DevFest Pune 2025: A product builder's guide to the agenda
GDG Pune has lined up one of the city's largest tech gatherings for 2025, with parallel tracks across Agentic AI, platform engineering, software craftsmanship, and design. Expect insights from experts at Google, GoDaddy, ClearRoute, HPE, SLB, and fast-moving AI startups. If you build products, this schedule gives you a clear path from idea to ship.
Morning kickoff: AI habits that scale
The day opens with a welcome by Harsh Dattani, Google Developer Relations. An early session from Google Labs, "The 10x Software Developer with Jules" by Shivani Poddar, sets the tone: smarter workflows, tighter loops, and fewer blockers. Grab your coffee, pick your focus, and plan your track before the 11:30 AM split.
11:30 AM - Parallel tracks that matter for product development
Tracks cover the full product pipeline: Agentic AI patterns, platform engineering, software quality, and AI-powered design. Speakers include Bhaskar Annadata and Amit Modak (Google), Supriya Rao (ClearRoute), Dharmesh Vaya (Wiz), Suresh Gupta (GoDaddy), Sandeep Jain (Gruve.ai), and Gaurav Kheterpal, among others.
- Building AI features soon? Prioritize Agentic AI sessions to learn intent handling, tool use, and orchestration patterns that reduce glue code.
- Owning reliability and velocity? Platform engineering talks will help you codify golden paths, environments, and guardrails your team can adopt next sprint.
- Shipping mobile/web at scale? Software craftsmanship sessions will tighten feedback cycles, improve testability, and cut rollback risk.
- Driving UX for AI? AI-powered design sessions focus on prompt interfaces, evaluation, and failure handling that actually fit user goals.
Track 3 + Community Lounge: prompts, AI web, Flutter, and security
Track 3 packs in prompt engineering, AI-powered web development, and Flutter system design. In the Community Lounge, lightning talks cover synthetic monitoring and secure React patterns, plus implementation notes on Google's Secure AI Framework (SAIF). If security or compliance sits on your roadmap, bookmark SAIF and translate it into team checklists.
2:00 PM - From AI apps to AI businesses
Post-lunch sessions go deep on AI-era product thinking, the shift from building AI apps to running AI businesses, and practical intros to ADK and AI agents. Technical talks include Compose Navigation patterns, Gemini-powered agentic workflows, human-centered design for agentic systems, healthcare AI agents, and Genkit-driven development speed-ups. Platform engineering journeys and AI-driven healthcare solutions round out the block with concrete implementation notes.
3:30-4:30 PM - Three panels, three levers
Track 1: GenAI - Moderated by Himanshu Jain, with leaders from HPE, SLB, Pune AI Community, and Last9. Expect candid trade-offs: model choices, cost controls, safety, and evaluation. Bring questions on data pipelines, agent reliability, and how they measure success beyond demos.
- What's your most effective evaluation metric for production quality?
- Where do guardrails live: in prompts, code, or policy?
- How do you control inference cost without killing response quality?
Track 2: Product Management & AI - Led by Imtiyaz Khatib with leaders from JPMorganChase, FCI CCM, FIS, and HashiCorp. This is your slot for roadmapping, pricing, and cross-functional delivery. Push for specifics on buy vs build, experimentation cadence, and how they sunset failing bets quickly.
- What's your weekly experiment cadence and stop/go rule?
- How do you price AI features: usage, outcomes, or bundles?
- What's the smallest artifact you ship to prove PMF for an AI feature?
Track 3: Founder-focused panel - Moderated by Mahaveer Muttha with founders and CTOs from SRide, OneCard, Partex.AI, and HyrGPT. Useful for PMs who own 0→1 or new business lines. Ask about team shape, funding constraints, and the first integration they'd automate if starting again.
- Which constraint forced your best product decision?
- What integration delivered outsized value with minimal effort?
- How do you keep scope small without losing stakeholder trust?
How to work the day like a product pro
- Define one goal: speed, reliability, or AI feature value. Filter sessions through that lens.
- Map two slots for depth, one for discovery. Avoid track-hopping every 10 minutes.
- Use a simple note template: Problem, Approach, Tooling, Risks, Next step.
- Pair with an engineer or designer. Split notes and regroup after each block.
- Translate SAIF and platform insights into a checklist your team can adopt next sprint.
After the event: ship something small in 14 days
- Run a 60-minute readout with your team. Vote on two ideas to prototype.
- Draft an experiment brief: hypothesis, user, success metric, kill criteria.
- Wire an agentic workflow for one narrow task. Keep scope tight and observable.
- Add platform guardrails (secrets, observability, evals) before the second prototype.
- Set a 30/60/90 plan: pilot, internal beta, limited external release.
If you want a structured path to upskill your team by role, explore curated options here: AI courses by job.
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