Steve Johnson, Principle, Under 10 Consulting

Purple Squirrel (n) is used by recruiters to describe a job candidate with precisely the right education, experience, and qualifications to fit a job’s multifaceted requirements. “Your perfect candidate is as rare as a purple squirrel”.

In recent years, title inflation has exploded. We’ve seen new definitions for old titles and many new titles have been created. In product management, we’ve got product managers, product marketing managers, product owners, program managers, product strategists, product line managers, portfolio managers, and more. The more prescriptive your requirements, the less likely you are going to find the perfect person. The same applies across every function in an organization.

Steve explains why you should reconsider the areas of expertise needed to build a successful team. Identify contributors with a more limited skill set, but with specific strengths. Adapting processes to the strengths of your team can be a better approach to scaling a startup or optimizing an existing business. Six types of expertise are necessary for a well-rounded product team. They are rarely found in a single person but that doesn’t matter.

(PS. They are: Business, Market, Technology, Domain, Process, and Operations.)

Slides, Video & Transcript below

Ash Maurya, Founder/CEO, LeanStack

Ash Maurya is the author of ‘Running Lean’, ‘Scaling Lean’ as well as the Lean Canvas business modeling tool.

Ash is driven by the search for better and faster ways for building successful products. He has developed a systematic methodology for raising the odds of success built upon Lean Startup, Customer Development, and Bootstrapping techniques.

Slides, Video, AMA & Transcript below

Lianna Patch and Alli Blum here – conversion copywriters extraordinaire and not-so-secret SaaS geeks.

Having met online just a few weeks before Business of Software 2017, Alli and I naturally threw caution to the winds and decided to become in-person BFFs at the conference this year.

But mere friendship wasn’t enough for two Type A copywriters. Nope.

We also decided to do a conference “takeover”, and interview BoS speakers and longtime attendees about their conference experience!

We asked everyone the same 3 questions:

Eric Ries launches his new book, ‘The Startup Way’ this month.

“My research has focused on what causes established companies to maintain success, and The Startup Way provides practical guidance on how to do just that.” Clay Christensen, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School

You should probably get yourself a copy. In  it he shows how to apply the ideas that have become so well established in startups to make larger organizations more agile and innovative. Looking through our copy, we were struck by how many of the speakers at Business of Software over the years have had an influence on his thinking.

Here’s a few recordings of Business of Software talks (transcripts too) from some of the people who Eric cites as driving his thinking…

Last time we saw Eric Ries in London was at the launch of the Lean Startup book in 2012.

As we prepare for our upcoming evening with Eric Ries to celebrate the launch of The Startup Way, 15th November, Central London, we took a look back at the last time he was in town…

Notes & Pictures from Business of Software Conference USA 2017

Collaborative notes from attendees, blog posts, pictures and other good stuff from the 11th Business of Software Conference USA.

Read on for the definitive guide.

Thanks to all of the hard note taking elves at Business of Software Conference USA.

Zack Urlocker, COO, Duo Security

Zack Urlocker is an executive, advisor and board member with over twenty years of experience in the software industry.

He has helped scale revenues in startups from under $6 million to over $100 million and has had multiple billion dollar exits. He has held executive positions at Zendesk (COO), MySQL (EVP Product), Active Software (VP Marketing) and Borland (VP Marketing) and is currently COO at Duo Security. In his spare time he writes rock operas.

Ninety percent of all startups self-destruct —mostly because they scale too quickly. So how do you go about scaling from a small company to a large one without blowing up? In this presentation, Zack Urlocker, Chief Operating Officer of Duo Security, walks you through some of the lessons he has learned in helping software companies like Zendesk and MySQL scale to billion dollar valuations. In particular he highlights what it takes to use a disruptive strategy and how to build a high-velocity business.

Slides, Video & Transcript below

Feedback from #BoS2017

Here at Business of Software HQ we’ve landed without too much turbulence (metaphorical or aeronautical) back into a week of sitting at desks and sending emails – a far cry from being in Boston last week for the 11th annual Business of Software USA Conference.

Having said that…

We’ve had the biggest grins on our faces reading the feedback from this year’s attendees.

It’s fantastic to hear from both familiar and new names that BoS continues to provide opportunities and content that genuinely help the growth of their businesses. Even some of the negative comments have made us laugh…

“The pen is horrible.”

Consider it noted (with one of those horrible pens).

Here are a few of our highlights from your comments:

Sketchnotes from Business of Software Conference USA 2017

Lianna Patch at Punchline Copy not only did a Lightning Talk at Business of Software Conference USA last week, she took some pretty cool sketchnotes of the talks when she wasn’t preparing to give her own.

We will add these sketchnotes to the collaborative notes and publish a summary of all the notes we are aware of. Please drop us a note if you have notes/pictures that you would like to include in our write up. Thanks for these Lianna.

The rubber chicken brightened our day.