Meeting/Event Information

Modern technical program work rarely arrives cleanly — it shows up as competing priorities, incomplete information, and teams pulling in different directions. In this session, attendees will be introduced to the “Seven Hats” framework, a practical way for technical leaders to recognize which perspective a moment calls for — engineer, researcher, product owner, storyteller, entrepreneur, human-centered designer, or simply human — and to shift between them deliberately rather than by default.

Meet the presenter: Dr. Joe Shepherd is Founder & CPO of Career Highways, an enterprise AI platform company, and author of “The 7 Hats of Technical Program Managers: How Great Product Leaders Navigate Complexity, Ambiguity, and Real Work.” He holds a doctorate in Business Strategy and Innovation, an MBA, and degrees in Management Information Systems and Aerospace Technology. With nearly 25 years of cross-industry technology leadership — including time on Microsoft’s forward-deployed engineering team — Joe works at the intersection of strategy, product, and AI, helping leaders navigate complexity and ambiguity in technical program work.