Business of Software Podcast

Mark Littlewood talks to Oh Blimey's founder Lucy Heskins about how you can/should hire an agency.

Quiet Light knows how to help SaaS founders like you to get the best value and deal terms for selling the business on. Christopher Moore joins Mark for a chat about the market for SaaS and Software companies.

Typically, when software companies write up their homepage, features page, or pricing page, they use messages and words their internal team is accustomed to using – but often, those words mean very little to their customers, users or prospects. Then they wonder why it’s so hard to acquire new customers.

Stand up against the pointless content that only distracts or overwhelms you, with Dave Collins

What are your customers trying to achieve, and how can you help them get there? Simple questions, but creating a disciplined approach to uncovering and capturing the answers is a huge step forward for your business. 

BoS Online Fall 2021 started with a conversation on Jobs to be Done and marketing with April Dunford and Bob Moesta.

In this talk, B Pagels-Minor will help you understand a little bit more what allyship might look like and how you can actually be a great ally in your workplace.

FE International works with founders and business owners to value, exit plan and ultimately sell their businesses on the best terms. FE uses hundreds of thousands of internal data points, accumulated from over a decade of successful exits to market and position businesses to the right buyers from day one.

In this talk from our Online Spring Conference in 2021, Simon Wardley walks us through how Wardley mapping helps you to understand where your business is, identify opportunities and threats to its existence, make plans for the future and, gameplay the routes to getting to where you want to be. It is a powerful tool to inform your strategy and monitor your progress.

Explore the good, the bad, and the downright dangerous as Wistia's Chris Savage talks about the three mistakes he and co-founder Brendan Schwartz learned from whilst building Wisita.

In this session, Bruce will walk you through the cultures and practices of these organisations and help you think about how to tackle the big, scary challenges in your organisation with a few examples where the right vision, team, and plan have led to winning formulas.

Sahil Lavingia discusses why and how he runs Gumroad with no full time employees, no meetings, no deadlines and no company perks.

You will learn how to prioritise your goals and achievements in all aspects of your life by weighing up the effort necessary against the experience to be gained in pursuing them with more everyday, mainstream, examples.

In this talk you will learn how to:

Cesar worked in advertising before leaving it all behind to pursue his own personal creative endeavours; among them a personal project – 1SecondEveryday.

We are back for another year! 

To kick us off, BoS's own Mark Littlewood joins Kirk for a discussion about what he has learned and will take away from 2021.

Don't forget to sig up for the BoS newsletter and get regular updates about new events and talks at businessofsoftware.org/update

Understand and conquer the challenges of scaling sales teams rapidly with a focus on the challenge of getting new hires up and running quickly and effectively with Paul Kenny

Joanna looks at some old school copywriters' tips to help your SaaS stand out, including the Seven Sweeps to give your copy before you ship it.

Almost everyone running a consulting, training or agency business, however successful, will admit at some point that they wish they could run a product business. Why don’t they? Laura Roeder talks about her experience. 

Join Yesware's Matthew Bellows as he discusses the importance and helpfulness of mindfulness in the workplace.

Scaling is a challenge which presents itself to any company starting out. Further to this, cash flow is the single greatest reason companies fail in the beginning. So how do you scale, whilst remaining respectful of your budget?

Once upon a time dubbed a “Queen” of Twitter, Laura “@Pistachio” Fitton co-authored Twitter for Dummies and founded oneforty.com (acquired by HubSpot) in 2009 when she recognised that software built on Twitter’s API was going to change the world.

In this talk, Michael will explore the soft skills necessary for building a product in a company full of bright people who all think they are right.

Software Ecosystems is a continuously evolving ideology in the field of software engineering. Mike Milinkovich’s talk at BoS Conf USA 2008 looks at providing you with a practitioner’s guide to ecosystem development.

In this talk Jessica Livingston - author of Founders at work - talks about the many lessons she learned from her interviews with the likes of Paul Graham, Steve Wozniak, Mitch Kapor and Joel Spolsky to name but a few.

Fascinating and wide-ranging conversation with Charles Caldwell, VP of Product, Logi Analytics

Drawing on his research, his experience, and physics Matt explains strategies and techniques CEOs can employ to spot patterns and trends in order to reduce uncertainty and get better at predicting strategic outcomes.

