They’re found in honest conversations with people who’ve been exactly where you are, and figured out what works. That’s what Business of Software Europe 2026 is about.

Cambridge. April 13-14. Two days with founders and leaders who’ve built real companies and are willing to tell you the truth about what worked, what didn’t, and what they wish they’d known sooner.

The Talks That Matter

Most conference talks are recycled best practices delivered by people who’ve never actually run the thing they’re talking about. BoS Europe isn’t that.

Every speaker on this stage has done the work. They’ve scaled companies, made expensive mistakes, figured out what actually moves the needle, and distilled those lessons into something you can use immediately.

Here’s what’s on the agenda:

April Dunford

Founder, Ambient Strategy

Differentiated Value: The Hardest Problem in Positioning →

April Dunford – Differentiated Value: The Hardest Part of Positioning

You know positioning matters. You’ve probably even done a positioning exercise. But if you’re being honest, you quietly skipped the hardest part: articulating genuine differentiated value.

April wrote the book on positioning (Obviously Awesome), and even she’s had to update her thinking after working with dozens of complex, multi-product companies. This session goes deep on the part most companies avoid because it’s uncomfortable—and it’s the part that actually determines whether you win or lose deals.

Why this matters for you: If your pipeline feels unpredictable, if your win rates are lower than they should be, if prospects keep saying “we need to think about it,” the problem is probably here.

Ton Dobbe

Founder, Value Inspiration

Is Your Company Remarkable? →

Ton Dobbe – Is Your Company Remarkable?

Ask any software CEO how differentiated their company is and they’ll say 7 out of 10. Then ask how long it would take a competitor to replicate their unique value. Answer: three weeks.

We fool ourselves constantly.

Ton has spent 30 years in enterprise software finding what actually makes companies remarkable—the ones customers talk about, pay premiums for, and call at midnight when something breaks. He’s identified 10 traits that separate them from everyone else.

In this session, you’ll score yourself live on the three foundational traits: who you’re really for, what makes you desirable, and what makes you genuinely different.

Why this matters for you: If you’re competing on features and price instead of value, this session will show you where the real leverage is.

Lizzie Lawley

Head of Applied AI, Memrise

The New Product Velocity – What Happens When Non-Developers Code →

Lizzie Lawley – What Happens When Non-Developers Code

At Memrise, Lizzie’s team went from an 18-month feature freeze to shipping multiple AI-driven products (some built entirely by non-technical staff), generating meaningful revenue.

It wasn’t clean. There was developer resistance. Fear of replacement. Plenty of messy experimentation. But the culture shifted from siloed, waterfall-style teams to one where everyone builds and developers evolve from gatekeepers to system supervisors.

Why this matters for you: If AI is changing how your team works (and it is), this session shows you how to change culture, teams, and roles without blowing up quality or morale.

Joanna Wiebe

Founder, Copyhackers

The Art and Science of Copywriting →

Joanna Wiebe – The Art and Science of Copywriting

Joanna basically invented conversion copywriting. If you’ve ever written a homepage, a product page, an email campaign, or landing page copy and wondered why it didn’t convert, this is the session.

It’s not about being clever. It’s about understanding what customers are actually trying to achieve and speaking to that clearly.

Why this matters for you: Your positioning might be solid, but if your copy doesn’t land, you’re leaving money on the table.

Melanie Rieback

CEO, Radically Open Security

Stop Profit Corrupting Product →

Melanie Rieback – Stop Profit Corrupting Product

Melanie runs Radically Open Security, a non-profit pentesting company. Her argument: chasing profit often quietly corrupts your product, your culture, and your values – and most founders don’t notice until it’s too late.

This isn’t anti-capitalism. It’s a hard look at what happens when short-term financial pressure starts driving product decisions instead of customer value.

Why this matters for you: If you’ve ever felt the tension between doing what’s right for customers and doing what hits quarterly targets, this session will make you think.

Shawn Anderson

Co-Founder & ex-CEO, PDQ

Building B2B Ecosystems →

Shawn Anderson – Building B2B Ecosystems

Shawn co-founded PDQ and scaled it to a successful exit. His talk focuses on how to build ecosystems in B2B, the partnerships, integrations, and network effects that turn your product into infrastructure customers can’t easily leave.

Why this matters for you: If you’re wondering how to create defensible competitive advantage in a world where features get copied in weeks, ecosystems are the answer.

