Since its start in 2019, the Software Product Management (SPM) Summit has been a premier annual gathering of practitioners, academics, and entrepreneurs to disseminate and exchange their latest insights, experiences, and findings within Software Product Management – a discipline to drive the growth of software ecosystems.  This year’s theme, “From Features to Outcomes – Why Most Software Products Still Don’t Create Real Value”, reflects our shared commitment to advancing product management as a driver of software- and data-driven business.

Software Product Management has matured significantly and has become a central discipline in modern organizations over the past years. Agile practices at scale, product operations, platform architectures, use of AI in operations and procures, as well as the use of data have improved the speed and efficiency of delivering software and digital products. At the same time, software products have become key value-creation components across industries and business models.

However, despite these advances, many organizations still struggle to demonstrate the actual value contribution of their software products. Although roadmaps grow, release cycles decrease and backlogs continue to grow, decision-makers still often ask what value was truly created. And the answer to this question is often unclear. For many software products, output indicators such as features delivered, releases shipped, or development throughput still dominate the evaluation of product success, even though customers, markets, and bsiness models judge software by other metrics such as adoption, retention, revenue impact, legal risk reduction, or strategic relevance.

This creates a central tension for Software Product Management. One the one hand, feature delivery is easier to comprehend and navigate, outcome accountability is harder to establish. On the other, outcomes require evidence, detection and alignment of conflicting goals, calibration of incentives, and the organizational ability to make product decisions contestable and prioritize. At the same time, this is precisely where the methodological maturity and strategic importance of Software Product Management becomes visible.

Against this background, SPM Summit Europe 2026 focuses on the current challenges and solution pathways for moving from feature orientation to outcome accountability in software organizations. With digitalization ongoing and the AI-based revolution on its way, organizations in all kinds of industries realize they are dependent on software, data and AI models (and infrastructures). All of these can be considered a software organization. The use of data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) can also provide support when making difficult decisions about products, product roadmaps and product portfolios. Thus, we invite contributions from industry and academia that examine how product teams deliver, measure and demonstrate real value in practice and share their experiences on what prevents them from doing so. We explicitly welcome evidence-based reports, case studies, methodological contributions, and also critical reflections, as well as experiences of failure and success that provide actionable learning concerning the application of Software Product Management in organizations and software ecosystems.

We are particularly interested in, but not limited to, contributions related to the following:

• Outcome measurement, value evidence, and causal learning
  • Meaningful outcome metrics and value indicators for software products
  • Approaches and methods to prevent inflated metrics
  • Software product orchestration
  • Experimentation and evaluation
  • Linking software products to business and financial impact
  • Balancing Speed of Innovation with Responsibility and Accountability
• Strategy, prioritization, and outcome-based planning
  • Outcome-oriented product strategy and planning models
  • Dynamic roadmapping
  • Handling software products in portfolios
  • Prioritization under conflicting objectives and resource management
  • Governance for outcome accountability
  • Software product alignment with business strategy
• Product discovery, adoption, and time-to-value
  • Discovery practices that lead to measurable outcomes
  • Translating customer feedback into validated value hypotheses
  • Capturing and communicating value contribution
  • Adoption, satisfaction, experience and customer success as product outcome dimensions
  • Continuous organizational learning
• Incentives and operations
  • Market analysis in the age of AI for Software Product Management
  • Novel product funding models
  • Product Ops / Analytics Ops
  • Organizational barriers in software product management and heuristics on how to overcome them
• AI, automation, and the risk of the new feature factory
  • AI-supported development and its implications for product economics
  • Agentic systems as catalysts of Software Product Management
  • AI for discovery, forecasting, insight generation, and outcome prediction
  • Measuring outcomes of AI-enabled and GenAI-based products
• Value beyond revenue: resilience, sustainability, and regulation
  • Security, reliability, and compliance as measurable product outcomes
  • Sustainability-related product outcomes and trade-offs
  • Software product management for regulated industries (e.g., healthcare, energy, finance)
  • Managing value realization under legal and regulatory constraints
• Software products and new horizons
  • Software product management for data products
  • Integration of AI in software products
  • Software products as part of complex, hybrid and adaptative systems
  • Tensions between local optimization and system-level value creation

Other exciting contributions from the core areas of software product management (e.g., portfolio management, quality management, maintenance management, price management, test management, release management, security management) are also encouraged.

Accordingly, the goal of this year's conference is to address research on software product management in the era of data-driven products, services, and ecosystems, and to address a wide range of areas of tension such as value generation through data, software implementation in data-driven products and services, data-driven startups, agility, processes, approaches, and strategies for data-driven business models and data ecosystems that still need to be addressed, and provides an opportunity for submissions on current research projects at the intersection of software engineering, information systems, and digital business.

Submission details

For submission, new and unpublished topics should be submitted as papers for publication that can serve as a basis for discussions at the conference. Accepted papers will be published in the GI conference proceedings as part of the GI Edition LNI (C-ranked according to VHB-JOURQUAL3). Two submission formats will be accepted:

• Short papers with the maximum number of pages of 6 pages (includes title, abstract, main text and figures) without bibliography,
• Full papers with the maximum number of pages of 12 pages (includes title, abstract, main text and figures) without bibliography.

The papers should be written using the LNI template.

Important deadlines

Submission: 20.04.2026
Notification of authors: 18.05.2026
Submission of revised and final papers: 08.06.2026
Completion of conference proceedings: tba
Konferenz: 22.06.2026-23.06.2026

Organizing Committee

• Andreas Helferich, ISM Stuttgart (Orga Chair)
• Dimitri Petrik, University of Stuttgart (Chair Program Chair)
• Andrey Saltan, LUT University (Chair Program Chair)
• Katharina Peine, highQ Computerlösungen GmbH (Chair Industry Chair)

Program Committee

• Karin Vosseberg
• Juergen Münch
• Martin Bertram
• Andreas Oberweis
• Wolfram Pietsch
• Thorsten Spitta
• Martin Engstler
• Eckhart Hanser
• Ralf Kneuper
• Masud Faza-Baqaie
• Heinrich Mayr
• Nane Kratzke
• Harry Sneed
• Urs Andelfinger
• Christian Kop
• Hans Brandt-Pook
• Martin Mikusz
• Lars Mautsch
• Benedikt Krams
• Gero Strobel
• Katharina Peine
• Dimitri Petrik
• Andreas Helferich
• Georg Herzwurm

In cooperation with the Management of Application Development and Maintenance Technical Committee (GI-MAW, https://fa-wi-maw.gi.de/) and the International Software Product Management Association (ISPMA, https://ispma.org/).

Paper submission via EeasyChair
We invite you to submit your papers for any of these tracks via the EasyChair submission system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=icdpm2026

If you have any questions about the call for papers, please contact Dr. Dimitri Petrik (dimitri.petrik@bwi.uni-stuttgart.de).