#BoSFAQ – Your questions, answered by our expert speakers

We like to help all our subscribers with a full catalogue of interesting and insightful talks from our previous Business of Software conferences.

With over 200 talks to watch there is something for everyone – the first step is knowing your problem; that’s where #BoSFAQ comes in. Here we answer your questions, with the help of our expert speakers. If this is your first time on the site, you should sign up for our regular, guaranteed content-filled, updates here. When you do, you will receive an email to confirm your subscription. Once confirmed, you can reply to the email with your biggest challenge. We will hand pick some talks that might help you address it.

This week we’ve been asked:

Q | How do companies adapt for growth and find their next breakout product?

#BoSFAQ – Your questions, answered by our expert speakers

We like to help all our subscribers with a full catalogue of interesting and insightful talks from our previous Business of Software conferences.  With over 200 talks to watch there is something for everyone – the first step is knowing your problem; that’s where #BoSFAQ comes in. Here we answer your questions, with the help of our expert speakers.

This week we’ve been asked:

Q | Where do I start with jobs-to-be-done?

Bob Moesta, Founder, The ReWired Group

How do you see innovation and how do you harness it effectively to make it work? How do people learn, and how can they work better? Every innovator comes across daily problems that they don’t know how to answer or where to even start thinking about the answer.

In this fast-paced talk from BoS USA 2018, jobs-to-be-done expert and lifelong innovator Bob Moesta helps give you the skills to make all your innovation outcomes more predictable, and successful. Bob has honed these key skills from his life working in everything from automotive, weapons systems, food, private equity, homebuilding, construction software, and more.

Video, slides, and transcript below

The Accidental and Deliberate Growth of Shopify

Shopify is now a $39 billion market cap business listed on the New York Stock Exchange and on the dreaded, ‘Black Friday’ this year, Shopify merchants made over $900 million worth of sales.

In a recent interview with Underscore.vc, Tobi Lutke, the founder and CEO, shared some of the things that made him change his view of the business from a lifestyle business, to one that became venture funded and then listed on the public markets. It has become one of the most successful and significant ecommerce platforms of the past decade. He discusses how he came to realize that his approach to running the business was becoming a significant block to growth.

In this context, it is fascinating to watch his Business of Software Conference USA 2011 talk: How to make sure your business is on the right side of history through code & culture.

Even then, he seemed determined that he wanted Shopify to have a lasting impact and legacy on the world.

The Accidental and Deliberate Growth of Shopify.

While the early growth of Shopify was in many ways accidental, there came a time when, for Shopify, deliberate growth was required.

A BoS Autopsy on Black Friday

Your inboxes have no doubt been flooded for most of November with “Pre-Black Friday Discounts”, “register now for early access to Black Friday deal” and my personal favourite “#000000Friday”.  So why does every retailer and business across the globe try to make Black Friday happen?

Cashing in on massive hype is not a new or ground-breaking idea in the retail world – ‘Boxing Day Sales’ is a very familiar term to us in the UK despite sales often starting late-November and continuing through to New Year. Recent rises in online shopping has been forcing high street shops to reduce prices earlier and earlier as they no longer have the upper hand in controlling consumer purchasing.  A recent Which? report shows that 48% of items were sold at a lower price after Black Friday and that 61% were actually cheaper before their Black Friday sale price.

How to combat Black Friday

Stephen Allott, Seedcamp

There are three main aspects to sales: Planning, Selling, and Tools.  This talk from Stephen Allott takes you through the journey of planning for success and which rules and tools can help and hinder your organization. From generating good leads, to spotting good sales people and how to motivate them to be better.

Over 30 years Stephen has seen the evolution of software and tech companies with a fascinating career spanning computers, strategy, software , universities, chairing 8 companies, Government, and most recently in AI gaining a wealth of experience and some great insights to share.

Video, Slides, and Transcript below

Black Friday Sucks.

In the US, it was created as an opportunity to sell more stuff people don’t want to people who can’t afford it to while away some time while your at home with your family in a turkey coma and your critical faculties are severely weakened. Retailers dump unwanted stuff, at prices noone was prepared to pay for in the first place then add a DISCOUNT!! Blurgh. No thanks. This ‘tradition’ has spread to the UK and beyond now and this is the season that all those things you bought online or in-store come back to bite you in the inbox (or spam box), as marketeers go ‘MAD!’ with their BLACK FRIDAY DEALS!!!!

