The Business of Software Conference USA 2016 Workshops

An integral part of a complete BoS experience is the Wednesday afternoon workshops. Speaker or expert led sessions where you get to put the lessons learned during the main conference in approximately 3 hour long workshops.

Workshops can be added to your BoS experience through purchasing your ticket with workshop inclusive, or buying a workshop only ticket, which only grants you access to these workshops on the Wednesday afternoon, and not the conference itself.

We’ve announced the 2016 batch on the schedule, but here they are collated in one place with descriptions, so you know everything you need to know about them.

Dave Collins – Website Teardown Workshop

Is your website telling your story as well as it should? Are you giving yourself as much of an opportunity to convert from visitor, to converter? Does it do what you want it to?

Dave Collins, fresh from delivering his Business of Software talk, will be tearing down your website and give you the advice to help you build it back up with purpose and meaning.

Poornima Vijayashanker – The Techie Guide to Public Speaking

At some point in your career you will have to speak at an event to a group of people. That group could be your colleagues, customers, employer or even potential investors! It’s a great opportunity to be heard, showcase yourself, and your work.

You’re excited, but there are butterflies in your stomach. What next?

Poornima takes you through the art of public speaking for techies, and gets you on the fast track to being more confident in front of your fellow professionals.

Jeff Szczepanski – COO, Stack Exchange – Building an Agile Sales Team

If you can manage the complicated process of building software using agile methods, you can make it work to improve your sales process relatively simply.

For technical founders and software developers in general, building out the sales aspects of your business can seem like a big scary foreign mystery. Drawing on his 20 years of experience as a coder, entrepreneur and now sales leader running a team of 65 sales people at Stack Exchange, Jeff share his experiences of what happens when you think about and manage sales like you would a great development team.

In this workshop, Jeff will describe some of the techniques he employs to manage software development efforts, that can be applied to sales for a more direct and bigger impact on the revenue and profitability of your company, as well as considering how these ideas can be implemented in your own business. In the process, he will help show the way to demystifying the process of managing the sales team in your company leaving you with some ideas to make sales a more efficient part of your business process.

Chris Lavigne, Trevor Holmes – 3 videos your company should make (and tips for how to make them)

In this interactive workshop, we’ll talk about 3 different types of videos every software company can benefit from. We’ll also walk through our favorite scripting and production tips that will help everyone in the audience feel excited and ready to hit the ground running.

Jim Geisman – Software Pricing Roundtable

Jim and Chris, owners of Software Pricing Partners (SPP), are putting on their surgical gloves to dive deep into YOUR software pricing approach.

SPP will be sharing key lessons learned and insights from over 400 software monetization engagements with software giants like Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Gartner, Cisco and Oracle, as well as many of the fastest growing software companies in the world.

Do you have the GUTS to let these gurus dissect your pricing approach and stitch your monetization strategy back together?!

Jeff Gothelf/Joshua Seiden – Sense and Respond: Building a Continuous Feedback Loop for Customer Feedback & Product Improvement

This hands-on class focuses on managing teams and their activities. It’s also a great opportunity to connect with, share experiences with, and learn from peers–leaders who are in a similar position as you.

This is the class for you if:

• You’re a senior practitioner or team leader who has run at least one lean experiment, and you’re trying to get better at running experiments.
• You’re currently working on an agile team, but it feels strangely “waterfall-ish.” You’d like to move to a more continuous and iterative feedback-based process.
• You have product discovery activities and product delivery activities, but they’re not as well-integrated as you’d like.
• You want to build your capability to lead the change on your team and at your company

• You’re managing multiple product teams and want to get better at coordinating their activities.