The best product and CX conferences to attend in 2026
Feb 16, 2026By Kristen Ribero
The best product and CX insights don't come from blog posts. They come from hallway conversations, late-night dinners, and the unfiltered takes speakers save for live audiences.
But not all conferences are worth the time and travel budget. Some are vendor showcases disguised as thought leadership. Others rehash the same frameworks you've seen a dozen times.
This guide focuses on the events that matter for product and CX leaders who care about building quality products, understanding their customers, and staying ahead of how AI is reshaping both disciplines. We've organized them by focus area—product management, customer experience, and AI leadership—so you can find the events most relevant to your role.
Product management conferences
These events focus on product strategy, discovery, delivery, and team leadership—with content ranging from tactical frameworks to executive-level conversation.
ProductWorld
📅 February 18-20, 2026 | San Jose, CA
ProductWorld is one of the largest product-focused conferences in the US, drawing 2,500+ attendees from product, engineering, and UX teams. It's co-located with DeveloperWeek, which means you'll be surrounded by people who actually build and ship products, not just talk about them. Sessions cover everything from product strategy to AI integration, with speakers from companies like Google, Uber, and Atlassian.
Best for → PMs who want cross-functional exposure and tactical content from practitioners.
SaaStr Annual
📅 May 12-14, 2026 | San Mateo, CA
SaaStr Annual is a massive gathering (10,000+ attendees) for the SaaS and cloud community. It's not a pure product conference, but it attracts a huge number of product leaders, founders, and executives who are grappling with the realities of scaling product-led businesses. Sessions span growth strategy, customer success, and product-led growth, with plenty of tactical depth.
Best for → Product leaders at B2B SaaS companies focused on growth and scale.
ProductCon New York
📅 May 20, 2026 | New York, NY
ProductCon is Product School's flagship conference series, running multiple times per year in different cities. The New York edition draws 1,000+ product managers for a day of keynotes, workshops, and networking. Speakers typically include product leaders from major tech companies sharing case studies and frameworks.
Best for → PMs at all levels looking for tactical content and networking.
Mind the Product (mtpcon London)
📅 June 16, 2026 | London, UK
Mind the Product is widely considered one of the best product management conferences globally. The speaker quality is exceptional, the content spans strategy to ethics to craft, and the community is deeply engaged. If you can only attend one international product conference, this is the one.
Best for → Product managers at all levels who want world-class content and community.
ELC Annual 2026
📅 October 14-15, 2026 | San Francisco, CA
The Engineering Leadership Community's annual event brings together engineering leaders for two days of talks, workshops, and networking. While not a product conference per se, the overlap between engineering and product leadership makes it valuable for product leaders who work closely with engineering teams or are building technical products.
Best for → Engineering leaders and product leaders who work closely with engineering.
Plan on attending? unitQ will be there—details to come!
CX and customer experience conferences
These events are built for customer experience, support, and experience management leaders—with a focus on measurement, operations, and service transformation.
Qualtrics X4 Summit
📅 March 17-19, 2026 | Seattle, WA
X4 is Qualtrics' flagship event for the experience management community. It's large (10,000+ attendees), polished, and heavy on product announcements. If you're in the XM ecosystem or evaluating enterprise feedback platforms, this is where you'll see where the market is headed.
Best for → Experience management practitioners and anyone evaluating enterprise feedback platforms.
Reuters Customer Service & Experience West
📅 April 21-22, 2026 | San Diego, CA
Reuters events tend to attract a mix of enterprise CX leaders and vendors. The West Coast edition focuses on customer service transformation, AI in support, and measuring experience ROI. The format includes case study presentations, panel discussions, and structured networking.
Best for → Enterprise CX leaders exploring service transformation.
Zendesk Relate
📅 May 18-20, 2026 | Denver, CO
Relate is Zendesk's annual customer conference, focused on customer service, support operations, and the evolving role of AI in customer interactions. If you're a Zendesk customer, this is essential for understanding the product roadmap. If you're not, it's still a solid window into where support technology is headed.