As everyone does it, we thought we had to, but we think these artificial festivals of consumerism suck.

Our Black Friday Deal is different.

Black Friday Sucks. So…

#BoSFAQ – Your questions, answered by our expert speakers.

We like to help all our subscribers with a full catalogue of interesting and insightful talks from our previous Business of Software conferences.  With over 200 talks to watch there is something for everyone – the first step is knowing your problem; that’s where #BoSFAQ comes in. Here we answer your questions, with the help of our expert speakers.

This week the question is:

Q | How do I scale my hiring efforts during rapid company growth?

Never the smartest in the room…

They say if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. The lovely thing about Business of Software Conference is that you are likely to be surrounded by some extremely smart people but as I am likely to be there, you don’t run the risk of being the dumbest. I aim to serve…

I was in London yesterday for the bi-annual Thinkers50 Awards, a day of talks and conversations with some of the people who are recognised as being the best ‘thinkers’ and communicators on business management in the world. Their ‘Thinkers50’ rankings are published annually. I was very touched to be invited by Rita McGrath, probably mainly because she was intrigued to know if I owned a suit…

Congratulations to Alex Osterwalder and Rita McGrath who were both ranked in the Top 5.

Rich Mironov, Smokejumper Product Executive

Following on from his BoS2018 talk “What to do about your audience’s real roadmap questions“, Rich Mironov joined Mark yesterday to answer questions from all over the world about how to make roadmaps that work.

Your product roadmap is not a model, an algorithm or an artefact, it is an ongoing process that requires careful management of the relevant stakeholders. What do you do when your stakeholders don’t agree? What is the MVR (minimum viable roadmap) for a product company? How do you truly understand customer demand and need? With so many questions posed to Rich, this jam-packed hour of Q&A is full of useful advice and answers for helping you to map out the right roadmap for your company.

See the hangout below

#BoSFAQ – Your questions, answered by our expert speakers.

When we welcome new subscribers to the Business of Software newsletter, we point them towards our catalogue of talks from previous conferences. There’s over 200 videos that might be able to help them with their current business problem. You can find those 200 videos here.

As you can see, there are a LOT of talks and, sometimes, it is hard to find the one you need (especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for!). So, we encourage new subscribers to reply to the welcome email with a direct question and we try to suggest some useful content. Think of it as our ML enabled content engine; where ML = Mark Littlewood, not Machine Learning. Our regular subscribers can, of course, drop us an email any time with a question too and we will try to help.

There are some recurring themes in the questions that people ask so we thought we would share some of them with you our wonderful subscribers. Let us know if you have a challenge that might be interesting to others

Q | How to move from being a consulting to product business. Read on…

SoftBank Investor Presentation November 2019

With all the talk about WeWork and its disastrous pulled IPO, founder shenanigans etc, it is interesting to read SoftBank’s latest investor update. SoftBank’s Vision Fund has, rightly, come under scrutiny for its investments in WeWork and other ‘punchy’ investments. Their shareholder update is at significant pains to point out that (a) the value of the the overall entity has risen in the past three months by some $13 billion USD and (b) they have a cunning plan for WeWork…

Quite an ‘interesting’ read. We thought it was a parody at first. Much of it reads like some sort of junior school project. It illustrates some very ‘high-level’ thinking and that putting some charts into a report solves everything. Don’t forget, there is over $200 billion value of market cap in SoftBank Holdings. That a company of that size and complexity can produce such an astonishingly simple report makes us think, if your share price is underpinned by some businesses that shell off money, you get a lot of leeway to play.

SoftBank Investor Presentation November 2019

Laura Roeder, Founder/CEO, MeetEdgar

Laura Roeder is a signed-up member of the Bootstrapping club. Her Social Media scheduling SaaS MeetEdgar is proudly bootstrapped in a market that has some very well-funded competitors – Hootsuite alone has taken nearly $300 million in funding. Why start a business when your biggest competitor has so much cash to throw around?

Laura is convinced that being small and bootstrapped is an advantage when your competitors are big and funded. In this talk from Business of Software Conference Europe 2018, she explains some of the advantages with examples from MeetEdgar. Bootstrappers, be encouraged – there’s room for you in the market, however much money your competition has!

