Signal Not Noise Melbourne
What will the next generation of companies
look like, and what will your role be?
Friday 13 November 2026
RMIT University, Melbourne CBD
Register Now
Opening Spotlight
The smarter machines get, the more valuable humans become.
Tane Hunter & Daisy Wong
Founder, Future Crunch & author, Full Stack Human · Security Culture and Awareness Lead, Disability Advocate
Opening the day, Tane and Daisy bring Future Crunch's Full Stack Human keynote — built on research into why most enterprise AI initiatives fail to pay off, and the trainable human capabilities (catching your own cognitive bias, learning faster than the rate of change, updating your thinking as evidence shifts, and staying curious under pressure) that decide who thrives as intelligence becomes abundant. Expect them to tie those threads back to several of the day's own Building and Navigating questions, setting up what the rest of the programme digs into.
Please see below for other announced sessions.
A day built of questions, ribs and spines
Spotlight speakers open and close the day. In between, the day runs in three rounds:
- each pairs one Building question with one Navigating question.
- to begin with, people participate in smaller group sessions (rib sessions), with a choice of 3 for each question
- then those groups combine for a "spine session", where those conversations turn into something useful for the whole room.
The tough questions
At Signal Not Noise, engineers, product managers, designers, delivery leads, data practitioners and the leaders who work alongside them, get honest about the tough questions they're dealing with.
This isn't an exhaustive list and no-one has all the answers to all the questions yet. Signal's promise is that we will provide you with more clarity and a path to answering your gnarliest questions, with these ones as a starting point.
These sit under five programme themes — Engineering, Cyber, AI & Data; Product & Strategy; Design & Research; Leadership & Teams; Delivery & Ways of Working — but the questions are the point, not the themes. Instead of picking a session because it's tagged "Engineering" or "Product," we're asking: does this help you answer one of the questions?
Building
What does good engineering look like when AI wrote half the code?
Understanding AI Output with Engineering Fundamentals
Dalia Sinclair — Full Stack Software Engineer
2 more sessions to be announced soon.
How do I build what matters when I’m not the one setting the strategy?
I’m a CD in a streaming world. Inside a 24-Hour News Channel’s Digital Transformation
James Scurry — Senior Producer
2 more sessions to be announced soon.
How do you design for someone whose expectations change faster than your research?
You Can’t Always Build What They Want: Finding Your Users Need
Megan Davis — Lead Storyteller
Duelling LLMs: what happens when the client and the analyst are both using AI to write the requirements
Simon Dale — CTO
The Research Was Good. It’s Just Not True Anymore.
Rebecca Karpiuk — Customer Experience Transformation Leader
Navigating
The board wants an AI strategy. What do you tell them? And how do you make it happen?
Govern AI: Modernising Governance for the Machine Age
Tony Ponton — Executive Principal Consultant & Phil Gadzinski
The AI Strategy Nobody Can Stop: Kettei and the Competence to Stop
Gareth Holebrook — Intent-Based Leadership Coach
1 more session to be announced soon.
Your team got faster. Why did you become the bottleneck?
Why Is Everything Waiting for Me?
Nick Wadsley — Engineering Manager
Everyone’s Busy. Nothing’s Shipping. Where’s the Bottleneck?
Rowan Gobey — Founder
The Product Organisation of the Future
Milad Dakka — CEO
The pilot worked. What happens next?
Children of the Magenta: what aviation learned about skill atrophy under automation, and what it means for GenAI at work
Sami Mäkeläinen — Founder
AI SDLC: What Does Good Look Like?
Andrew Elms — Engineering Manager
1 more session to be announced soon.
One round, close up
Rib sessions — small groups, pick one topic each
Building
group 1
Building
group 2
Building
group 3
Navigating
group 1
Navigating
group 2
Navigating
group 3
Spine session — everyone comes back together, choose one theatre
Building theatre
what came out of those groups
Navigating theatre
what came out of those groups
Why Signal Not Noise?
