2010 Speakers

Ever sat around a boardroom table with colleagues for hours, debating the placement of an image, or the style of a button? Unfortunately, it's often the person with the loudest voice or the highest rank that wins these debates, regardless of their design skills - and that's not good news for users.

Wouldn't it be great to have solid reasoning to back up your intuition? To convince your colleagues, through evidence, that they should follow your advice?

In this workshop, Meredith will explain the key principles that underpin interaction design. Deeper than generic "best practices", you'll learn fundamentals of human psychology, behaviour and cognition -- why certain things work in design and others don't. Go back to your boardroom table with tools that will help you resolve your most troubling design conundrums!

Way back in 2003, the founders of FreshBooks solved the hard problems: they got to market and built something people are willing to pay for. In the process however, FreshBooks built up some technical debt, and, as any good developer knows, technical debt needs to be paid back in order to scale and retain agility.

For the last year and half, FreshBooks has been doing just that: repaying our debts. Diana (FreshBooks’ team lead on this project, affectionately dubbed Evolve) will walk you through the decisions, architecture, some technical details, and most importantly, the lessons learned as her team rips out the back-end of a legacy PHP web application and replaces it with a shiny, RESTful, python web service.

Building a product is only half of the path to success - the other half is having customers who are paying you money. In the end, if you are a business, you need customers to pay you money.

Depending on the type of product you are selling, the price point, the market size, who your customers are, where your customers are and the stage of company you are at – these factors all weigh heavily into how to grow your sales organization.

In this session, Isaac will discuss how to select, build and scale your inside sales team, as well as the major pitfalls to avoid particularly in the early stages of your business.

You've launched, you're live, you have customers, you have suppliers, you have revenues, expenses, products, services! You have a community, bloggers, tweeters, your bank, accountant, industry associations, and perhaps a regulators or quality or environmental certification.

But how many? How much? How frequently? How often does a customer buy this product with this other product? How do customers decide what to buy, when to buy? Are my customers satisfied? Are you complying with your certifications? What can I improve to lower costs, increase inventory turns, improve customer satisfaction?

In the midst of the day-to-day operations of your organization - selling, buying, transacting, communicating - how do you get answers to these questions so you can adjust, optimize and improve in the short term AND get the information you need to plan strategically?

Enter the Data Warehouse!

The Data Warehouse is the technology platform which allows you to mine your data, creating the information you, your leaders and managers need to understand your business and make the decisions to grow and be successful.

In this session Antony, based on 20+ years of industry experience, will walk you through what you need to know about planning, implementing and evolving a data warehouse right for your organization.

Antony will discuss:

• What are the signs your organization could benefit from a data warehouse?
• What are the benefits you can realistically expect?
• What are the preconditions for success?
• Who owns the warehouse - business or the IT organization?

Do you like making hiring mistakes? Of course not; they’re not fun.

Getting the right (or wrong) people on your team can make (or break) your business, but it’s tricky to get this right. In fact, all the innovation over the past 30 years (job boards, hiring software) hasn’t impacted employee hiring success in a material way. Average employee tenure has been dropping like a stone and employee turnover rates continue relatively unchanged. Hiring mistakes are so accepted that “money-back guarantees” have become table stakes for any recruiter.

But there IS a better way. In this session, we’ll review some epic hiring mistakes and how to avoid them ... also how you can hire great people who will stick around a long time and help increase the value of your business.