SaaS companies obsessed by User Acquisition and User Acquisition Cost are focusing on the wrong metrics, missing the far more important growth drivers for a SaaS business: monetization and retention. In this talk from ProfitWell's Patrick Campbell, we look at the importance of developing your product in collaboration with your current users to understand the needs of the people that are paying for your product.

Jason went against a lot of traditional advice for startups: staying in your lane; not going after big companies as your first customers; treating customer support as a cost center. Those unorthodox decisions have been key to the growth of ActiveCampaign.

Be it Fear or futility, Those pesky employees aren’t telling you everything. Claire Lew looks at why and gives you actionable advice on how to build a better work culture.

For more talks, check out businessofsoftware.org

Are you saying ‘sorry for the inconvenience’ and ‘Thank You for the Feedback?’. Is your customer support leaving your paying customers feeling more exasperated than fulfilled? Sarah Hatter is here with a talk to remind you of what you should be saying or what might be triggering negativity.

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Psychology, philosophy, and economics together demonstrate how software developers, entrepreneurs and engineers need to embrace the forgotten science of Praxeology.

For more BoS Talks, visit businessofsoftware.org

Heidi Roizen Is a Silicon Valley executive, venture capitalist, and entrepreneur. 

In this BoS Talk she discussed why are VCs so difficult? Heidi, will tell you why VCs behave the way they do, and what you should do to maximize your chance of success with a venture capitalist.

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Spotting trends is pretty easy if you know how. Using that knowledge is different – there’s one thing you really need to understand if you are going to capitalise on the future...

For more great talks from BoS Conf, visit businessofosftware.org

In this conversation with Fall 2021 and USA 2019’s BoS speaker Teresa Torres, Mark Littlewood digs into her latest on customer discovery and what to expect in her new book and her BoS Fall talk Continuous Discovery Habits.

To be part of BoS Conf Fall 21, sign up now at businessofsoftware.org/fall

In this talk from BoS Europe 2019, Sarah discusses why Dressipi started as a B2C play but the data it collected on customers has a much higher value to fashion retailers as it enables them to forecast demand more effectively and reduce their unsold inventory. You will leave with ideas to stimulate creative, data-driven, approaches to problem solving and how you can harness culture to build long-term value in your business.

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What is the world of tomorrow going to look like? They say to find out what life is like in 20 years time, ask a current 10 year old as they are the future and what matters to them may not be the same as what matters to current adults.

In this talk from BoS Conf Online Europe 2020, Rita McGrath looks at early warning scenarios and discusses with a high school student the pros and cons of the sudden dive into the deepend of online learning thanks to the 2020 pandemic.

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Jeff ‘Tall Jeff’ Szczepanski from Stack Exchange delivers a talk on his experiences of what happens when you think about and manage sales like you would manage a great development team.

Don't forget to sign up for the BoS Newsletter and keep up to date with everything going on at BoS. Visit businessofsoftware.org and click Subscribe!

In this talk from BoS Conf Online, Radhika talks about where iteration goes wrong, Methodologies such as Lean and Agile have democratized innovation by teaching us to harness the power of iteration to innovate faster, but our ability to set a clear destination hasn't kept up with the pace. When we iterate without a clear vision or strategy, our products become bloated, fragmented, and driven by irrelevant metrics. They catch “product diseases” that are often fatal to true innovation.

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org

Having a dialogue with your customer is worth so much more to you and your business than anything else; and the most important thing that you need to know is how to work out what your sales proposition is, what your story is. 

This talk from BoS Conf USA looks at The reason you should be talking to your clients, not just emailing them, not just blogging at them, the reason you should be talking to your clients is because they each have their own unique way of describing a problem.

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Fly in the face of what is often perceived as wise strategy and hear how building new features does add value to your product with Stack Overflow Founder Joel Spolsky.

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org and join thousands of other smart folk enjoying the benefits of the BoS community.

What works for one company might not work for another; but other peoples mistakes are worth taking note of.

In this talk, ServiceRocket's Rob Castaneda discusses the mistakes he made that could help you in your business.

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Software companies are often torn between meeting customer needs and product velocity. A well-designed ecosystem allows you to do both. Companies with flourishing ecosystems have several competitive advantages – moats, product development, customer advocates and more. Building and maintaining an ecosystem requires a clear plan and a systematic approach. Knowing where to begin, or where you’re going wrong, can be challenging. In this conversation, Peter and Bill from ServiceRocket discuss everything you should consider.

