Company Culture is your organisation’s operating system.

Good company culture is more than a ping-pong table or beers on a Friday – it’s about creating an environment for your employees to thrive in. But how do you build that? And how do you scale it?

This Business of Software Playlist is here to help answer those questions.

We hosted Marty Cagan, founder of Silicon Valley Product Group last night in London for a talk based around the new edition of his book, Inspired: How to Make Tech Products Customers Love.

Originally meant to be a slight update, Marty soon realized that the evolution of Product Management in the past 10 years called for a full rewrite of the original book. One of the topics he covered was making better use of engineering teams. Super-smart, experienced and an absolute gent, he talked about some of the latest developments in the world of Product Management before taking questions from a sell-out audience of very smart product people. We overran but no one cared.

A highlight for me was the six points he made on making better use of engineering teams…

Anil Dash, CEO, Fog Creek

Anil discusses the challenges of stepping into a leadership role in what is perhaps one of the best-known software companies the public probably haven’t heard of. FogBugz, Stack Overflow and Trello are all products that have come out of the Fog Creek stable. This year, they unleashed Glitch to the world. Anil is committed to putting impact and sustainability, both of business model and company culture, at the heart of their vision for the future. What does that mean in practice and what can you learn about your own vision?

“The Startup Thing” – Recent worrying trends in software

• In the post-web 2.0 era, startups came as a response to the pop culture idea of what tech was
• There was very little discussion on how to build strong core values and much more on how to secure funding from important investors
• A pattern of speaking but not acting on values began to emerge
• The tech industry was on a path to being the next Wall Street (and not in a good way)

Software Matters

• It is more than just a piece of technology; it is a set of values and sociopolitical statements that are created into something real
• All the choices you make about design, UX, UI, etc will trickle out into society – see the “It’s complicated” feature
• Bugs are more than just a broken piece of code. The big bugs are often problematic at a societal level even when the software works as designed
• Sentencing software recreates the socioeconomic and racial biases that people have reinforced through years of judicial discrimination
• What if creating technology is a way to reckon with the changes of the world?

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

What is an Inflection Point? And how can Software Companies take advantage of them?

Yesterday’s hangout demonstrated that Rita Gunther McGrath and Michael Sikorsky are two of the smartest minds we’ve had at BoS. We had a fascinating discussion about Inflection points, and how software companies can take advantage of them to innovate and take the lead in new fields, both in terms of product and org dynamics.

Read on to find the replay and more about Michael and Rita.

Josh Seiden is the co-author of Lean UX and Sense & Respond.

Last Tuesday we sat down to discuss ‘Sense & Respond’, and how it can help product teams to produce better results. We had some great questions to discuss including: How Sense & Respond can be used in small companies (and why it’s different to Lean); How to hold employees accountable for performance when outcomes are less well defined; How to communicate LeanUX benefits to client/product stakeholders; and many more.

Josh is now running Sense & Respond Press – they publish short, practical business books. One of their authors will be speaking at BoS Conference Europe next month. Check them out – great stuff.

Video below

Ever heard of Dollar Shave Club?

(If you actually hadn’t, you can thank us later for showing you this advert)

They disrupted a massive industry, and sold their business to Unilever for $1 billion.

In 2016, a frustrated Tesla owner tweeted at Elon Musk.

6 days later, Tesla released an update to the software in their cars with a new feature. Once an owner’s car was fully charged, they received a smartphone alert telling them that if they didn’t move their car, they would be charged a per-minute parking fee.

6 days from tweet to feature.

In 2011 Mike McDerment spoke at Business of Software Conference about the ‘litany’ of product management errors that defined FreshBooks up to that point.

Turns out he wasn’t joking. To eliminate the level of technical debt they had accrued, something drastic had to be done. In 2014, secret plans started to take shape in the FreshBooks offices – they were going to re-platform. And not just that – they were going to build their own competitor, BillSpring.

Now, thanks to the re-platform, FreshBooks is stronger than ever. We chatted to CEO and Founder Mike McDerment about the process of leading the company, the board, and eventually the customer through the transition.

Video

Josh Seiden, Author, Sense & Respond

Software has fundamentally changed the way business works. It’s not simply that software has given us new ways to reach our customers, or new capabilities to achieve our goals. Software has enabled—in fact it demands—a new way of working. Organisations that seek to thrive in the digital age must examine their core management practices. So much of our management practice was created in the industrial age and not all of it remains useful in the face of software. Managers and leaders inside and outside of the software world need a new set of principles for the next century of work.

Video, Hangout, Slides & Transcript below

Mike McDerment, Founder/CEO, Freshbooks

In 2012, the year after Mike spoke at BoS about the Litany of Product mistakes that had created Freshbooks, the company was growing faster than ever but those mistakes were coming back to haunt him. He knew he needed to rebuild the platform. Two years and $$$$$ later, still nothing had changed. Mike was seriously concerned a competitor would come onto the market that would be 10x nimbler and easier to use. In 2015, that startup Mike feared, launched but in fact it saved the long-term future of Freshbooks. How?

