Business of Software Podcast

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 design...

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 ey...

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,...

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...

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 Busi...

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 ...

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 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 t...

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...

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 y...

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,...

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...

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 t...

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...

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 s...

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...

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 sta...

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 t...

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 &...

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: What easily-collected analytics, like bounce rate, actually tell us about our users’ experiences Why techniques like a money-left-on-the-table analysis can show us how...

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. Recorde...

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 yo...

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 ex...