Best for → Support and CX leaders, especially Zendesk customers.
Forrester CX Forum
📅 June 16-17, 2026 (NYC) | June 29-30, 2026 (San Francisco)
Forrester's CX Forum is offered on both costs—East (NYC) and West (San Francisco)—on separate dates. It’s research-driven and enterprise-focused. Sessions are grounded in Forrester's data and frameworks, which makes them more rigorous than the average conference talk. The audience skews toward large enterprises, and the content focuses on measurement, ROI, and organizational alignment.
Best for → Enterprise CX leaders who value research-backed insights.
Leadership and AI summits
These events are designed for executives—Chief Product Officers (CPOs), Chief AI Officers (CAIOs), and senior leaders shaping product and AI strategy at the organizational level. Expect peer-level conversation over tactical content.
Chief AI Officer Summit
📅 April 14, 2026 | Santa Clara, CA
As AI becomes central to product strategy, the Chief AI Officer Summit brings together executives responsible for AI adoption across their organizations. Sessions focus on practical implementation challenges: governance, ROI measurement, and integrating AI into existing product workflows. It's executive-level, which means less tactical depth but more strategic conversation.
Best for → Product and technology executives leading AI initiatives.
Plan on attending? unitQ’s Co-founder and CEO, Christian Wiklund, will be speaking at this event. Request your free pass here.
Chief Product Officer Summit San Francisco
📅 September 24, 2026 | San Francisco, CA
Part of the Product-Led Alliance event series, the CPO Summit San Francisco is specifically designed for senior product leaders. The format emphasizes candid conversation over polished presentations, which makes it more valuable for leaders who want to compare notes with peers facing similar challenges.
Best for → CPOs, VPs of Product, and senior product leaders.
Plan on attending? unitQ will be attending this event.
On the main stage, Vani Kumar (Director of Engineering, Pinterest) and Christian Wiklund (CEO, unitQ) will present "Scaling Quality Signals Across Teams: How Pinterest Streamlines User Feedback with unitQ."
The session covers how Pinterest centralizes feedback from support, social, and app store channels—and how AI-powered categorization improves signal clarity across Engineering, Product, and CX.
Note: The CPO Summit series from Product-Led Alliance runs throughout the year across multiple cities. Each event is specifically designed for senior product leaders, with formats that emphasize candid conversation over polished presentations. If you're a CPO or VP of Product, these are worth tracking.
Other 2026 dates:
Reuters Momentum AI
📅 September 24-25, 2026 | Austin, TX
Momentum AI focuses on the practical application of AI across the enterprise, with tracks on implementation, governance, and measuring business impact. The audience is a mix of technology leaders, product executives, and operations leaders exploring how AI fits into their strategy.
Best for → Product and technology leaders focused on AI implementation.
Plan on attending? unitQ will be exhibiting. Stop by to chat about customer feedback intelligence.
How to choose
A few questions to help you prioritize:
What's your role?
Senior leaders (VP+) get more value from smaller, peer-focused events like the CPO Summit series. Earlier-career PMs benefit from larger conferences like ProductWorld or ProductCon where there's more breadth and structured content.
What do you need right now?
Strategic peer conversation: Forrester CX Forum (East or West), CPO Summit series
Tactical content and frameworks: ProductWorld, Mind the Product, ProductCon
Vendor roadmaps and ecosystem: Qualtrics X4, Zendesk Relate
Where are your peers?
The best conference is the one where you'll find people facing similar challenges. CX leaders should prioritize CX-specific events. B2B SaaS product leaders might get more from SaaStr Annual than a general PM conference.
See you there
We'll be at several of these events throughout the year. If you're attending any of the conferences where unitQ is sponsoring or speaking, come find us. We're always happy to talk about how teams are using customer feedback to build better products.
