There was a lot of stuff happening at Collision this year, a lot of great talks, people, startups, and the NOLA vibe.
After a few days, there were a few talks and facts that really resonated in my mind.. I guess this means they are worth sharing, so here you go:
TALK 1: Top things your company strategy should include
Most of those key ideas were shared by John Chambers (Cisco) who did a great talk on “The five mistakes your company should not make”.
World is changing and it’s faster than before
Don’t focus on beating competition, they represent the past.
Make sure you understand the market you are working with. It will evolve and this will be quick. The market transitions are happening faster and faster and this only get worse:
- It took Amazon 10 years to dominate the market
- It took Uber 7 years to change the market
Have a scalable process.
Have replicable process to ensure you can bring everyone up to speed and expand. Keep your employees: replacing an employee that left takes a long time and is expensive.
Customer satisfaction
Nothing new here. Never forget that your customer is the key for your growth. Never neglect your clients.
Culture
Great companies have great culture
In the French environment, it’s not considered as important as it is in the US. This has proven to be a key to hire and keep talents. The company culture is what keeps all employees tied together.
TALK 2: Pros/Cons of remote work
Remote working is something we would like to implement at In Extenso Digital. The debate by exposed interesting arguments on both sides:
Remote working benefits
- Attract top talents : there are 10x more applicants when the role is remote, increase in diversity, less turnover
- Delivery focused teams: presence is only visible through items delivered, people tend deliver more.
- Reduce costs: cut your costs on the office space.
Office working benefits
- Better collaboration: Being physically together is key to generate new idea. This is one of the key of Google’s 20% rule.
- Integrated teams: it’s easier to integrate new joiners, keep team cohesion, and motivate everyone when people are physically present.
Conclusion
Flexibility is the key: not offering remote work to employees should not prevent the company from being flexible in employees schedule. Flexibility is often what is being requested when asked to work remotely.
See the full debate here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqqzspcTSlI
Interesting facts
Converting freemium users to premium users is not as simple as it seems. Dropbox has only 3% conversion rate of their free users to paid users.
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Akamai is processing 1.7 trillion DNS queries daily. They are able to inspect requests to see the device, motion, time between 2 taps and detect if they are coming from bots.
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Graeme Hackland, CIO, Williams F1 explained how they still rely on 1 human to make the strategic decisions in the race. He did an inspiring talk on how AI and devices could change the game.
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Startups
This conference is also about startups trying to promote their idea, attract VC, trial their concepts. The main ones I’ve noticed were:
joinpapa.com: great idea, would definitely be applicable in EU
uilicious.com: simple UI testing
