Historically, businesses were top-down, executive-driven operations. The days of taking an executive’s instincts at face value however are long gone.
Today, successful businesses increasingly make data-driven decisions across the entire organization.
Every organization is made up of users with different levels of data literacy and competence.
Most organizations massively overestimate how data literate their people are. In this survey, 84% of businesses think employees have high, or very high levels of data fluency, while only 10% of those users consider themselves data fluent.
All humans – this includes your users – sit on this continuum. Even simple organizations have different data needs.
Understanding where your customers are on the data literacy continuum was the subject of a very lively breakout discussion at BoS Conf Online Fall last month that used a sandwich shop to illustrate what it means and why it matters.
This week on the BoS Podcast, we revisit Jessica Livingston‘s talk from BoS Conf USA as she takes a look at what she learnt interviewing some of the giants of industry.
See the full video here
Three People in a Room, each takes it in turns to play the role of ‘client’, while the other two play the role of consultants.
Someone must be in charge of timing the session.
Three People in a Room, you decide between you which ONE will play the role of ‘client’, the other two play the role of consultants.
Someone must be in charge of timing the session.
Our supporters are awesome.
Not only do they help and support the conference and the community, they also help fund our scholarship program to enable awesome people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend, come, take part and get a leg up into the world of software and SaaS.
ServiceRocket helps software companies accelerate their go-to-market strategy by assisting in the creation and growing of scalable ecosystems, including services delivery and implementation, partner channel programs, customer education and support.
You can hear more about what ServiceRocket do in their chat with Mark on the BoSPodcast or when their CEO Rob Castaneda shared some of the mistakes that even top software businesses make at BoS 2016.
Our supporters are awesome.
Not only do they help and support the conference and the community, they also help fund our scholarship program to enable awesome people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend, come, take part and get a leg up into the world of software and SaaS.
Dave Collins and Aaron Weiner have been an almost permanent presence at BoS.
In The Lost Art of Meaningful Content, Dave Collins, founder and CEO of Software Promotions, advocates taking a stand against the banal and pointless pollution the web has become littered with by a huge amount of the algorithm optimization tricks that web marketing, SEO and adword agencies take for granted. They are different and have strong values.
With attention to detail, expertise, and a warm and friendly demeanour, it’s with great pleasure we welcome back Software Promotions as a supporter of BoS Conf Online Fall 27-29 September.
Find our more about Software Promotions and their Google Whispering ways
Our supporters are awesome.
Not only do they help and support the conference and the community, they also help fund our scholarship program to enable awesome people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend, come, take part and get a leg up into the world of software and SaaS. It was Peldi and Balsamiq who first came up with the idea of our scholarship program and Balsamiq have been huge supporters over the years.
For many, BoS Conferences and Balsamiq‘s CEO Peldi go together like PB & J (or Spaghetti and meatballs for our Italian friends!) and over the years Peldi has recounted (sometimes with painful honesty) his experience of building a successful SaaS company.
We’re delighted Balsamiq are supporting again at BoS Conf Online Fall 27-29 September. Balsamiq embody our values and what we believe makes software companies great:
Balsamiq’s product — Balsamiq Wireframes — is a simple platform for non-designers to quickly express great product ideas using drag-and-drop pre-made UI elements.
Our supporters are awesome.
Not only do they help and support the conference and the community, they also help fund our scholarship program to enable awesome people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend, come, take part and get a leg up into the world of software and SaaS.
PDQ.com builds software tools that make it easy for Sys Admins to install software and patches throughout their organization and see what’s already installed on company computers.
Our supporters are awesome.
Not only do they help and support the conference and the community, they also help fund our scholarship program to enable awesome people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend, come, take part and get a leg up into the world of software and SaaS.
Logi Analytics, an insight software company, empowers the world’s software teams with the most intuitive, developer-grade embedded analytics solutions and a team of dedicated experts invested in your success.
For over 20 years, Logi Analytics has helped companies embed sophisticated dashboards and reports in their applications. Logi is the only developer grade analytics platform on the market, and is rated the #1 embedded analytics platform by Dresner Advisory Services.
We had Charles Caldwell, VP of Product, Logi Analytics on the BoS podcast recently to talk about what makes a great product manager and the difficult evolution of Business Intelligence and how understanding the data literacy of your customers is key to building awesome applications.
Our supporters are awesome.
Not only do they help and support the conference and the community, they also help fund our scholarship program to enable awesome people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend, come, take part and get a leg up into the world of software and SaaS.
Kevel offers the infrastructure APIs needed to quickly build custom ad platforms for sponsored listings, internal promotions, native ads, and more – so you can drive new revenue. The vision is that every online retailer and publisher should be able to add user-first ad revenue streams and take back the Internet from Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other digital monopolies.
