Blog

Do engineers mean to kill people?

Brilliant technology with bad design can kill people at worst. Not a great outcome. There are plenty of less extreme examples of bad design in software that have resulted in injuries, the destruction of one of the world’s greatest cathedrals, through to frustrated users who often end up not using the software you take so much care to build.

Is your product as easy to use as you think? In this new BoS talk, Scott Berkun tells great stories and offers practical steps to design your products better. He discusses why we’re responsible for the products we put into the world and the importance of making design an integral, iterative part of building products. He shares the four fundamental questions of design you should ask whenever you building products. Check out the latest video from the BoS Library.

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Let’s talk lobsters

Lobsters are weird.

In 1800s they were dirt-cheap because they were so copious, so were routinely fed to prisoners, apprentices, enslaved people, and children. Nowadays they are seen as delicacies for the more fortunate. This rags to riches story is why we at BoS LOVE the lobster and why we are proud to wear the lobster emblem on our USA tours.

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Questions Founders Have About Selling Companies

What do you wish you knew about selling your company? You probably won’t know until it is too late.

The most common feeling that founders share post exit is that they wished they had known more about the ins and outs of selling a company before they entered a process. 

At BoS, we’ve been talking with a lot of founders, both post-exit and those that are considering an exit, to understand what they would like to know about the process of selling a company. We’re going to be running a mastermind group for founders who want to achieve the best possible exit for themselves, their customers and their teams.

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Book your On-site En-suite tout suite

BoS Conf USA is being held at the Seaport Hotel in Boston, MA on 26-28 September and you can now reserve your room at the BoS Conf Special rate of just $289 per night.

This rate is only available until Wednesday 24 August, after which attendees will have to pay The Seaport’s public full rate.

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Supporting BoS Online Confs

Building long term relationships with high-valued SaaS leaders

At Business of Software conferences, we aim to make a real difference to the wonderful people and companies that make up our BoS Community. When we aren’t able to meet in-person, we can still come together online to share ideas, learn new tricks, and work on our businesses together. This isn’t something we can do all on our own though – it is thanks to the speakers, supporters, and attendees who come together to help each other grow and succeed.

The best place to learn practical lessons that can be applied to your business right away.

James Avery, Kevel | BoS Online 2021 & 2022 Supporter

Join dozens of people all over the world to help you make progress, at BoS Online

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PSA PSA Test

Not many people know what a PSA test is.

It’s nothing to do with software but probably important to a large number of software folk.

What is a PSA test?

A PSA test is a blood test for screening for prostate cancer. It measures the level of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in your blood.

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Team Rates for BoS Conference Online

Why do we offer a bundle price for online events but not a bundle price for teams to share in the same online event?

Good question…

Our bundle pricing aimed to encourage you to come to more online events, be part of the community, access some of the smartest people on the planet who can help you build better software and companies.

We think we should encourage participation at all our online conferences.

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Culture & Allyship in Theory & Practice

Is your company culture negotiable?

This got us thinking about how much company culture is performative vs deep-rooted and non-negotiable.

B. Pagels-Minor shared a talk at BoS Conference Online Fall 2021 on how people and organizations can be effective and positive allies for marginalized groups in companies, focusing on gender diverse communities.

Bethany Pagels-Minor

B. shared an historical perspective, discussed some of their own personal experiences and offered some excellent ideas that would be both practical and useful for any organization that wants to create and maintain and welcoming, diverse and healthy work environment. While the talk focused on gender diversity, much of it is equally applicable to diversity more widely.

They also talked a little about their current role, in product as Games Launch Manager at Netflix where they were also a Global Lead for Netflix’s Black and Netflix’s Trans employee resource groups.

It was notable how excited B. was about working in an organization like Netflix, that has a well discussed culture and was so committed to supporting diverse groups of people in the organization.

Shortly after the conference, life changed for B. at Netflix.

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BoS Conf Giveaways – Doing Things Differently

At Business of Software we want to make a positive impact to you and your business and not a negative impact on the world, as we deliver the great, inspiring, conferences you have come to know and love.

When we moved our 2020 Europe Conference from in-person to online a lot of stuff happened very quickly. Once the event was over, I was faced with a mountain of unusable merch – T-shirts, bags, notebooks, and cups all had “2020” on them, equating to 1000 items. I was determined that they would not end up as landfill. I had no idea how we could reuse them, I just knew we absolutely had to.

BoS Europe 2020 giveaways prepped and ready

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At BoS we run events and publish highly-valued content for anyone building, running, or scaling a SaaS or software business.

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How Vision, Strategy and Positioning are Related. 

April Dunford: Confusing Positioning and Strategy  

April is riled by this. She discussed why she feels it is so bad. 

“I started getting clients come to me, saying, what we want to do is a strategy session and I was like, I don’t do strategy. I do positioning, and they’re like, hey, yeah, it’s the same thing.” April Dunford 

April blames consultants in Silicon Valley for propagating the myth that a story that works for VCs will work in a sales situation and for attracting employees into your company. Everything magically happens. “No! No! It’s not the same thing.” 

How are vision, strategy, and positioning related? 

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The JTBD Conf

8 June | Online

Jobs to be Done is not new, but it is an underrated tool every level of every business can use to get better at understanding where others are coming from as the view your product/project.

On 8 June 2022, Business of Software are bringing you a one-day conf full of amazing JTBD insights, workshops, and talks from experts such as Bob Moesta, Claire Suellentrop, Nopadon Wongpakdee, and many more.

BoS Conf Online 8 June 2022

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More Options for Financing SaaS Companies

Once upon a time, back in the last millennium, there were two ways of financing a software company: you raised money from friends, family, fools and angels; or you pitched VCs for funding.

Then the world changed.

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Partnering with Business of Software

Building long term relationships with high-value SaaS and software leaders

At Business of Software conferences, we aim to make a real difference to the wonderful people and companies that make up our BoS Community. This isn’t something we can do all on our own though – it is thanks to the speakers, supporters, and attendees who come together to help each other grow and succeed.

Read more

Want more of these insightful talks?

At BoS we run events and publish highly-valued content for anyone building, running, or scaling a SaaS or software business.

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Conference Swag and Giveaways

Our BoS 2022 tote bag looking full and useful

We try to offer attendees a few things to remember the conference by and make sure that whatever we produce is worth keeping.

The t-shirts, notebooks, pens, books, bags, and more, everything we hand pick is designed to be taken home, kept, and used time and time again. We know that, in general, people value what they receive and we hate to think that things will be thrown away. Sadly, every year the landfill sites across the world get fuller and fuller.

This year at BoS Europe, we made some changes and we’ve been very encouraged by the feedback.

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