craft into AI's strongest parts. Credible product voices are already saying it on record: the information mover PM is becoming a dinosaur; the judgment-and-taste PM is being paid more. This is a field report from inside that future!
Author Bio: Amit has been doing product since "AI" meant "search relevance" — 15+ years in the US (ad-matching at Yahoo, search & video at Google, co-founding Mediastudio, acquired by Deluxe) and now from Prague, where he's worked on Skype and Teams Meetings at Microsoft. He is currently leading a team on Copilot quality and evals, holds four patents, and believes most product debates end with a good chart.
10:20 - 10:40 (20 mins)
Šimon Zámečník
When AI becomes your data therapist
AI today is no longer just about automation or experimentation. When used correctly, it helps companies better understand their data, uncover hidden patterns, and make higher-quality business decisions. This talk focuses on practical approaches to data processing that drive business growth. Through real-world examples, we will show how we address these challenges at ui42 and how AI enables us to quickly and effectively evaluate ROI, analyse product margins, predict inventory needs, and process extremely large volumes of inconsistent data from multiple sources. The goal of the talk is to demonstrate that AI does not have to be a complex experiment, but a practical tool that brings clarity to data and turns insights into real business decisions.
Author Bio: Šimon is an experienced technology leader and long-standing member of the ui42 team, where he has worked since 2007. Before joining ui42, he gained hands-on experience in software development and IT infrastructure, working with technologies including C, C++, Java, and PHP. At ui42, he grew from a web developer into the lead developer of the BUXUS e-commerce platform, now powering hundreds of international projects across markets from Japan to the United States. Today, he works as a Technical Architect, focusing on system design, solution architecture, and building sustainable development practices while mentoring and growing the engineering team.
11:00 - 11:40 (40 mins)
Benjamin Rancic
How to get design right by doing it wrong?
What if the usual advice on designing UX, creating products and building teams is all wrong? What if the key to success is to ignore your users? To make products intentionally harder to use? To launch prototypes before they are ready? Or to purposefully build incompatible teams? How about doing what your stakeholders explicitly don’t want to do?
Author Bio: Benjamin is a design director, currently leading creative teams across the globe to deliver successful gaming projects at Interblock. Previously, he worked in a number of digital consultancies and design agencies in London and Slovenia for clients in banking and energy, through to telecoms and aviation, as well as FMCG and tourism.
12:00 - 12:40 (40 mins)
Kate Astrid
A real story: Dropping MUI for clean CSS
Modern frontend teams often rely on powerful UI frameworks to move fast, but over time, those tools can quietly become bottlenecks. What once accelerated development begins to add weight, slow down performance, and make customisation more complex than it should be. In a world where performance budgets are tight and user expectations are high, these slowdowns aren’t just inconvenient — they’re real risks. In this talk, the speaker shares a real-world story of how their team decided to move away from MUI and rebuild their component library using Clean CSS and CSS Modules. The goal was clear: reclaim speed, flexibility, and full control over the UI. From analyzing performance bottlenecks to managing the migration in production, this session covers the key decisions, trade-offs, and outcomes that reshaped how the team builds frontend experiences.
Author Bio: Kate is a senior frontend developer focused on building complex web applications with a passion for clean architecture, fast frontends, and product-driven development. Before her career in tech, Kate spent five years in cartography and geodesy, followed by another five years as a fashion photographer. That mix of spatial thinking, precision, and visual storytelling shaped how she approaches software today — with both an eye for structure and a deep care for user experience.
13:00 - 13:40 (40 mins)
Jiří Devát
Designing for futures that don’t exist yet
Design and code are great at solving today’s user needs, but what if your product category rewrites itself tomorrow? In a world of accelerating change and rising entropy, strategic foresight helps teams look beyond trends to map plausible futures, test their likelihood, and spot the hidden assumptions shaping roadmaps. You’ll learn a practical approach to exploring multiple scenarios, extracting scenario-specific success factors, and building future-ready customer segments, so your next product decision isn’t just data-driven, but time-driven.
Author Bio: Jiří is a Czech business leader and entrepreneur. He is best known for serving as Country Manager at Microsoft and later at Cisco Systems, and has also held senior leadership roles in the aviation and banking sectors. He has (co-)founded startups in film, design, and FMCG, and most recently co-founded DSGHT.ai, an AI-powered strategic foresight platform.
14:00 - 14:40 (40 mins)
Baru Obračajová
Futures as a design tool
What if you could conveniently borrow alternative futures for your design process? We are going to walk through the design process from start to finish across multiple projects and show how you can infuse any process with speculative and generative elements and artefacts. Drawing from designing legal products and learning experiences, you'll see how diegetic prototypes, assemblage spaces, and future scenarios expand the solution space and become immediately applicable tools. Learn how futures can not only be tangible but also extremely useful.
