//kood at Digit 2026: the skills no one talks about, but everyone hires for
On Friday 9 October, developers, architects, testers, tech leads and data people meet at the Kammivabrik in Tartu for the Digit 2026 software conference. //kood is a conference partner – and our people are on stage too.
Who is there from //kood?
- Karmen Tigas – giving the keynote “Skills no one talks about, but everyone hires for”.
- Ivo Kund and Agur Jõgi – on the panel “Beyond the Horizon: What does future hold? Can we predict it?”. Ivo is one of the authors of the AI part of the //kood curriculum; Agur is the CTO of Pipedrive.
The skills no one talks about, but everyone hires for
Karmen’s keynote starts from a simple idea: software is a tool, value is the point. As writing code gets cheaper, the scarcest part of engineering moves towards understanding the right problem, making good decisions, explaining them – and showing that the result actually created value.
Code is getting cheaper. Judgement is not.
The talk builds on //kood’s 2026 market research: conversations with technical recruiters, senior engineers, engineering managers and //kood alumni across startups, scale-ups, fintech, software houses, banks and AI-native companies. The pattern held across sectors – even when the job title still says Software Engineer, employers increasingly describe success in product-engineering terms: understanding the user’s problem, making trade-offs, taking ownership and measuring impact.
Why this matters to //kood
These exact capabilities – technical foundation, systems thinking, communication, product and business thinking, AI judgement, and drive – sit at the core of the //kood AI-Ready Product Engineer curriculum. Code still gets written, of course – but learners solve real problems with companies and have to defend their solutions.
Want to know which skills will move your career forward next? Check the programme at digit.dev and come and hear Karmen.