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

Shawn Anderson & Shane Corellian, Co-Founders, PDQ.com

How does a bootstrapped software company effectively market especially when its founders despise (and, in fact, suck at) sales and marketing? The answer for PDQ.com finally came, in part, from Charles Bukowski: Don’t Try. The founders just started doing what they loved: Talking tech. They offered solutions and suggestions for Sys Admins via content in blogs, KB’s, videos and webcasts. The content was created for people, not algorithms. In this talk, Shawn and Shane share some ideas that worked and some that didn’t…

Video, Slides, & Transcript below

Business of Software Conference USA 2019 Speaker Reading List

What do the smartest people have in common? It is pretty well established that a thirst for learning is a common trait. Here are the books that this year’s Business of Software Conference USA 2019 speakers say have had the biggest influence on their business lives, and what they are reading now.

Not anything like as good as being at the conference but if you want to pick up some pearls of wisdom, start here…

Business of Software Conference USA 2019 Speaker Reading List

What To Expect for 1st Timers and Ol’ Timers

With just over two weeks until the 13th Business of Software Conference USA starts in Boston, MA, here are a few of the things that you should expect this year. Whether you are 1st timers or ol’ timers, there is plenty going on and here are a few notes about what you should expect. We want Business of Software Conference to be the best conference you attend in the year, for content, for atmosphere, for attendee experience.

There are some new elements this year so take a look and let us know if you have any questions…

Here’s What To Expect This Year

Claire Suellentrop, Founder/CMO, Userlist.io

When marketing a product, it’s common for founders to focus on the product itself. “Look at our cool features! We help you do XYZ activity, but better!” This is a recipe for getting lost in the noise.

Instead, capturing your customer’s attention requires focusing on her ultimate motivation (“job to be done”), which is to transform her current life-situation into a preferred one.

After this talk, you’ll understand how the ‘jobs-to-be-done’ theory helps SaaS companies create effective positioning — and a proven, step-by-step process for uncovering your best customers’ ‘job-to-be-done’.

Video, Slides, and Transcript below

Business of Software Conference USA 2019 Unconference Sessions

One important element of Business of Software Conference are the Monday afternoon breakout sessions. They help people meet each other, offer a break from the talks and a chance to do something different. We have had speed networking sessions and competitive task completion exercises in the past. This year, we want to do something a little different and give people the opportunity to discuss things they care about with others in small, informal groups – our Unconference Sessions.

This is how they will work

Boston Events During BoS Conference

Boston isn’t just the home of your favorite SaaS and software conference. There is plenty going on. This year, you could take the opportunity to see, among others, Baseball – Redsox vs Giants, Lizzo, ZZ Top, David Byrne, King Crimson, The Who, a Downton Abbey Exhibition (!) and lots, lots more.

Here are a few of the things you could do while you are at the conference in 2019.

Greg Baugues, Developer Community Manager, Twilio

Greg Baugues has bipolar disorder and ADHD. He spoke at BoS USA 2013 in an extraordinary talk that has been instrumental in helping start a conversation for many about mental health in tech. Today, he leads the Developer Community team at Twilio. In this short talk, he updates the BoS Community his story, and shares some of the lessons he has learned that go beyond talk, with some thoughts and observations that will help you to support coworkers and others who we suspect might be struggling with their mental health.

Talking is the first step. How can you best support a co-worker who is strong enough to take it?

Video, Slides, and Transcript below

Matt Wensing, Founder, SimSaaS

Warren Buffett said “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” We’ve all experienced that feeling of immense ignorance as leaders of software businesses. One area of constant anxiety is not really knowing how adjusting or changing one component of our business will impact the whole. Software businesses contain an incredible number of moving parts and variables. How can we isolate and study them? For most of us, it’s a combination of trial and error and learning from others’ mistakes when they’re brave enough to share them. Matt has spent the last 10 years starting and running his own software company (Riskpulse), learning many hard lessons along the way.

This led him to wonder: in addition to stumbling forward and searching for mentors, could he write software to simulate the future of his business? What lessons could it teach him? What could he learn if his computer could run 1,000 different startups in minutes, not years?  What light could a simulation like this shed on the underlying laws (physics) of software businesses? About people?

Video, Slides, and Transcript below