Author Bio: If navigating complex systems was a sport, Baru Obračajová would aspire to make it to the Olympics. She is a legal and futures designer with more than a decade of thriving and innovating in large law firms. At Charles University, she teaches Modern Lawyers: Innovation, Technology and Design, empowering the next generation of lawyers to explore disruptive approaches and design for alternative futures. Baru shares her experiments on her blog, Attorney-at-Code.
15:00 - 15:20 (20 mins)
Radek Pavlíček
Accessibility by the numbers: What actually matters (and what just looks good)
Accessibility is often discussed, but not always addressed effectively. This talk focuses on real-world data (from sources like WebAIM and the WebAIM Million) to identify which issues have the most impact on users. We’ll also examine critical gaps in WCAG 2 - especially the lack of prioritization based on context and function - and briefly touch on what WCAG 3 promises to improve. The session offers a practical framework for setting priorities and making informed decisions about what to fix - and what may not be worth the effort.
Author Bio: Radek is a renowned accessibility and assistive technology expert with more than 20 years of experience helping others make their products and services accessible. A long-standing member of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals and a Certified Professional in Web Accessibility, he was honoured with the IAAP Global Accessibility Leadership Award 2025 for his exceptional leadership and lifelong commitment to advancing digital inclusion.
15:20 - 15:40 (20 mins)
Peter Leško
Designing for everyone: How we built accessibility into our design system
Most design systems include a brief accessibility section or a few links to WCAG guidelines, but accessibility often remains an afterthought. At Tatra Banka, we took a different path: we embedded accessibility directly into every component of our design system. In this talk, Peter will share how their team transformed accessibility from a checklist item into a built-in system feature. You’ll see their approach to defining structure, roles, and states for each component, as well as setting up clear design and development rules for focus, colour contrast, screen reader behaviour and much more. Additionally, you’ll see how they integrated these specifications into the handoff process between design and development. This is not a theory or a set of guidelines, it’s a real case study from the banking world, where accessibility isn’t optional. You’ll walk away with a step-by-step understanding of how to start embedding accessibility into your own design system, regardless of scale or maturity.
Author Bio: Peter began his professional career as a designer at the Finnish company Digitalist. He later worked at GlobalLogic Slovakia as a Lead Designer, where he spent 7 years creating design solutions for international clients. Since 2021, he has been employed at Tatra banka as part of the Unified Design System team for Raiffeisen Bank International. He believes that simplicity is the key to good design. Peter dedicates his free time to popularizing UX and educating others, either as the co-founder of the UX / Košice civic association, a member of the Slovak User Experience Association, or a long-time mentor of Digital Application Design students at the School of Applied Arts in Košice. For several years, he organized and led the World Usability Day conference within SUXA.
16:00 - 16:40 (40 mins)
Anastasiia Gartseva
Why adding 45th theme to your product won't be a problem
In this talk, Anastasiia shares how to build a theming system, so adding new themes doesn't become a nightmare. She’ll demonstrate how to organise design tokens, layer themes, and maintain UI consistency - even as your project grows. Learn how to manage themes with different color schemes, light and dark modes, and address color contrast the right way. You’ll leave with practical techniques, real-world examples, and the confidence to scale theming in your product.
Author Bio: Anastasiia is a Senior UI Developer and member of the Design System team at Wrike. She specialises in scalable solutions and was a driving force behind Wrike’s dark mode and design token naming architecture. Anastasiia believes in practical, clear design decisions that make a real impact on teams and users. Watching a project evolve and improve thanks to her input is what drives her professionally.
17:00 - 17:40 (40 mins)
Karin Pribylová
29 campaigns, 8 teams, 4 months: How to build a GTM engine and scale with Claude
How do you get 8 teams (PMM, Content, SEO, Video, Web, Socials, Performance and Design) to operate as one? Not with more meetings. With a system. At Apify, they hit a coordination wall last year. They faced separate briefs for every team, single-channel launches and no shared timeline. Even a single landing page took almost two months to ship. So Karin and her team built the GTM Engine. It serves as one source of truth, multi-channel by default, keeping every team in sync. In less than 4 months, they moved 29 multi-channel campaigns into motion across all 8 teams. Now they are in Phase 2: automating as much as possible with Apify Actors and Claude skills. In this talk, Karin will show you how they built it. She will explain what worked, what broke and what you can steal for Monday morning. You will leave with a concrete, replicable system for running cross-functional GTM at scale, built at a developer-first tech company with AI as one of the coworkers.
Author Bio: Karin is the Product Marketing Lead at Apify - the marketplace for web data and AI tools. She leads a team of 7 PMMs that owns positioning, messaging, launches, and go-to-market strategy across the company. She partners with other teams to drive acquisition, adoption, and retention - fueling revenue and customer growth. Together with her team, she builds with Apify Actors, Agents, and Skills to scale the product marketing function at Apify.