It is Useful. The test for any session is whether it can help you answer the tough questions on Monday. If it can't, it doesn't make the programme.
It is based on Real work, not just theory. We prioritise people who have done the thing, run the team, or solved the problem.
It is Deliberately Cross-functional. Engineers, CTOs, product managers, designers, engineering managers and delivery leads all in the same building. The best ideas come from that mix.
It is Community-built. Signal Not Noise has been running in Australia since 2012, built on local organisers and affordable registration prices. Accessible and collegiate, on purpose.
Work is changing faster than the frameworks.
Everyone is being asked to figure out AI, rethink delivery, and restructure teams, all while keeping the lights on. Signal Not Noise is where people doing it share what works.
Work is being rewritten.
What are you going to do about it?
Melbourne 2025 was the last event under the LAST Conference name…thirteen years after it started in 2012. If you were in that room, welcome to something built differently.
AI is changing team structures, role definitions, and what companies are even for. Nobody has this figured out yet. So instead of a programme built around themes, Melbourne 2026 is organised around some tough, specific questions the people building, leading and shaping digital products and services are grappling with.
See the questions we're addressingWho comes?
People making the calls and doing the work,
in the same room.
Signal Not Noise Melbourne is for people navigating real structural change in how companies are built and run. The CTO deciding what to tell the board about AI strategy. The product lead building without setting the roadmap. The engineer standing behind code half-written by AI. Different roles and perspectives, the same hard questions.
What people say…
We have had thousands of people come to our previous conferences somewhere in Australia or online to a Club event. Here's what some of them have had to say about the benefits of our events:
Registration details
-
Registration is open. The date is confirmed: Friday 13 November 2026.
Pricing structure:
- Early Bird - Best value, limited time offer
- Regular - Standard registration pricing
- Signal Not Noise Club Full Members - Discounted rate for Club members
All prices include GST.
There will also be an option for self-funded registrations, early-stage founders, and people who are unwaged. Please get in touch with details of your situation.
FAQs
What is Signal Not Noise?
Signal Not Noise is a one-day conference for engineers, product managers, designers, delivery leads, data practitioners, tech leaders and the people who work alongside them. Every session is selected because it's useful. Every price is set to keep the event accessible.
What happened to LAST?
What are your health and safety policies?
Are you taking submissions?
Will there be catering?
Will this be recorded or live-streamed?
What are your cancellation/rescheduling policies?
Do you have a Code of Conduct?
How can I help?
Supported by:
Signal Not Noise is proudly supported by these organisations. If you would like to be part of our year round festival of community-based learning, please contact us.
Support the communitySupporters
RMIT forward.
RMIT FORWARD is RMIT University's centre for future skills and workforce challenges, exploring learning ecosystems and inventing next-generation skills solutions for workforce development.
Software Engineering when you need it
High quality, scalable, distributed development teams are ready to help you now.
Get engineering delivery on track, sustainably.
We're unlocking the collective power of every team.
Backers
Build interactive experiences in seconds with AI
Deckle helps you create scavenger hunts, quizzes, challenges and social activities with just a prompt
Narrative strategy and storytelling for businesses
We help teams and organisations engineer story-based insights into the buy-in and communication strategies they need to produce the solutions of tomorrow.
AI / Engineering / Data
Helping teams build quality software faster.
Learn about Atlassian tools
Atlassian Community Events are free, user-led meetups Open to all Atlassian users, developers, and people interested in learning about Atlassian tools.
This event will be held on Wurundjeri land. We acknowledge the people and elders of the Wurundjeri of the Kulin Nation who are traditional custodians of this land. We respect the cultural, spiritual and educational practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
We have been signatories to the Diversity Charter for conferences since 2016. For us, this means taking active steps to ensure that the lineup of presenters we have reflects the community we serve. It also means that we seek out under-represented voices and topics for the schedule.