For more great talks direct to your inbox, sign up for the free Bos Newsletter at businessofsoftware.org/update

Brianna Wu is head of development at Giant Spacekat, a company specialising in cinematic experiences using the Unreal Engine. She’s known as a frequent speaker on women in tech issues, and is an advocate for increased diversity in the games industry. In this talk from BoS USA, Brianna looks at what we can do to start helping women in tech.

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Just a few days into the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, Wildbit's Natalie Nagele and Balsamiq's Peldi spoke at BoS Europe Online about how even fully remote companies who have been doing asynchronized work for decades have had to change their ways of working when the pandemic hit.

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In this talk, Bridget Harris (co-founder YouCanBook.Me) lays out a framework for making sure you hire the right people. Create a company that you want to work for, and aim to hire people who want similar outcomes as you – then document it, describe it, defend it, talk about it, share it, and make decisions based on it.

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org.

Back in 2010, Scott Berkun had a ‘wonderful and a horrible’ idea. He thought he’d go get a job as project leader at WordPress. This is his story…

For more great talks and articles from the leaders of SaaS, sign up for the BoS newsletter at businessofsoftware.org/updates

In this talk, April is going to teach you the difference between selling and helping customers buy. She will show you the different types of pitches to use and the pros & cons of each, and why Point of View pitches work so well.

For more great BoS Talks, visit businessofsoftware.org or sign up for the free newsletter at businessofsoftware.org/update

Joel Gascoigne, co-founder of Buffer, shares some of his thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of building a business while sticking to the core principles that he and his partner Leo set out when they founded the business.

Can such a highly distributed, radically transparent approach to building a business pay off in the long term?

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Yes Ep 60 is our 100th Podcast episode - thanks to a re-launch in 2020 where we reset the counter - so what better time to sit down with Business of Software's CEO Mark Littlewood to get the full story of BoS and his story building a community.

Don't forget to sign up top the BoS newsletter and get regular doses of BoS Goodness right to your inbox. Visit businessofosftware.org/updates for more information

People talk a lot about scaling SaaS, or scaling your hiring or culture. But what about marketing? How does your Marketing need to develop in line with the rest of the business?

Andrus Purde was head of marketing at Pipedrive, a simple tool that helps small teams get their sales organized. He is currently Co-founder and CEO of Outfunnel (a sales centric marketing automation tool.)

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Culture is reinforced by strong leaders with a willingness to address some of the daily things that let emotional triggers prevent us from building a great company. Promise is building a loyal team at tap influence, innovating in a product area that's entirely uncharted, and helping evolve how businesses get heard by consumers. Prior to TapInfluence, Phelon was Chief Revenue Officer of the Resumator, CEO of The Phelon Group, and served as CEO of UpMo, an enterprise talent management SaaS system. 

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If you’ve ever worked with someone you didn’t trust, you will know why trust is important in the workplace. Teams that don’t trust each other don’t work well together. Much of the talk around ‘trust’ in business is misunderstood and lacks clear and actionable frameworks for you to make things better.

Drawing on personal experience and a lot of study, Gareth Marlowe of Eqsytems.io spoke at BoS in 2019 with a talk aimed to help you to appreciate how trust issues may be limiting your company’s growth and the role you might be playing in destroying trust.

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Poppy is a co-founder and CEO of Darktrace, a world-leading AI company for cyber defence, named Europe’s ‘Fastest Growing Super Scale-up’ by Tech Tour in 2018. Poppy was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in 2019 in recognition of her services to cyber security.

In this talk from BoS Europe 2019, Poppy will discuss how Darktrace has grown to become one of the world’s fastest growing cyber AI company. She will share some of her experiences in helping to shape and scale a successful commercial strategy that has meant the company has grown incredibly quickly; from the outset, the intention was to establish a reputation in a key market before applying its AI know-how to other challenges, such as risk or compliance.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference Europe 2019

Choosing the wrong metrics can lead to the wrong strategy, or worse, no strategy at all. (For example, learn why revenue is a dangerous target.) In this talk from BoS USA Online, Matt shares some of the lessons he’s learned in growing companies, large and small, that will help you choose the right metrics to target in your organisation.