Kevel have already seen successful ad platforms launched from the likes of Ticketmaster, Yelp, Strava, Mozilla, and many more .
What’s more BoS than a founder with a kick-ass growth story, who wants to give back to their community? It’s just one of the reasons we love that Kevel are back at BoS supporting BoS Conf Online Fall 27-29 September.
Fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with Charles Caldwell, VP of Product, Logi Analytics
There were some great pithy lines and some super sensible insights.
Listen to the full conversation on the Podcast
We talked about:
Why did product management became his thing? Turns out he had always been interested in trying to find ways to make things better for people from being a young kid but didn’t know what that was a job.
BoS Conf Online Fall, 27-29 September starts next week.
To get you in the mood, we’re sharing some talks from previous conferences from some of this year’s speakers, as well as a few primers on fundamentals that will help you get the most from the conference. If you cannot make it, they are well worth a watch.
If you are. Yay! They will help you prepare, get excited and think about what’s to come.
We’re also sharing our reviews of two great books that we thoroughly recommend. Both authors are speaking this year. If you’ve read the books, you will understand why – and you can.
And a little BoS Bonus, conference attendees will get a link to download their own eCopy of Radhika’s book before the event begins and the books is even published next week.
BoS USA 2010 | 7 mins
BoS USA 2018 | 8 mins
BoS USA Online 2020 | 48 mins
BoS USA 2019 | 54 mins
BoS USA 2013 | 55 mins
BoS USA Online 2020 | 56 mins
BoS Europe 2016 | 57 mins
BoS USA 2018 | 57 mins
BoS USA 2019 | 60 mins
BoS Europe 2017 | 61 mins
BoS USA 2018 | 65 mins
BoS USA Online 2020 | 83 mins
BoS USA 2011 | 90 mins
Radical Product Thinking, the new book by Radhika Dutt, is published 28 September and we are delighted and honored she will by joining us for BoS Conference Online Fall 27-29 September to share some of the key messages that the book shares.
I’m also lucky to have been given a pre-publication copy and am sharing my thoughts on why we believe it is worth your time.
Radical Product Thinking is a clarion call for vision-driven product development over the iterative approach that has, for many, become the orthodox approach to product strategy and management. For Radhika, vision-driven product development embodies the power of long term thinking over short term. She explains why she believes this has come about, why a different approach is needed and most importantly, offers a highly engaging and practical step-by-step approach to adopting the philosophy.
Iterative product development – perhaps most visibly in the rise of lean and agile development methodologies, has become widespread over the past couple of decades at a time when resources are relatively plentiful. They are powerful and useful. There is no questions that they are highly effective approaches to help your team get to the destination faster. However, they don’t necessarily get you to where you want to go.
Iterative techniques help you to optimize for local maxima rather than achieving the global maximum. If you want to climb Everest and your approach is to climb higher from where you are now, you’re very unlikely to summit. A different approach and plan is required.
Radical Product Thinking describes and explains the challenges that agile and lean techniques have and digs into what Radhika describes as product diseases that they can cause. Diseases because they are contagious, damaging and difficult to cure.
It is filled with examples of different approaches in action – the iteration towards electric vehicles taken by GM vs the vision-driven approach of Tesla – for example.
Radical Product Thinking is not a critique of agile or lean approaches, it recognizes their value, importance and place. It does however argue that if you want to build impactful, meaningful, products in a way that has long term impact on the world and your organization, you need to lead with an approach that accounts for the long term goals.
Radical Product Thinking is particularly useful as a book as it doesn’t describe a problem in lots of detail and conclude that something has to be done. It has a very clear prescription for change. Not only that, the bulk of the book both describes an approach and offers engaging, practical and helpful thoughts on what you can do to incorporate the philosophy into your own work.
Radical Product Thinking offers a roadmap to making this happen and Radhika steps you through five critical elements, offering examples, tools and exercises that will help bring the concepts alive.
I thoroughly recommend reading Radical Product Thinking. it’s a thoughtful synthesis of how we have got to where we are today but also a highly practical, interesting and well-structured handbook to changing our approaches.
We’re delighted Radhika will be joining us at BoS Conference Online Fall 27-29 September to tell us more, lead a discussion about how your thinking can change and also leading online masterclass sessions post event that will allow you to put the ideas to work and make a difference in your own businesses.
At BoS we run events and publish content that is highly valued by anyone trying to build, run, and scale a great software company.
Sign up for a regular dose of actionable and useful content:
On Monday the news that Mailchimp has been acquired by Intuit for $12 billion in cash and shares got people talking.
The usual playbook on Twitter when these deals go down is a flurry of hot takes and congratulations to the founder and team from investors who by law have to include a line that somehow reflects well on the investors foresight, vision or investment thesis – even when they did not invest.
