KCDC 2025
Each year, at the Convention Center in downtown Kansas City, we draw a large audience of new and experienced Developers, Architects, UI/UX Designers, QA Professionals, PMs, and Technology Managers from Missouri, Kansas, Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, and around the United States and the world.
Contemplating a Software "Standard of Care"
Aug 15, 2025 at 9:45 am
As software becomes more integrated into our lives, it is also becoming more integral to systems that we, our companies, our society, our governments, and our world depend on. When software problems occur it can lead to increasingly catastrophic consequences. In this talk we will discuss the challenge of determining a “standard of care” that is appropriate for the systems we are working on and will explore a selection methodology that helps to address this challenge.
From Ideas to Action: A Hands-On Innovation Workshop
Aug 13, 2025 at 8:00 am
Every innovation starts with a person and an idea—but most early ideas won't ultimately succeed. How do you quickly assess, refine, and validate an idea so it either gains traction or fails fast so you can move on to the next one?
In this interactive, fast-paced workshop, you’ll bring your own idea for a startup, product, or feature and work through a series of activities to:
- Expand your perspective and add structure to your idea.
- Explore new possibilities by generating ideas you hadn’t considered.
- Assess desirability, feasibility, and viability to refine your concept.
- Identify concrete steps to bring your idea closer to reality.
- Tap into the collective intelligence of the room to accelerate your progress and maximize your experience at KCDC.
Whether you’re tech lead shaping a new feature, a senior developer with a side project, or a manager fostering innovation in your team, this workshop will equip you with the tools and insights to move from idea to action and help others do the same.
Roadmapping with Critical Thought
Aug 14, 2025 at 1:00 pm
We’re discovering and taking on increasingly complex problems. Businesses want to deliver more value and faster. Roadmaps have become the fundamental tool to aligning teams in these efforts.
We’ve all learned how to structure a roadmap, but how do we figure out what to actually put on the roadmap? This session will dive into customer discovery and critical thought tools to evolve from a product owner publishing a roadmap to a team co-creating one together.
Learning Objectives
Discover benefits gained with collaborative roadmaping
Overview customer discovery & co-creation
Identify the nature of problems, predictable or research and development
Apply activities to facilitate team critical thought