The Next Web | Day 1
Seen from a Product Designer‘s eye
If you were thrilled by the idea of flying down to Amsterdam and joining a bold tech conference plenty of big players from your favourite industries, I’m pretty sure you didn’t get home disappointed this weekend.
3.500 visitors, 75 speakers, 10.000 (free) beers, just to mention a few of the numbers that this conference has seen.
When you leave your busy routine for a few days to join the party, you (probably) must have some good reasons — David Allen, Mark Randall and Brian Wong were mine.
But the cool part starts when you mess up the schedule and bump into some unknown player that changes your expectations.
Let’s dispense with the pleasantries, and this is what my Day 1 agenda looked like:
Werner Vogels | CTO, Amazon
Samuel Hulick | Author, The Elements of User Onboarding
David Allen | Author, Getting Things Done
Brendan Gahan | Founder, EpicSignal
Aaron Shapiro | CEO, Huge
Jens Wohltorf | Co-founder & CEO, Blacklane
Bas van Abel | CEO & Co-founder, Fairphone
Davide Scalzo | Product Director, YPlan
Des Traynor | Co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Intercom
Xabier Ormazabal | Head of EMEA Marketing, Dropbox
Fancy lights and an apocalyptic soundtrack can’t definitely be missing to kick off the event (almost made me feel on a front row seat at the Ivan Drago vs Apollo Creed show in Rocky IV - love it). Suggestion for the next time? Fireworks!
The conference started a bit late, I guess they were not ready to welcome a 3.500 people audience in just 1h, and after a brief intro of the Co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten and an appearance of Neelie Kroes (ex-Vice President of the European Commission), it’s finally time for the very first speaker: Werner Vogels from Amazon!
I was not sure if this would have been particulary relevant to me, but when you work closely with developers and engineers, probably getting some insights from a ‘big chief’ CTO is not such a bad thing. And so it was!
Werner spent a good portion of time going through Amazon’s innovation process, highlighting how they’re innovating and presented an interesting point of view on how to validate ideas. Reversing the process! Keeping the customer first, he suggested to work backwards, following 4 steps: 1. Write a Press Release; 2. Write the FAQ; 3. Define the User Interaction; 4. Write the User Manual. This will help you define the key proposition of the product and putting customer first decreases the risk of failure.
If you want to increase innovation, you have to lower the cost of failure.
After that, I moved to the blue room, where Samuel Hulick was sharing his expertise on how to on-board new users - a critical piece of every digital product/service.
The key lesson I learned here is how important it’s to create an emotional connection with the users from the beginning and that our final goal has to be building an experience able to make their life easier and better: Start your designing where your users start their using.
People don’t buy products. They buy better versions of themselves.
After this great talk, I had some time to kill before Allen’s one, so I decided to stay comfy on my front row seat and see what Nicolas Brusson (Co-founder & COO, BlaBlaCar) had to say.
The talk covered hot topics like growth and how to build a solid global business in Europe, able to face tech giants of the Silicon Valley; but I was not particularly in-line with his perspective.
Brusson expressed concern on the model adopted by Silicon Valley’s giants, acquiring small companies and shutting them down to avoid competition.
But, at the same time, he sees the ‘Acqui-hiring’ process as a good strategy for European companies to grow faster, open new market opportunities and put themselves in a better shape to face US giants. This actually increases the exit of smaller local realities from the market, bringing the ‘Silicon Valley model’ to Europe.
I’m personally not a big ‘Acqui-hiring’ fan, as this gives a good exit to few and leaves home talents, not needed as a part of a big organisation.
It would be curious to see if BlaBlaCar would keep pursuing its crusade in Europe if tomorrow a Uber were to knock its door with a Billion dollar offer.
David Allen’s time had finally come! I was so excited before he started and much less when he was done. The talk was ok, but probably my expectations much higher. I’ve learned the productivity lesson, but what next?
After lunch time, where I was lucky enough to get a signed copy of Ninja Innovation from Gary Shapiro, I joined Brendan Gahan for some social media strategy and Advertising 2.0 notions.
He gave some insights on how social media influencers and celebrities can help businesses reach a bigger audience on a budget and less effort.
This form of advertising is getting popular, and it would be interesting to see the conversion rate. Youtube is definitely a powerful container, but the audience you can target probably is limited. So, is a higher number of views converting in better sales, compared to a more traditional form of advertising?
Aaron Shapiro from Huge went on stage just after Brendan, and his presentation was very inspiring. He is such a concrete man, an entrepreneur that faced different scenarios and got a big luggage of experience to share.
He walked us through the process of creating good products, saying that a good product is not necessarily the result of a cool idea but comes from solving real problems. We need to plan not a product roadmap but a solution strategy.
The best products are never done.
Europe’s Fastest Growing Startups interview followed Aaron Shapiro, with Jens Wohltorf (Co-founder & CEO, Blacklane), Bas van Abel (CEO & Co-founder, Fairphone) and Davide Scalzo (Product Director, YPlan) on stage. Here it was interesting to see how 3 fresh companies from different industries are facing the same problems (growth, opening new markets and hiring the right talents to support their mission were the main ones). I have particularly enjoyed Bas van Abel, very humble and fresh entrapreneur pretty scared from the rapid growth that his company is facing.
After the debate, was Des Traynor’s turn, the guy that definitely made my day 1. I had no idea of who he was, I just added him to my agenda because I’m fascinated by the CSO role and wanted to know more. Just few minutes of his talk and I was 100% absorbed. Funny Irish accent, kind of a grumpy man, speaking fast and changing slides even faster, but he knew his stuff!
Des stressed the importance of focusing on the core functionality of a product, and saying NO to features not part of this core.
A product team measuring it’s success through ‘code shipped’ is like a parent measuring their success by ‘presents purchased’.
Here following the 4 types of work part of a product roadmap he suggested: 1. Improving a feature: (↑ Customer satisfaction); 2. Getting more people to use it: (↑ % adoption); 3. Getting people to use it more: (↑ frequency); 4. A new feature to support a new workflow: (↑ customers/revenue)
Don’t swap the long term ‘ow’ for a short term ‘wow’.
We’re at a time where very small teams with very big ideas, can achieve massive traction, so long as they avoid feature creep, focus on usage, and revisit old assumptions.
The last two talks I joined were with Jonathan Wisler from SoftLayer (IBM) and Xabier Ormazabal from Dropbox. I haven’t personally found them very relevant to me, as both were pretty much oriented on how their companies will succeed in their own field (Big Data management for SoftLayer and work collaboration tools for Dropbox).
Day 1 come to an end, with lots of notes to put together, very positive impressions due to the level of speakers and with even more desire to see what Day 2 were about to bring.