For this deal, there were certainly ‘hot takes’ but VCs were noticeably absent in their rush to congratulate the company and founder on the acquisition incorporating their personal reflected glory.
Mailchimp has been bootstrapped from a web design agency in 2001. It has not taken any professional external funding so there are no investors involved. So congratulations, and of course, some reflected glory…
Since the start of 2020, the pandemic has changed how many of us work and live. Suddenly all those face to face meetings and amazing conferences you flew all around the world to attend were forced to become virtual. Teams, Facetime, Zoom and countless other platforms exploded and became the new stomping ground for business and social interaction.
It was exciting. This new way of working, which was in fact, not new at all, gave way for exploring what we really need or want to get out of life.
At BoS Conf Online Spring 21, Jason VandeBoom was asked:
We’ve had this small pandemic for the last two years, and we’re all sitting at our homes. And one of the big existential questions is whether this is a ‘change the world’ situation, and how that’s going to impact both our customers, and how we run our businesses; has it been a nice little hiatus, are we gonna go back to business as normal? How do we go forward from here?
Mark Stevens
Here’s ActiveCampaign’s Founder’s thoughts:
Jason, on the return to the workplace and the move from all remote to something different, “There’s More challenges ahead…”
A sentiment echoed by our ‘return to work‘ survey of attendees that highlights the direction and challenges the workplace of the future will hold – there’s an expectation that hybrid working is the future but much less clarity about how that works best.
Hybrid may end up being the worst of both worlds for many.
Conferences have the same challenge. Traditionally physical events became virtual. Virtual conferences need to be designed for the medium. Most aren’t but here’s a great example of one that is.
As life continues on, hybrid events are becoming a thing but we think they will impair attendee experience .
Don’t miss the best online conference of the year – 27-29 September at BoS Conf Online Fall 21.
At BoS we run events and publish content that is highly valued by anyone trying to build, run, and scale a great software company.
Sign up for a regular dose of actionable and useful content:
Elizabeth O’Neill, People & Culture expert, BoS participant and, this year, speaker, explains the difference between having one bad meeting and creating a culture of silence in this guest blog post.
A Founder, who I’ll call Sam, has finally come up with an idea that will pivot his company from its flatlined growth. It’s taken many sleepless nights, but he’s formed a solid vision for a new product that will make their existing platform exponentially more valuable. Excitedly, he pulls together his small team and describes his idea.
Azeem Azhar is speaking at BoS Online Fall, 27-29 September!
If you saw his talk at BoS Europe in 2016 on whether we should be worried about AI and Machine Learning, you will be as excited as I am and know he is a phenomenal thinker and speaker. I’ve been super-privileged to have just read an advance copy of Exponential, Azeem’s new book, published September 7.
It is a must read for anyone in tech.
So good in fact, we’re going to send a hard copy to the next 20 people who sign up for the conference, so you can read it before you meet.
Here’s a summary of the book to whet your appetite…
Technology is developing at an exponential rate. Humans evolved for a linear world. The result? The exponential gap. How can we adapt?
It’s brilliantly written, where do we start?
A history of the evolution of technology at the turn of the 20th Century – the great transition when the world changed beyond recognition. Cars, electricity, telephones and more were the manifestations of a phase transition.
Exponential argues we’re living through another phase transition – from the industrial to the Exponential Age.
Computers were the first exponential technology – improving at more than 10 per cent per annum for multiple decades straight.
Azeem demonstrates exponential technologies are increasingly common, massively disruptive, and show no signs of slowing down. Renewable energy price collapses and the cost of modelling the human genome at a dollar apiece are just two examples he shares as he describes how four industries – computing, energy, biology and manufacturing are being transformed by exponential technology.
The transformation of these sectors alone mean we have entered a new era of global civilization.
The Exponential Age is problematic. Exponential change is fast. Humans evolved to deal with slower, incremental changes – the annual harvest, the human lifespan, the changing of the seasons. When change starts accelerating, we struggle to comprehend it. He explains the psychology showing humans are ill-equipped to deal with rapid change and why human institutions – whether our businesses or our political norms – tend to move slowly too.
The exponential gap is why exponential technology is so dangerous: it has the potential to leave our economy, our politics and our lives behind.
Until a decade or so ago, the rules about how businesses work were fairly simple. Bigger businesses made more money but if they got too big, would creak becoming too complex and less efficient. They might become complacent. There were ‘decreasing returns to scale’ – the bigger a company became, the less return it got on dollars invested. Azeem argues exponential technologies have inverted this logic so the bigger companies get, the more efficient they become. Digital technology can scale indefinitely for almost no cost and without becoming more cumbersome. The corrosive effect increasing returns to scale might have on our economy could herald a new age of monopoly capitalism.