Recorded online via Zoom at Business of Software Conference USA Online, September 2020.

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Rita introduces her new research on how strategic inflection points offer an opportunity to disrupt existing players using examples like Dollar Shave Club vs. Gillette to show how changes in technology can destabilise existing competitive advantages. Michael Sikorsky shows how companies create entirely new business models to solve perennial problems and drive growth – how can banks use mobile to appeal to millennials and machine learning talk to talk to your mobile?

Recorded live at BoS USA 2017 in Boston, MA.

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Jason shared some of the things he did to make ShipCompliant the successful business that it is. More importantly, he’ll talk about the mistakes he made in selling and what he wished he had realised before he did. He believes ‘Exit by acquisition’ should not be the only manifestation of success for bootstrappers.

This talk was recorded live at BoS Conference Europe in 2017.

For more great talks, visit the website at businessofsoftware.org

Nandini has a background in marketing and journalism and has been responsible for growth and community at companies including Kayako and ProdPad. She was named by Business Insider as one of 23 industry leaders “fixing” digital advertising and a Digiday Changemaker in 2017.

At BoS USA Online 2020, Nandini discussed some of the potential dangers organisations face in a world where news travels fast online. She shares some insider insight into why HotJar publicly dropped the Trump campaign and GOP’s account in August 2020 and she also explores the role of acceptable use policies and the steps you can take to ensure your companies values stand the test of time.

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos. 

Wistia are in it for the long run – they want to run their business their way - which seen them grow and then turn down a buyout before growing some more. Co-Founder & CEO Chris Savage speaks about the process of scaling Wistia in this week's talk from BoS USA 2017, including some fascinating insights into how to communicate well internally in a growing company, and the importance of delegating as your company grows.

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos where you can browse by topic or see a full list of all available talks.

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Like many BoS speakers, Peldi comes to the conference every year regardless of whether he’s on stage. He comes to be part of the community, to learn from others, and to hang out with his "tribe" – incredible entrepreneurs keen to give advice and meet new people. 

In this talk he shared an honest update about his worries in Balsamiq’s milestone 10th year. On realizing he’s still too integral to the business, Peldi started the ‘Winter 2018 Injected Turbulence Project’ – delegated product design and engineering management, deleted Slack and witter from his phone, and stopped watching their internal wiki.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA 2018, in Boston, MA.

For more great talks, visit businessofosftware.org and don't forget to sign up for the newsletter to be kept up to date when new talks go live on the website for you to stream free.

Ayat Shukairy is a ‘queen of CRO’ with over ten years helping companies create websites that customers love, and that result in increased sales and retention.

Most marketing talk, or business strategy meetings, emphasizes the importance of ‘customer first’. Yet if we take a look at companies and how they operate, the  C-Level exec are still calling the shots without paying heed to the needs and wants of the customer. Even when companies embrace a customer first approach, the way they tap into their customers voice doesn’t give them the right result.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA 2018 in Boston, MA

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos.

We’ve all been there. You finally step foot into the job you’ve wanted forever only to feel like you aren’t good enough for the role, or worse, a complete fraud.

You’re not alone; an estimated 70% of people from all walks of life, both men and women experience imposter syndrome at some point in their careers. In this talk from BoS USA Online 2020, Tiffany Da Silva (Founder, flowjo.co) shares her own experiences along with the framework and tools she uses every day to eliminate it.

Recorded live online at Business of Software Conference USA Online 2020

Visit businessofsoftware.org/updates to stay up to date with the latest talks, podcasts, and events from BoS

In this (fireless) Fireside chat, we delve into what inspires and motivates David, how he came to start five different companies, and how he leads a high-growth company. Plus there are some great questions asked by the audience at the end that helps David open up about what he has done and what’s next.

Filmed live at Business of Software Conference USA 2018 in Boston, MA

Back in 2016, Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf teamed up to explain how the Obama campaign testing their software systems early gave them an upper hand over the Romney campaign using facts and figures and rigorous testing.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA 2016 in Boston, MA

For more great talks, visit businessofosoftware.org/videos

In this talk, Thompson Aderinkomi - co-founder Nice Healthcare- will share how he has come to understand why so many of the things people know to be true about growing a successful business are simply not true. His experiences as a serial entrepreneur have taught him to question the orthodoxy and why deciding on the right course is down to you. He will leave you with an understanding of how you can ask the right questions through some very honest and personal experiences.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA 2019 in Boston, MA.

