Workshops

After 2.5 days of being bombarded by ideas, it’s time to step back and take stock.

Optional, informal, interactive and fun. BoS workshops will help you prioritize and focus in order to maximize the value of your investment in attending Business of Software Conference.

Workshops are highly interactive, draw on the content of the conference and help you make sense of how your learning may be applied in your own organization. You will leave with an actionable ‘to do’ list of things to apply in your own company.

For the first time ever at BoS, you can now buy Workshop only tickets.

If you’re a Boston based company and want to attend one of the Workshops on October 3rd, you can now buy a Workshop only ticket. Come and learn in a highly interactive, thoroughly engaging and useful 3 hour workshop from renowned practitioners and consultants.

Read on to find out more about the Workshops, and to book your ticket.

Customers don’t just buy a product—they switch from something else. And customers don’t just leave a product—they switch to something else. It’s in these switching moments that the deepest customer insights can be found but most businesses don’t know the real reasons why people switch to—or from—their products. You’ll learn how to find out.

• You’ll participate in live customer interviews.
• You’ll learn new techniques for unearthing the deep insights that most companies never bother to dig up.
• You’ll understand why people switch from one product to another and how you can increase the odds that the switch goes your way.

Product people are frustrated with traditional product roadmapping because it’s no longer delivering that comforting sense of certainty. Many have abandoned roadmaps altogether, but retain this nagging sense that they are missing the strategic big picture.

Fortunately, there is a new generation of product people developing a new breed of product roadmap – one focused on results, not features and dates. This workshop, based on Bruce McCarthy’s new book Roadmapping Relaunched: Setting Product Direction While Embracing Uncertainty (O’Reilly, September 2017), will give you hands-on, expert advice on relaunching a roadmap that works.

Whatever stage you are at in your business, considering your future exit options and what you will need to put in place to get there is essential. Whether you are thinking about selling now, or not at all, there are things you can start doing to make your business more sellable and attractive to potential buyers. Sometimes, circumstances change and business owners are forced to make a decision about selling. It is best to be proactive rather than reactive in these situations and you will be a step ahead if you have already started planning.

In this workshop you will learn:

• How valuations work and industry trends
• What different types of buyers look for when acquiring companies
• Short and long term strategies when exit planning
• When to know when the time is right to sell

In this workshop, Dave Collins will help you focus on making your own website do the job you need it to do.
You work hard to bring in targeted traffic to your website, but then probably lose more than half of them immediately. Is your website telling your story as well as it should? Is it communicating what you do in the right way? Are you giving yourself the best chance of converting inbound traffic to achieving your goal?
Dave won’t pull his punches. He will ask all participants challenging questions starting from the first question, what is your goal? Dave will spend time dissecting your website, starting from the home page, to offer you insights and advice to help you build it back up with purpose and meaning.

Design Origami is a 3D version of a journey map that provides a methodology for modelling and understanding complex business interactions, before designing better solutions. The approach is particularly powerful for understanding complex software products.

Using an example all workshop participants will have experienced as customers, you will learn how to model physical and digital user journeys using everyday objects to model and understand how users experience complex products. You will then learn some of the tools you can use to improve these experiences.

Register for Business of Software Conference USA 2018