Offering people choices when they have no choices

I was talking to the always entertaining and insightful Rory Sutherland today about his forthcoming talk at Business of Software Europe. He’s talking about how we can use technology to hack the human consciousness and he came up with this brilliant insight about offering people choices even when there are no choices.

He was talking about scheduled operations in the NHS, the UK’s National Health Service, free at the point of delivery but not always the slickest when it comes to keeping ‘customers’ happy. (Though having taken one of our team members to A&E last week when she tripped over on the way to work, cut her head open, broke her wrist and elbow, I was reminded that they are an amazing organisation).

When you are scheduled to have, for example, a hip replacement, you will wait some time before getting a call to say something along the lines of,

“Your operation is scheduled for 10.30 am on 21st May.”

You have no choice, you  have to be there or get rescheduled to a later date.

Here’s another approach…

Jenni Jepsen, Partner, goAgile

The key to building high performance teams is understanding how our brains work.

What motivates us as individuals?

Jenni explains how we can make it easier to harvest all the benefits of Agile working by understanding why neuroscience, how people’s individual brains work, is key to creating and motivating a high performing team.

Jenni’s work focuses is on helping people deliver the right product faster whilst creating lasting changes.

Slides, Video & Transcript below

We’ve laid out three fundamental facts about commercial software: your development team will never be big enough; all of the profits are in the nth copy or nth subscriber; and the software bits we release are not the product. These led to three laws for software businesses (the Law of Ruthless Prioritization; the Law of Build Once, Sell Many; and the Law of Whole Product).

One last market observation is that you can’t outsource your strategy.  Not to your customer base, not to your sales force, not to a strategy template, and not entirely to a prioritization algorithm. Product strategy is a prediction about how your future actions will move the market, and therefore needs a range of inputs and scenarios. Plus some strong beliefs about where things are going. So let’s stand up a few of the most popular strategy outsourcing approaches, and then knock each one down.

Can’t Customers Decide For Us?

At BoS USA 2015 Rich Mironov delivered a classic talk on Software Economics that are so common that they are not just theory, they are the law. See the talk here. After delivering the talk, Rich captured his laws in a series of posts, delivered originally on his site, and reposted with permission on the Business of Software blog.

Our two previous posts noted that your development team will never, ever be big enough to catch up with your dreams (pushing us to The Law of Ruthless Prioritization) and that all of the profits are in the nth copy (thus The Law of Build Once, Sell Many).

Part three starts with the observation that the software bits we release are not the product. Rather, they are part of the product. We may celebrate releasing code, but there’s more a software company needs in order to turn bits into money. Like giving a hungry man a can of soup, but no can opener. So what’s missing?

Paul Kenny, Ocean Learning

Difficult Conversations for Growing Companies. Every business person faces hard conversations at some point in their growth. One of Paul Kenny’s best talks at Business of Software Conference. Not about sales, but about the challenges that everyone faces in growing a business.

He discusses why having those difficult conversations, with co-founders, co-workers, employees, employers, partners are so difficult to have. More importantly, he offers some excellent, practical advice about how you can make the hard stuff easier and more productive.

Equally applicable in times of growth or trouble.

Slides, Video, AMA & Transcript below

At BoS USA 2015 Rich Mironov delivered a classic talk on Software Economics that are so common that they are not just theory, they are the law. See the talk here. After delivering the talk, Rich captured his laws in a series of posts, delivered originally on his site, and reposted with permission on the Business of Software blog.

Rich’s first law has been revealed (link). In the following post, Rich discusses his second law…

All of the profits are in the nth copy or nth user.

“Don’t count the things you do.  Do the things that count.”

Guest Blog Post from startup founder, Angela Hood, This Way Global, who attended Business of Software Conference Europe last year in Cambridge. This year she will return to Ireland for Business of Software Conference Europe, May 16-17th.

The two most important days for our startup in 2015 were spent at Business of Software (BoS).

Join us for Steve Johnson’s Product Management Surgery – April 14th 2016

Steve Johnson was once described by my most cynical (and perhaps consequently most competent) product manager friend as the only product management guru worth listening to. He shares a wealth of experience, in this talk where he questions the notion that Lean Methods work, not least because most people haven’t read the book…

Join Steve online – bring your gnarliest product management problems for a one hour, AMA Product Management Surgery, 14th April, 17:00 BST, 12:00 EST.

You can also view his Business of Software Conference USA talk, with transcript and notes below.

Define, Design, Deliver, Refine.

Why You Should Attend BoS 2016: My Five for Five from BOS 2015

Hello! My name is Jamie Seefurth, and I attended Business of Software 2015 in Boston.

Those three days are still resonating in me, and, like many others, I was filled with gratitude after attending that week. Mark requested I write this blog based on two sentences of feedback I provided him:

“This conference should not be marketed to Entrepreneurs. It is applicable to anyone in the startup and software industry who work in all facets of the company.”