For more great videos visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

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How can you find fun in the usually mundane? Do you design your business software like game designers design games? Rahul Vohra founded Superhuman as the antidote to boring email platforms.  Being able to do things faster, without distraction, and with a goal of inbox zero makes you change your perspective on emails.

Rahul talks us through the different aspects to think about when designing business software and how to make an everyday task exciting and surprising for the user.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA 2019 in Boston, MA.

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

Derek Sivers has been a musician, circus performer, entrepreneur, TED speaker, and book publisher. Long ago he started CD Baby, and wrote a great little book about it called “Anything You Want”.

In this BoS Talk Derek will offer some perspectives on what we can do to be more mensch and make the world a better place, how can we end up on the right side of history, and why we should keep our eyes on how the game we play is going to end.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference Europe 2019 in Cambridge UK

Fore more great videos visit businessofosftware.org/videos. don't forget to sign up for the BoS Newsletter to get updates when new talks go live. Visit businessofsoftware.org/updates

Alex is the author and inventor of Business Model Canvas, a best-selling book and tool to visualise, challenge and reinvent business models. At Business of Software Conference Europe 2017, he led us through an exercise to help identify the jobs your product should be doing to meet the needs and pains of their ideal customer.

Recorded live at Business of Software conference USA 2017 in Boston, MA.

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos or sign up for our newsletter to receive reminders of when new talks are live online at businessofosftware.org/updates

When marketing a product, it’s common for founders to focus on the product itself with pitches like “Look at our cool features! We help you do X activity better!” Which can just get lost in the noise.

Capturing your customer’s attention requires focusing on their ultimate motivation (“job to be done”), to transform her current situation into a preferred one.

Claire Suellentrop loves getting inside customers' heads, uncovering what those customers really care about, and using these juicy details to create great marketing. She's currently the co-founder of two companies: Userlist.io (behavior-based email for SaaS products), and Forget The Funnel (SaaS marketing training).

recorded live at Business of Software Conference UAS 2018 in Boston, Ma

for more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

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.

Recorded at Business of Software Conference USA 2018 in Boston, MA

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

Rita McGrath is a longtime professor at Columbia Business School and one of the world’s top experts on innovation and growth. She is also one of the most regularly published authors in the Harvard Business Review.

This talk gives company leaders food for thought with questions such as do you incorporate diverse perspectives in decisions? Do you empower small, agile teams? Are there resources available for little bets? And does your organization reward truth-telling?

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA 2019, in Boston, MA

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

Paul Kenny is no stranger to the Business of Software Conference stage. A sales coach with experience working with software companies including Redgate and StackExchange, Paul has a huge amount of experience and insight to share on the process of selling your software. In this talk from BoS USA 2017, Paul talked about the important things to get right to set your company up well to turn your software into money.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA 2017, in Boston, MA

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

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.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA 2018 in Boston, MA

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

Swiss based Alex is a gifted communicator and the author of ‘Business Model Generation’ – a book about business models that has sold over 120,000 copies. (Why? Because it is extraordinarily good). Fast Company Magazine named Alex’s book one of the Best Books for Business Owners in 2010. At BoS 2011 he talked on how to implement this practically in your own business.

Recorded live at Business of Software USA 2011.

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

In this talk from BoS USA 2013, Mikey Trafton looks at how to attract the best talent, how to interview, how to make an offer of employment that will know the candidate’s socks off, and so much more.

Recorded live at Business of Software USA Conference in 2013.

For more great talks, and the prequel talk Mikey gave in 2012, go to businessofsoftware.org/videos

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.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA in Boston, Ma

For more great talks, visit businessofsmoftware.org/videos

After years of smuggling creativity into the corporate sector without getting busted, Tania Katan has learned that we don’t need to be in a job that is distinctly creative in order to be distinctly creative in our job. In fact, no matter how tedious the task, or how buttoned-up the office environment, we can all learn to conjure imagination anywhere, anytime.

