Tampa Bay Product Group

Tampa Bay Product Group
Empowering Tampa Bay’s creators of physical and software products through education, collaboration, and industry connection. Do you build software or physical products? Are you looking to connect with peers and stay abreast of industry trends? The Tampa Bay Product Group calls all product enthusiasts no matter your role.
This group is for professionals who are passionate about Agile, Product Development, and Product Creation. We connect to share experiences, knowledge, and best practices in Lean Product Development. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, this group is the perfect place to network, learn, and grow in the field of product development. Let’s collaborate, innovate, and elevate our skills together!

About the event
Everyone is being told to “add AI.” The harder question is: where does AI actually make a product better? For every genuinely useful AI feature, there are dozens of impressive demos that become expensive, unreliable, frustrating production systems or features that users simply stop using.
In this workshop, the team from ViaForge.AI will take a practical look at what separates AI products that create measurable value from those that create technical debt. We’ll move beyond the hype and examine the real product and engineering decisions behind successful AI systems: where generative AI belongs, where it doesn’t, how architecture affects the user experience, why prototypes often collapse under production conditions, and how teams can evaluate AI opportunities before committing months of development effort. Expect practical examples, real-world failure modes, architectural patterns, and a candid discussion of what we’ve seen work (and fail) in production.

## Key Takeaways

Where AI Actually Belongs
Learn how to identify product problems where generative AI creates meaningful leverage, and recognize cases where traditional machine learning, deterministic software, search, automation, or a simple rules engine will outperform it.
Patterns That Survive Production
Explore practical approaches to retrieval, grounding, structured outputs, constrained execution, tool use, evaluation, and human oversight that make AI systems more predictable, useful, and maintainable.
The “What Doesn’t Work” Hall of Shame
We’ll examine common failure patterns: chat interfaces awkwardly bolted onto existing products, autonomous agents given too much freedom and too little structure, poorly designed RAG systems, endless prompt engineering, runaway inference costs, latency problems, and AI features searching for a reason to exist.
Prototype vs. Product
A five-minute demo can hide almost every difficult problem in AI engineering. Learn what changes when a system encounters real users, real data, edge cases, concurrency, security requirements, cost constraints, and expectations of consistency.
Designing for Trust
AI systems fail differently from traditional software. We’ll discuss how product teams can design around uncertainty, communicate confidence and limitations, recover gracefully from failure, and avoid destroying user trust when the model inevitably gets something wrong.
Measuring Real AI ROI
Move beyond “we added AI” as a success metric. We’ll look at practical ways to evaluate adoption, task completion, accuracy, latency, cost per interaction, human time saved, and whether the AI feature is actually improving the underlying product.

Who should attend
This session is designed for product owners, product managers, software engineers, technical founders, architects, UX leaders, and technology decision-makers who are responsible for turning AI ideas into actual products.
Whether you’re evaluating your first AI feature, inheriting an AI prototype that suddenly needs to become production-ready, or trying to separate worthwhile opportunities from executive-driven AI hype, this workshop will give you a practical framework for deciding what to build, how to build it, and when not to use AI at all.

Agenda
6:00 – 6:30pm – Networking & Refreshments
6:30 – 7:55pm – Program: AI in Products: What Actually Works and What Doesn’t
7:55 – 8:00pm – Closing
8:00pm – Optional non-sponsored networking @ World of Beer

Location
Vaco

Tampa Bay Product Group
Empowering Tampa Bay’s creators of physical and software products through education, collaboration, and industry connection. Do you build software or physical products? Are you looking to connect with peers and stay abreast of industry trends? The Tampa Bay Product Group calls all product enthusiasts no matter your role.
This group is for professionals who are passionate about Agile, Product Development, and Product Creation. We connect to share experiences, knowledge, and best practices in Lean Product Development. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or just starting out, this group is the perfect place to network, learn, and grow in the field of product development. Let’s collaborate, innovate, and elevate our skills together!

About the event
Cross-functional alignment fails when the real objection never gets raised. Not because anyone is lying, but because somebody decided it wasn't worth the trouble. This session covers three specific things you can do in a review or a discovery call to make it cheap enough for people to say what they actually think. Attendees will pair up and practice, not just listen.

Who should attend
Tampa Bay Product Group events are for anyone involved in creating products, whether physical or software – product managers, product owners, designers, engineers, QA, data folks, delivery leaders, and others who care about how products get built.
This evening will be especially relevant if:
You’re a product leader, senior individual contributor, or manager who wants better ways to talk with executives about value, risk, and trade-offs.
You’re earlier in your product career and want to build confidence in managing up.
You work with Agile teams and often find that “Agile only goes so far” once the conversation moves into governance, funding, or organizational change.

Agenda
6:00 – 6:30pm – Networking & Refreshments
6:30 – 7:55pm – Program: Silent Pushback: Getting the Real Objection on the Table
7:55 – 8:00pm – Closing
8:00pm – Optional non-sponsored networking - location TBD

Location
TBD