Video and Transcript below

Rita McGrath (Author, Seeing Around Corners) & Alex Osterwalder (Founder, Strategyzer)

At Business of Software USA 2019 we were joined by two titans of innovation thinking. Rita McGrath & Alex Osterwalder both gave fantastic talks at the conference and shared enthusiastically in the 3 days of learning. It’s probably fair to say that Alex made more notes than anybody!

Rita & Alex sat down together on the third morning of the conference to discuss the state of innovation as they see it in companies across Europe and the USA. A fascinating 10-minute discussion unfolded between two of the smartest people we know.

Watch the Video & Follow the Transcript below:

A Conversation with Andy Ellis (CSO, Akamai)

Andy was one of the speakers at this year’s BoS Conference USA 2019 and talked about why humans were awesome at risk management and why humans were awful at risk management. Subscribe to watch the talk when it is published. It is good. Very good. At the speaker dinner, we got into a conversation about how people can take the same data to come to derive completely different meanings. He’d been thinking about this and explained how you can take the Harry Potter stories and come to some very disturbing conclusions. In this discussion with Andy, he explains, using both Harry Potter and the Star Wars trilogy as examples. Very entertaining and thought-provoking… Harry Potter fans might not like it.

You will also learn how to tell whether your house is haunted. A true Halloween spooktacular!

Watch here…

Four Quick Takeaways from #BoS2019: Guest Post by Allison Grinberg-Funes

I learned a lot at the Business of Software Conference when I attended as a first-timer in 2018. Throughout the conference, it wasn’t hard to pinpoint takeaways that folks would be able to bring home to improve their individual growth or their team’s outputs. #BoS2019 was no different.

BoS is rare for how much it encourages community. I mean – have you ever been to another conference offering interactive notes? In the spirit of giving back to those who may have been actively listening or away fielding a client call, I took the time to record a few takeaways.

If you’re looking for something to jog your memory – or even better, a reason why you and your teammates should be at BoS2020, here are 4 quick takeaways* from Business of Software Conference 2019.

Join us on Thursday 14th November for a live online Q&A with Rich Mironov on Product Roadmaps & Prioritization

The roadmapping process is almost always broken. Roadmaps are met with frustration and boredom in equal measure. That’s Rich Mironov’s experience of working with Silicon Valley software companies for 35+ years.

Different voices in the company want different things. Sales need that one new feature for a big client, and they’re sure will only be ‘a few lines of code’. The executive team wants to know why you’re not getting more done. Support has hundreds of ‘good’ ideas from customers that they want to see. How do you manage expectations across the company, and create a product roadmap that prioritizes the right things while uniting your organisation?

Join us for a Q&A with Rich Mironov, product coach, seasoned entrepreneur, and author of ‘The Art Of Product Management’, who will be walking us through some tactics for designing a roadmap process that works.

🦞 Business of Software Conference USA 2019 – Some Highlights 🦞

The 13th Annual Business of Software Conference USA took place in Boston a few weeks ago – September 16-18 2019. What an incredible few days. A huge thank you to all the speakers and attendees who made it one of the most memorable ever, for all the right reasons. The talks will be edited, published and transcribed in the next month or so but until then, here are the slides, sketch notes, interviews and photos from some of the attendees.

Read on to see Slide Decks, SketchNotes, Highlights, and Photos from BoS USA

Why do speakers attend BoS? And what do they learn?

Each year at the Business of Software Conference, attendees hear insights from some of the smartest people in software, all willing to share their expertise with the community. Over the last 13 years, hundreds of speakers have shared their experiences and wisdom with the BoS community. At #BoS2019 this September, Allison Grinberg-Funes sat down with speakers old and new to learn their thoughts on the BoS community and what it’s like to be a speaker.

Guest Post by Allison Grinberg-Funes

Rich Mironov, CEO/Founder, Mironov Consulting

Your product roadmap is not a model, an algorithm or an artifact, it is an ongoing political process that requires careful management of the relevant stakeholders. One major challenge is that your stakeholders DO NOT WANT the same things. To make a Roadmap useful, you need an allocation model and a selling strategy that helps you: understand; manage the expectations of; deliver value to people across the organization who prioritize very different things. Rich explains some approaches to help you understand and manage a roadmap’s stakeholders so that your products and customers are prioritized over the requirements of other stakeholders.

Video, Q&A, Slides, & Transcript below