Full of hilarious stories, and wacky, battle-tested exercises for flexing your creative muscles you’ll learn tools and strategies for taking more creative risks and embracing obstacles as an opportunity to accelerate growth.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA 2018, in Boston MA.

For more great talks from expert speakers, go to businessofsoftware.org/videos

Innovation is hard. It takes more than a clever idea to make a business. Tendayi Viki works with entrepreneurs in startups and large corporates who are looking to innovate. Here he presents 8 business model questions to consider when attempting to innovate, followed by a Q&A with some great questions about innovating in a large corporate.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference Europe 2018.

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

How would you feel about being posed the contention that prioritisation is really about saying no to good ideas because there’s always too many of them? There’s always more of them than we can handle and we’ve got to focus not just on the good ideas but on the truly great ideas.

In this BoS Talk from Product Guru Bruce McCarthy, he will walk you through the ins and outs of prioritisation and why they are important and where we can improve our prioritisation in our companies.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA in Boston, MA, September 2018.

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org

Isa Watson talks about some of the ways that companies can provide a better environment for humans to work and share how she came to realize that in her startup, she had to bring her ‘best self’ to the business every day.

Recorded live at Business of Softare Conference USA 2018, in Boston, MA.

For more great talks, visit businessofosftware.org/videos

Author, lecturer, and computer scientist with an MBA, Clarke Ching has been powered by Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints for 25 years, and using it to speed up Agile since 2003. Whereas others go deep into the details, acquiring more and more knowledge, Clarke went deep into ToC and Agile, and then decided to go wide - cherry-picking both bodies of knowledge, simplifying them, then sharing the most useful bits far and wide.

Clarke's BoS USA talk “Rock paper scissors” looks at the everyday stories that can help you make changes in your business, what you can learn from them, and how you can iomplent real change.

Recorded live at BoS Conference Europe 2016 

For more great talks from great speakers, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

It's not easy finding the right candidate for a role in your team, and it's even harder to make them feel integrated into the company that they want to stay long term.

In this BoSTalk, Elpie Bannister (former former Director of Talent at Simprints) and Alex Yang (VP Engineering at Simprints) look at how to manage a new recruit from the moment their application lands in your inbox through to them stepping out the door at the end of a trial day. Using exact measures to carefully track applicants, and giving feedback along the way helps candidates stay interested, and helps you get the best person for the job

Organisations that seek to thrive in the digital age must examine their core management practices. So much of our management practice was created in the industrial age and not all of it remains useful in the face of software. Managers and leaders inside and outside of the software world need a new set of principles for the next century of work.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA in Boston, MA in 2017

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker, and adviser who splits his consulting time between start-up companies in the Wildcat Venture Partners portfolios and established high-tech enterprises, most recently including Salesforce, Microsoft, Autodesk, F5Networks, Gainsight, Google, and Splunk.

In this BoS Talk from the Business of Software conference USA 2009, Moore looks at the challenges faced by start-up companies transitioning from early to mainstream customer bases.

Recorded live in San Francisco in 2009.

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

Alison Coward is founder of consulting and facilitation agency Bracket, helping teams in the creative and technology sector to collaborate better and improve their performance.

It’s not just enough to hire talented people and hope for the best. Innovation and complex problem-solving requires teamwork, so we need to pay attention to how people work together. Building great products means creating the best environment for teams to thrive. In this talk, Alison will share her insights on effective collaboration, the habits of successful teams, and principles for designing an outstanding team culture.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference Europe in London, UK in 2018.

For more great talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

The year is 1999 and Google launch their defining OKRs video. Twenty years later Whitney O'Banner takes to the BoS stage to ask why these goals have never been redefined for the ever changing world we now live in.

Hear how Whitney (the Engineering Manager at Medium) delves into which aspects of Google’s video should be embraced, which should be updated in line with the times, and which should've  been left in the ’90s.

This talk was recorded live at Business of software Conference USA 2019 in Boston, MA. for more great talks visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

Design is a process where we finely tune our intuition to create great user experiences. Yet, sometimes, what we think is best rivals the metrics. What do we believe – our gut or the data?

This talk from Jared Spool will teach you:

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA in Boston, MA 2018

For more great videos of BoStalks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

Carl Ryden has been a regular attendee at Business of Software Conferences for a long time. His company PrecisionLender has seen incredible growth leading to acquisition in 2019 and providing a huge amount of value in the banking sector. 

