Business of Software 2009

The Business of Software 2009 conference in San Francisco, organized by Neil Davidson and Joel Spolsky, was one of the most inspiring conferences I have ever attended.

I was there to participate in the pecha kucha contest, with a 6 minute and 40 second presentation on agile management and complexity. I didn't win. There were participants who were even better than me. Can you believe it? That's how good the conference was.

For me, the best part of the conference was not being on stage and flaunting my personal brand. The most valuable part was being inspired with thought-provoking presentations, and being triggered to critically evaluate the things we're doing in our new business unit.

For example:

"Distinguish core from context" - Geoffrey Moore
Geoffrey Moore made me realize that I couldn't properly define what our core business is. Which means that our team was probably wasting time on context. So I thought long and hard in my hotel room, and I finally ended up with "Social Relationship Management": helping clients to build and manage relationships with customers on social networks. That's our core business. Anything that doesn't contribute to that goal is context. And the less context we do, the better.

"Make your home page SEO friendly" - Dharmesh Shah
Indeed, the title of our home page was simply "Sociotoco". Just like Dharmesh Shah predicted. How did he know? Amazing! A home page should mention what your core business is. So I changed it immediately.

"Love your customers" - Ryan Carson
True, our customers, potential customers, and partners are getting too little attention from me. I intend to rectify that as soon as I return. Promise!

"Tell a story" - Paul Kenny
True, I still don't know how to tell a good story about our services. But I will think about it on the long way home to Holland.

"Make your users awesome" - Kathy Sierra
Kathy Sierra made me realize that I'm not even awesome myself. My own social relationship management is a mess! Our new product helps, but not enough (yet). It's going to take some work to clean it all up, and become awesome ourselves. Only then can we really make our users awesome.

"Make money with features, but make them elegant" - Joel Spolsky
We don't nearly have enough features to make money, but I already see the risk of a bloated product looming. Joel Spolsky pointed out that we have to focus on both valuable features and elegance of implementation. Making things look simple is much harder than keeping things simple.

These were (for me) the highlights of the conference. I'm glad I was there. And if you're a (future) user or customer, you'll be glad I was there too.