Ash Maurya is the author of ‘Running Lean’ and the newly published, ‘Scaling Lean’ as well as the Lean Canvas business modeling tool.

He regularly hosts sold out workshops around the world and serves as a mentor to several accelerators including TechStars, MaRS, Capital Factory, and guest lecturers at several universities including MIT, Harvard, and UT Austin. So, all in all, he’s  pretty good guy to listen to if you want to think about scaling lean methods in your business.

Ash is speaking at Business of Software Conference 2016 on Scaling Lean Methods, but before he does, he took your questions based on your particular problems.

In an entertaining half an hour, Ash covered a range of topics and previewed what is to come in his talk perfectly.

See the video below.

Game room, free lunch, fully stocked kitchen, on-site barista, and free beer. These elements of a job description are used to capture the the attention of industry talent.

However, it’s not what truly engages or retains them. In today’s technology field, perks are a game of one upmanship in the recruiting wars and while they may land you some good people, your best people stay for the culture that underlies the glossy perks.

Culture is a very different animal, but unfortunately I often see it conflated with perks. I understand the value of perks for both businesses and their employees. At TapInfluence, I want to make our office an enjoyable place for people to work, and providing creature comforts helps employees stay in the game. But perks should simply be an extension of culture, not a mask for a weak one.

15 Years of Continuous Improvement

When you are running your business based on a single software product, decisions about software development are as integral to your success as business decisions—in fact, they are directly related to your business. This is why the second part of this blog series about the inseparable connection between growth and agility focuses on the top 6 software development decisions we have taken in the last 15 years. These are the decisions that, in retrospect, we consider important—most of them didn’t feel so important at the time:

Congratulations to Chan Hon Meng who runs a street food stall, HK Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle, in Singapore that has just been awarded a Michelin star.

At S$2 (US $1.50), Mr Chan’s soya sauce chicken rice and noodle is the cheapest Michelin-starred meal you can get in the world.

Guest blog post from Matt DeLeon, Chief Programmer at KnowYourCompany on the value of a conference.

“So, what’d you think of the conference?”

my co-worker asked me on our way home from Business of Software last year…

“I don’t know… Good, I guess?”

I had doubts.

All the talks from previous Business of Software Conferences from one place. Great SaaS & Software Talks.

If you want to watch previous BoS Talks, you can access all of the publicly available ones from here, listed by year. The more recent talks will link to the video of the talk, a transcript, the speakers slides, any follow up online AMAs and attendee notes. Great talks on building SaaS and software businesses.

Enjoy!

Patrick McKenzie, StarFighter

Patrick McKenzie (or patio11 as he is better known on the Internets) gave a great, practical and actionable, talk about how to get better at hiring engineers at Business of Software 2015.

“Every hiring process sucks, but think of hiring as a funnel.

• Outreach — Creating the eco system (100 nerds)
• Attract — Getting people to come to you (10 nerds)
• Assess — Do they meet the requirements? (6 nerds)
• Close — Give them an offer (Your new employee)

Slides, Video & Transcript below

Sarah Allen, Ultrasaurus

Even data warehousing software has a personality – even if you might not want to spend your leisure time with it. Whether you are aware of it or not, everything you ship will reflect the values and culture of your business. Organisations spend a lot of time reflecting on and thinking about their internal values but these are not necessarily embedded in the software you ship. All software has a personality – it can be passive-aggressive, boring, dominating, supportive, helpful, even fun.

What does your software say to your customers? Can you build software people love, even if it’s doing the kind of things people hate to do? Sarah draws on her experience delivering projects at every scale to show how you can build software that delights customers, no matter what it’s doing.

Video, Slides & Transcript below

Why does culture matter and how can we design it?

“Your company’s culture is your operating system” – Dave Gray. In most companies, there is a gap between the actual culture and the desired culture.

Potential Culture Issues

• Loudest people get promoted
• Bonuses not correlated to current performance
• Culture of fear
• Managers don’t give feedback

What does a great company look like?

• Makes a profit
• Gets customers excited
• Gets employees excited
• Makes the world better

“The world is full of bankrupt companies with world-class cultures. Culture does not make a company” – Ben Horowitz

This applies to startups, but existing companies can suffer dramatically from bad culture.

Culture Map

• Used to systematically design organizational cultures
• Based in research on culture development and success
• Uses experimentation and testing to design better organizational cultures

In this talk Alex Osterwalder describes the key steps in designing an effective organizational culture.

We often add something silly in our content just for our own amusement – and strangely, we often get notes from people saying, ‘X made me smile’. We’re always pleased when it entertains others. We get that little rush of dopamine you get when you let someone out into slow moving traffic and they thank you with a wave or by indicating right-left-right.

Delight is good too!