In this talk, Carl talks about how PrecisionLender use AI to offer a valuable service to their customers, and what he sees as the future of AI.

Recorded live at Business of Software Conference Europe in Cambridge, UK in 2018

For more great BoS talks go to businessofsoftware.org/videos.

Building a company takes an extraordinary amount of effort, no matter your role, and both life and competitors don't hold punches for anyone. CEO and Founder of ProfitWell, Patrick Campbell knows this first hand.

Using his experience bootstrapping ProfitWell to $10M and beyond (while simultaneously undergoing some pretty big personal roadblocks), he talks us through essential frameworks to help you handle problems in the proper context, while also teaching some operational takeaways to keep you ahead of the increasingly competitive landscape.

Recorded live at Business of Software conference USA 2019 in Boston, MA.

For more talks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

Teresa Torres is a Product coach at ProductTalk.org advocating strong critical thinking practices to ensure there is a strong connection between what teams are learning in their research with the product decisions that they are making. 

If you are like most leaders, you got to where you are because you are good at making decisions. You can quickly go from strategy to execution and you know exactly what should be done next. But if we make all the output decisions (e.g. what to build, what programs to roll out, how a process should work), our company’s solutions are only as good as we are. To avoid this trap, instead of telling our teams what to do, we need to tell them what outcomes we expect them to drive.

Recorded live at Business of Software USA 2019 in Boston, MA.

For more talks visit businessofsoftware.org/videos

Rahul Vohra – CEO and Founder of Superhuman – presents his BoS 2018 talk Product-Market Fit Engine, a five step plan to revolutionise the way you think about product market fit, metrics, and understanding the needs of the people that really matter.

Rahul was previously the CEO & Co-Founder of Rapportive, a gmail plug-in that displays your contacts’ social media information inside your email application. After selling Rapportive to LinkedIn, Rahul worked with several startups in both investment and advisory capacities before setting up Superhuman - the world's fastest email experience.

This was recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA 2018, in Boston MA.

For more videos of BoS Talks, go to businessofsoftware.org/videos

So you want to start a business? No problem. You want to bootstrap it yourself? Okay. You want to position yourself directly against huge competitors and play them at their own game? You've got guts!

Laura Roeder launched MeetEdgar - a social media scheduling tool - in 2014 and was up against giants like Hootsuite (who have raised over $300m in funding). So how can a small bootstrapped company compete? Laura spoke at BoS Europe 2018 with her Four P Points for success.  

Recorded live at Business of Software Europe 2018 in Cambridge UK. For more talks from BoS conferences, go to businessofsoftware.org/videos

Marty Cagan has worked with some of the biggest tech product companies in the world. He was involved in the early stages of Netscape and eBay, and has since formed SVPG, who work with tech product teams to help them make the most of their products. With SVPG, Marty has worked with teams at Google, Apple, Netflix, Airbnb, Disney, and Amazon – to name just a few.

In this talk, Marty hammers home the point that customers are not the source of innovation – it must come from inside your company. Using examples from some of the biggest product companies in the world, Marty shows how using engineers in Product Discovery can lead to innovation in a way that a customer feedback never could.

Recorded at BoS CEO Tales 2018 in London. For more great talks, go to businessofsoftware.org/videos

We’ve all seen movies about artificial intelligence getting smarter than us and overthrowing our stronghold to make us obsolete, but how close are we to total subordination, and is the fear of losing jobs to robots as real as we are led to believe?

In this informative and witty talk by Rick Nucci – CEO and co-founder of Guru (a company based on empowering others to do their jobs) – we see that there are many factors to take into consideration before we start throwing in the towel on humanity and that the hype of every innovation gone before was the big thing to fear.

Recorded live at Business of Software USA 2018. For more great talks from the BoS conferences, go to businessofsoftware.org/videos

Gail Goodman (CEO of Constant Contact) describes Constant Contact's roadblocks that many face, and gives her actionable advice for overcoming it.  (Listen in particular for the advice to do a roadshow to local Chamber of Commerce events, get an educational-event-qua-micro-salespitch down, and then scale that out by hiring people to replicate the process over other territories.) In addition to the tactical advice Gail delivers an inspiring story that even mega-successes like Constant Contact had, in the not-too-distant past, challenges which every company can relate to. 