Video, Hangout, Slides, & Transcript below

Business of Software Conference USA 2017 was one of our best ever conferences.

Yet again at a BoS Conference, we were wowed by the wonderful attendees, brilliant speakers, and the great discussions we had.

While it’s no replacement for being at the conference, you can now get early access to all the talks from Business of Software Conference USA 2017.

Including full length talks from:

Jason Cohen, Founder, WPEngine

For his 4th company, Jason Cohen wanted a different journey. Seeing the potential of WPEngine after 2 years of bootstrapping, for the first time Jason took funding. For the first time, Jason decided he would not be the CEO of a company he founded.

We had a fascinating Hangout with Jason last week, which you can watch below. All manner of topics were covered, including:

• Why Jason decided that WPEngine would raise money
• The role of mentoring in overcoming impostor syndrome
• Practical tips on how WPEngine built its great organisational culture

Hangout Video Below

You’re an impostor.

You had a good idea one day. Your good idea turned into a great product. Slowly but surely, you gained customers who paid for your product. Then you started employing people. People who looked up to you, trusted you, followed you. You’re successful – both the business and you personally.

And yet, there’s still that little voice in your head.

You’re an impostor.

Jon Reynolds, Founder, SwiftKey

Jon Reynolds founded SwiftKey, the predictive typing app, in 2008 with university friend Ben Medlock. From launch in 2010 to now, SwiftKey has grown to over 300 million daily users. Jon was CEO of the company from its genesis and guided it from humble beginnings, through to selling the business to Microsoft in 2016.

In this fireside chat, Jon tells the story of SwiftKey – its early days in Cambridge, moving to a USA office, and acquisition. A fascinating story of a vastly successful tech company.

Video & Transcript below

Jason Cohen,  Founder, WPEngine

Jason Cohen is a hugely successful entrepreneur – he is the founder of Smart Bear Software and WPEngine (which recently passed $100m in annual revenue). In this, his 4th talk at Business of Software Conference, he raises the issue of Founder Health. Are you the Hacker News ‘Founder in Pain’? Or maybe you struggle making the big, emotional decisions that necessarily come with running a business? Jason has words of comfort and challenge for you.

Video, Hangout, Slides & Transcript below

BoS Editor: This blog post is written by our friend Leon at IDR Solutions. IDR Solutions are regular attendees at BoS Events – in fact Leon wrote this as a response to our recent Scaling SaaS Marketing Hangout. Join the conversation on Twitter – Leon tweets at @AthertonLeon.

On the recent hangout with Andrus Purde, one of the questions from the Q&A was about pushing users towards the sales team for a demo before letting them try the product.

Mark Littlewood recalled recently receiving emails from a company trying to sell their services where everything about pricing on their website pushed you towards filling in a form to speak to their sales team. Mark was most unimpressed by this.

I think his exact words were “No, not ever!”.

Product Development is the bread and butter of the SaaS Business.

Seeing the seed of your idea grow into something useable and sellable – that’s the stuff of dreams. But the road to a market-ready product is filled with Product Development potholes.

What are the rules you need to abide by when building a great product?

Jason Eckenroth, Founder, ShipCompliant

The 2 years since ShipCompliant’s sale has given its founder Jason Eckenroth plenty of time to think about the process of acquisition. Is it really the big win that it is so often made out to be? What’s more rewarding – the big cash cow, or sticking with the business through potential growth plateaux?

Influencer Marketing is big business but in a very short amount of time it has become so rife with fraud you cannot trust what you read on social media.

On Saturday, the New York Times published a detailed expose of the activities of a Social Media Influencer company called Devumi who sell fake and fraudulent followers and engagement to people desperate for validation and influence. Influencers peddling their shtick to the world are fraudulently misrepresenting their ‘influence’ for financial gain. They’re everywhere these days and they are making money as a result of their fraudulent behavior in all sorts of ways.

How do you spot the frauds and fakes?

3am in the morning – 5 hours to close.

I felt the weight of 17 years of building a business all come down to this moment where I’d lost absolute, complete confidence that I was gonna make the right decision.

Walking away from something I’d built for 17 years. It was my life. And I had no idea what was gonna be on the other side of it.

Jason Eckenroth founded ShipCompliant in 2000. A bootstrapped company, it grew to be a highly profitable market leader – well loved by customers with a NPS of over 70.

Jason sold the business to a private equity house in 2015. He stayed on to lead the new business unit before the acquirer was sold on to another private equity house in 2016 at which point Jason left. A significant financial success for Jason, no question, but…

Would Jason sell again?