Comparative Agility Meetup Group

Registration is free. Register here.

This session is part of Resilience Days 2026, a digital agile conference like no other! This event brings together industry leaders and innovators to share real-world solutions, stories of success, and the challenges they’ve overcome.
Important Note: While this session is listed on Meetup, attending the conference requires you to register directly on our website. RSVP on Meetup does not complete your registration.
Registration is free. Register here.

Product discovery is one of the most valuable practices in product development — and one of the most skipped. Most teams cite the same reasons: it takes too long, costs too much, and requires access to customers who are hard to reach. The result is what this speech calls 'discovery theater': going through the motions without the substance.

Synthetic Users — AI-generated personas that can be interviewed, probed, and stress-tested — offer a new opportunity to change this. This speech presents a balanced, evidence-based case for how product teams can use synthetic user research to accelerate and expand customer discovery, without replacing the irreplaceable role of real human research.

Drawing on a real parallel study that ran synthetic and human discovery side by side, the speech surfaces what AI gets surprisingly right (emotional depth, consistency, willingness to go deep) and what it structurally cannot see (lived edge cases, the specificity of real human experience). It then introduces a practical 7-guardrail framework for using Synthetic Users responsibly — setting the right expectations, feeding models the right data, and knowing when to stop and talk to a real person.
In the hands-on portion of the workshop, we’ll simulate the discovery on a real product, and we’ll use AI to create and interview Synthetic Users.

The core argument: Synthetic Users are the next frontier in product discovery, but they don’t replace discovery: they remove the excuse not to do it.

A product innovator and digital leader, Valerio Zanini is passionate about creating products that customers love and developing the teams that make them a reality. With two decades of product development experience in a variety of organizations, including Capital One, Cisco, Goozex.com, and others, he excels at building new products in the early stages of product innovation, where uncertainty and lack of a clear solution are the biggest challenges. He works with organizations worldwide to spark a culture of innovation and agility.

This session is part of Resilience Days 2026, a digital agile conference like no other! This event brings together industry leaders and innovators to share real-world solutions, stories of success, and the challenges they’ve overcome.
Important Note: While this session is listed on Meetup, attending the conference requires you to register directly on our website. RSVP on Meetup does not complete your registration.
Registration is free. Register here.

2026 is the year GenAI shifts from experimentation to bottom-line impact. The unfortunate, but undeniable truth is that organizations that identify and rapidly close key readiness gaps will succeed in scaling GenAI, and those that don't—won't. Join us to explore proven approaches to accelerate your GenAI Readiness - what we're seeing work, what doesn't, and actionable steps to accelerate and de-risk your GenAI journey.

Jason Molesworth is a highly-experienced business strategist and AI practitioner with over 25 years of experience driving transformation and business growth across many of the best known brands in the world. His areas of expertise include Generative AI strategy and implementation, business model transformation, data-driven decision making, change management and adoption, and strategic adaptability.

This session is part of Resilience Days 2026, a digital agile conference like no other! This event brings together industry leaders and innovators to share real-world solutions, stories of success, and the challenges they’ve overcome.
Important Note: While this session is listed on Meetup, attending the conference requires you to register directly on our website. RSVP on Meetup does not complete your registration.
Registration is free. Register here.

Developing our leaders is essential in today's world, but do we know how to develop our emotional resiliency? Emotional resiliency is the ability to adapt to stressful relationships and situations as we encounter them in our day to day. There has definitely not been a shortage of stress in the world in the last few years. Stress affects each of us and the clients we serve differently, and the right amount of the right kind of stress is actually a good thing. In this highly interactive session, we will discuss our stress triggers, biofeedback & behaviors, and how they affect our ability to lead. We will also discuss concepts around Locus of Control and learn whether our brains focus on things that are within our control.

Michelle Cummings, M.S. is the Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Personify Leadership, a leadership development company known for its bold, experiential approach to building real-world leadership skills. With over two decades of innovation behind her, Michelle co-designed the Personify Leadership model, built on eight body-based competencies that bring leadership to life. Her methods don’t just teach, they transform how people lead.