Recorded Live at Business of Software USA 2012.

Greg Baugues is the Manager of the Developer Community at Twilio. In this talk, Greg shares an honest and brave story of his own struggles with mental health, and offers advice to employers to help them support their team members fighting similar battles.

Recorded at Business of Software USA 2018. To listen to more BoSTalks from all conferences go to businessofsoftware.org/videos

Amir Salihefendic is the founder and CEO of Doist, a fully remote company. In this talk, Amir shares ten lessons from his entrepreneurial journey, including why he thinks hiring remotely is a superpower. There's a lengthy Q&A after the talk with some great practical advice on running remote teams and company retreats.

If you're interested in remote working, check out our episode from a couple of weeks ago with Wade Foster, Founder/CEO of Zapier, on running a remote company.

Recorded at Business of Software Europe 2019. To listen to more BoSTalks from all conferences go to businessofsoftware.org/videos

Tom Adeyoola’s self-confessed list of ‘fails’ at previous jobs is… significant. Technology launched before the market was ready, a funded company run into the grown, struggling to reach the heights of an American counterpart. However his latest venture, Metail, is going from strength to strength. 

In this talk, Tom outlines some of the key things he learned during his ‘fails’ that helped propel Metail to the level of success they’re currently experiencing and allowed him to later leave Metail to focus on future endeavours.

Recorded at Business of Software Europe 2018. To listen to more BoSTalks from all conferences go to businessofsoftware.org/videos

***Don't forget : Business of Software Europe is on 23-24 March 2020 in Cambridge UK.  Get your tickets at businessofsoftware.eu***

Dame Stephanie is 50 years ahead of her time. While remote work is becoming more popular now, Dame Stephanie’s company was remote only from the outset. Forget Slack, this was a time when there was still a decade before email was invented and almost 30 years before Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web.

In this interview, Mark and Dame Stephanie will discuss some of the lessons she’s learned (often the hard way) in starting, building, growing and exiting one of Europe’s most successful companies. You will hear why some of her core values - trust, a belief in strong culture, valuing outputs over inputs, a sense of values and determination - are as critical to building a successful business today as they were in the jet age.

Recorded at Business of Software Europe 2019. To listen to more BoS Talks, go to businessofsoftware.org/videos

This week on the BoS Podcast we have Claire Lew - professor of entrepreneurship at Northwestern University and CEO of Know Your Team (a software tool that helps managers become better leaders) - talking about how no one sets out to be a bad boss, but it’s easy to become one. 

After years of research from 15,000+ people and 25 countries, Claire, shares the biggest, most counter-intuitive mistakes that leaders unintentionally make – and what to do about them.

Recorded at Business of Software Europe 2019 in Cambridge, UK. To listen to more talks go to https://businessofsoftware.org/videos

Business of Software Conference Europe 2020: 23-24 March, Cambridge UK. For more info, go to https://businessofsoftware.eu

This week’s talk is by Wade Foster – CEO and co-founder of Zapier, a fully remote company. Wade talks about how he builds operating cadence at a fully remote company, covering hiring, employee onboarding, how they run meetings, and how they work to continuously improve the company culture.

The talk is followed by a mammoth Q&A – make sure you stick around for that.

Recorded at Business of Software Conference Europe 2018 in London, UK.

To listen to more BoS Talks, go to https://businessofsoftware.org/videos.

Software pricing is notoriously difficult and it doesn't matter how much you spend – the customer only cares about it's value to them.

You can’t sell your product until it’s built and the developers need paid to create the product; so how do software businesses make money if they are out of pocket before they even start? In this talk Rich gives you the key points to remember throughout your journey from startup to success.

Recorded at Business of Software Conference Europe 2019 in Cambridge, UK.

To listen to more BoS Talks, go to https://businessofsoftware.org/videos.

This week, Bruce McCarthy shares his vision of what he calls 'Product Culture'. Bruce outlines the 4 key aspects of a product culture. 1 - Lead with a vision of Human Awesomeness. 2 - Build small diverse teams. 3 - Trust people to manage their work. 4 - Learn and improve continuously.

Recorded at Business of Software Conference Europe 2018 in London.

To listen to more BoS Talks, go to https://businessofsoftware.org/videos.