Yep - the most useful conference I have ever been as a product designer for a job portal was when I convinced my boss to send me to RecSys (recommender systems)

Yep - the most useful conference I have ever been as a product designer for a job portal was when I convinced my boss to send me to RecSys (recommender systems) instead of another designer conference. I learned a lot, but I was also able to filter and connect many of the recommender technologies to the actual user needs, which sometimes even their authors were unaware of.