Here are more observations I have put together. Like a good project manager, I’m going to summarize those in five bullets of five bullets:

• Five details about me
• Five things I didn’t know about BOS until I attended
• Five of my favorite talks from Boston 2015
• Five hopes for Ireland
• Five items of feedback for BOS team

Go!

Lee Sodol is a genius level Go player but he has one fatal flaw in the battle against the machine. He is human.

“Man breaks computer”

Not news.

“Computer breaks man”

Hold the front page!

Rich is a seasoned executive and serial entrepreneur – he has been the ‘product guy’ (as CEO/VP Product) at six startups. With deep technical roots in B2B infrastructure, SaaS and consumer online, Rich combines ‘what-we-can-build’ with ‘what-markets-want’. 

What follows is a guest blog from Rich. He built the posts from his specially produced Business of Software talk and serialised it across four blogs, which will follow in the coming weeks. For more from Rich, including the original posting of this blog, find his site here. 

Newton taught us that gravity’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

I’ve spent a lot of the last decade with one foot in the engineering organization and the other with marketing/sales.  While the two sides of the business communicate poorly, I think there’s something more fundamental happening: we don’t believe in the same laws of physics.   So with some gross generalizations, here are a few core principles of software economics.  At the executive level, these should help us drive our tech companies in the right direction – to let gravity pull us where we want to go.  Four posts lay out a should-be-obvious set of truths and their matching laws. (Originally presented as a Business of Software talk.)

If you don’t know your company well, how can you expect to run it well?

Why is the CEO often the last to discover something? Those pesky employees aren’t telling you everything you need to know. Claire’s talk helps you understand why people don’t tell you the things you need to know but more importantly, has highly actionable advice about how to build a much more honest, open and productive work culture.

Slides, Video, AMA, Notes & Transcript below

The Apple Brick 2

The FBI is very keen to make Apple unlock the phone used by one of the alleged perpetrators of the San Bernadino massacre. An iPhone, it is locked with a 4 digit code that gives you 4 chances to crack a code with 9,999 combinations before the phone is wiped.

Apple is refusing to assist claiming, apart from anything else that it cannot help.

The Apple Brick 1

A viral hoax is doing the rounds that suggests if you set the date on your iPhone or iPad before January 1st 1970, you’re accessing an easter egg that gives the device a ‘retro feel’. One of those stories that you check on Snopes but there seems to be something in it.

Retro is the word if retro means, working like 1970s electronics.

What is Critical in Scaling a Software Company?

Literally a billion dollar (or more) question we asked Stephen Allott, a man who has been there and done it numerous times – most notably through his experience with Micromuse (NASDAQ: MUSE).

Stephen took questions from Mark and an audience of software entrepreneurs on what are the most critical factors in growing a software business from startup, to scale up, to IPO. See the video below from the hangout, and join us for our regular master classes from some of the world’s most leading thinkers and practitioners in software scaling.

Stephen will be talking at Business of Software Europe Conference in Dublin on 16-17 of May 2016. Book your ticket now or see who else is talking.

This is a guest blog post from Mark Stephens, the original posting of which can be found here. Mark is a previous BoS Lightning Talk speaker and Systems Architect/Lead Developer at IDR Solutions and took a few moments to note why he will be coming back to BoS in 2016. 

Software conferences consume lots of time, money and emotional energy. So you need a good reason to include one in your agenda. I tend to limit mine to really important sales events (JavaOne), things I believe passionately in and want to support (NetBeans days) or the chance to go somewhere amazing and be part of an awesome event (DevFest Istanbul).

In the past, I have also been to Business of Software. I first attended in 2008 (which was a real eyeopener for me on how to run a business. In 2009, I did the Lightning talks (still the most scary event in my life) and in 2010 I was lucky enough to go back as a speaker. Since then the date has clashed with JavaOne and I have got out of the habit of attending.

This year I have decided that it is time to return. There are of reasons to go (we have several clients in Boston, I love the city, etc) but my 3 main reasons are:

Bill Janeway, Founder of Warburg Pincus’ High Tech Investment team and investor founder of such companies as BEA Systems and Veritas Software is also a Cambridge academic who has analysed the economics of stock market bubbles over the years.

Are investment bubbles a good or a bad thing? The answer may surprise you. (No! It really might, this isn’t buzzfeed).

Bill argues, very cogently, that ‘productive bubbles’ are not only a good thing, they are essential to enable the creation of huge, market-transforming, disruptive ideas.

Slides, video and transcript below…

What a week for Artificial Intelligence.

The death of Marvin Minsky and the announcement of a huge breakthrough in the field as the Google DeepMind team defeats professional Go player, Fan Hui five times in a row. The latter was expected to happen one day, but not for ten years.