Giant monopolies aren’t just bad for small businesses, they’re bad for workers. We get work in the age of big tech wrong. For all the talk of mass automation, we’re not headed for a ‘jobless future’. Despite what headlines say, automation will probably lead to more jobs, not less.
That doesn’t mean the future of work will be easy. Automation is a distraction from the real issues facing workers in the exponential age: from pernicious systems of algorithmic management, to a relative decline in workers’ wages.
Laws governing our workplaces were forged in the industrial age and are being undone by the remarkable pace of technological change.
Globalisation supposedly turned the planet into one big, inter-connected market – the local gave way to the global. Maybe once. Not any more. Azeem shows how exponential technologies are making the economy increasingly regionalised. New innovation makes some global trade unnecessary or less important – renewable energy for example means states need to ship less and less oil across the world. De-globalisation brings problems as rich countries stop depending on poor countries for manufacturing, that could bring untold economic instability in developing countries.
The exponential gap drives ever-greater inequality between the rich world and the poor.
As countries become more insular, global politics becomes more unstable. Nations have less in common – and are more likely to go to war. This conflict will be more savage than ever as exponential technologies turned everywere into a potential battlefield. Cheap military drones mean a few hundred dollars can mount real-world attacks.
Growing online connectivity means anything from lightbulbs to fridges can become a crack in our national security – from misinformation campaigns to autonomous weapons.
Azeem argues we’re living through an unprecedented commodification of human existence.
Historically, there were limits to the market economy – you could sell food and gadgets; but you couldn’t sell people’s private lives or a nation’s laws. The boundaries are increasingly blurred. A handful of platforms dominate our public sphere, private companies make the laws that govern our lives. The emergence of the data economy means that the most intimate details of our lives are bought and sold for profit. The result, an erosion of the lines between public and private sector.
To survive and thrive, we need to understand the new rules, consider how we fit within them and adapt. Fast.
There’s much to be cheerful and hopeful about. That’s where the book gets really interesting.
If you’ve got this far, I’m not going to spoil the punchlines, buy a copy and read if for yourself.
Or come to BoS Online Fall, 27-29 September and I’ll send the next 20 people to register a hard copy myself.
Exponential technology could bring a new age of prosperity.
We will only build this future if we manage to close the exponential gap. Azeem outlines specific policies and ideas we need to make life in the Exponential Age liveable. He also describes the broad principles that could help us get there.
Exponential ends with a message of hope. While the exponential gap is eroding our societies, with the right solutions we can build a world of abundance and equity.
As software folk, we’re responsible for designing and building the technology of the future. That will have significant impacts on the health, happiness, wellbeing and of the world’s population.
Azeem will be at BoS Online Fall, 27-29 September with a talk and extended discussion based on the book, Exponential.
He will discuss the book’s core ideas – how the exponential gap came about and caused of some of our most pressing problems. He will also share why he thinks the exponential gap is not inevitable – and how those that can harness its power will do much better than those who don’t.
Azeem is the founder of a number of successful tech companies. After exiting his latest venture in 2016 he spoke about AI & Machine Learning at BoS Europe. (Well worth a rewatch). Then he gave his bio as,
‘Currently discovering literature, neuroscience and thinking about exponential change.’
Shortly after, he founded Exponential View, a platform for in-depth tech analysis with free and paid newsletters with over 200,000 readers across the world. He also created the The Exponential View Podcast in partnership with Harvard Business Review which has 2,000,000 listeners.
Notable subscribers include
“Exponential View is a must read”
Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek
“I look forward to being challenged and inspired by the Exponential View every week”.
DeepMind founder Mustafa Suleyman
He’s a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council, sits on the board of the Ada Lovelace Foundation and contributes to the Financial Times, Prospect and MIT Technology Review.
At BoS we run events and publish content that is highly valued by anyone trying to build, run, and scale a great software company.
Sign up for a regular dose of actionable and useful content:
Business of Software is a paid conference with limited sponsorship. We focus on delivering value to our customers – the attendees. We know this means not everyone who would like to can afford the cost of attendance.
We’re delighted and grateful for the lovely people at:
As supporters, they help support us to enable smart and awesome people who would otherwise be unable to attend the event to come, learn, join the community and get a helping hand to start the next phase of their career and journey as an entrepreneur.
Stephen Allott is a venture partner at Seedcamp, a fund that has around 300 active portfolio companies.
As an engaged investment partner, when Covid first hit the UK, Seedcamp doubled down on assisting their companies with navigating the unprecedented uncertainty they faced. What they, and Stephen in particular, are particularly good at is scenario planning which – when done well – is about planning for uncertainty.
The silver lining for us is that in the talk, Stephen is sharing a new tool that you can use for planning out your response to unexpected scenarios.
The full talk and links to the original slide deck and transcript are below.