Adam Bird

CEO & co-founder, Cronofy

Company Culture is Never Done →

Adam Bird – Company Culture Is Never Done

Adam is CEO and co-founder of Cronofy. His message: culture isn’t something you build once and maintain. It’s something that requires constant attention, iteration, and care, especially as you scale.

Why this matters for you: If your team is growing and culture feels like it’s slipping, this session gives you a framework for keeping it intact without becoming bureaucratic.

Vince Darley

Product & Growth

Extreme Clarity. Relentless Focus. →

Vince Darley – Extreme Clarity. Relentless Focus.

Vince has worked in product and growth at Meta, Deliveroo, and King. His talk distills lessons from these high-velocity, high-stakes environments into something you can apply: how to create extreme clarity on what matters and focus relentlessly on getting it done.

Why this matters for you: If your roadmap feels cluttered, if your team is spread thin, if you’re shipping a lot but not moving the needle, this is the session.

Stephen Allott

Chairman, Tarigo

Financial Planning and the Theory of Constraints 2.0 →

Stephen Allott – Financial Planning and the Theory of Constraints 2.0

Stephen is Chairman of Tarigo and brings a fresh take on financial planning using the Theory of Constraints. This isn’t accounting. It’s about identifying where your business is actually constrained and allocating resources to unlock growth.

Why this matters for you: If you’re reinvesting revenue but not seeing corresponding growth, this session will show you where the bottleneck actually is.

But the Talks Are Just the Beginning…

Here’s the truth about BoS: the talks are excellent. You’ll learn a lot. But they’re not the reason people come back year after year. The real value is in the room with you.

The founder at lunch who’s already solved what you’re stuck on.

You’re wrestling with churn in a specific segment. Someone two tables over dealt with the exact same problem 18 months ago and figured out what actually worked. That conversation happens at lunch, not on a stage.

The Lightning Talk that gives you the exact framework you needed.

7.5 minutes. One idea. Delivered by someone who’s been in the trenches. No fluff. Just the thing that worked for them that might work for you.

The dinner conversation that goes until midnight.

You sit down with four other founders. Someone mentions pricing. Three hours later, you’re still talking, and you’ve completely rethought your approach to packaging.

The realization that you’re not the only one who feels like you’re making it up as you go.

This might be the most valuable part. You’re surrounded by people running successful companies, and they’re all dealing with the same uncertainty, the same trade-offs, the same impossible decisions. It’s weirdly comforting. And it’s why the community lasts long after the conference ends.

The BoS Guarantee

We’re confident enough in the value that we offer a no-quibble guarantee: attend BoS Europe and if you don’t get value, we’ll refund your ticket.

No questions asked. No forms to fill out. Just email us and we’ll refund you.

That’s how sure we are that these two days will be worth your time.

HAPPENING NOW

BoS Europe 2026

13–14 April · Cambridge, UK

A two-day single track conference for software founders, CXOs, and emerging leaders around the world.

Get Tickets → Limited seats

Cambridge. April 13-14, 2026.

Two days. Churchill College. Some of the best minds in software sharing what they’ve learned.

More importantly: a room full of founders and leaders who understand what you’re dealing with because they’re dealing with it too.

What’s included:

• Pre-registration drinks (Sunday evening)
• Monday and Tuesday breakfast, lunch, and networking drinks
• Monday dinner
• Access to all talks, Lightning Talks, and Birds of a Feather sessions
• The BoS community (which lasts far longer than two days)

The no-quibble guarantee: If you attend and don’t get value, we’ll refund your ticket. No questions asked.

See you in Cambridge.

But in a recent Business of Software AMA ahead of her talk at BoS Europe in Cambridge, positioning expert April Dunford made clear that even for the people who wrote the book on it, positioning is a living strategy that demands constant refinement.

As she prepares for her upcoming talk at Business of Software Europe in Cambridge, April shared why she decided to release an updated and expanded edition of her seminal book, Obviously Awesome.

The “Do-Over”: Why Even the Experts Refine Their Thinking

It has been roughly six years since the original release of Obviously Awesome, and in that time, the market (and April’s own perspective) has evolved. She noted that while the core framework holds true, working with dozens of more complex, multi-product companies has highlighted gaps in the original text.

“My thinking has changed on some things,” April admitted during the AMA.

“There are other things in the book that I really wished I had a do over on that I felt like I didn’t explain it well enough”.

She specifically pointed out that some concepts she originally glossed over deserved far more depth: “I went back to the book and went, Oh, man, I spent two pages on that, and it should have been 10”.

The Multi-Product Challenge: When Positioning Gets Complicated

One of the session’s central themes (and a question that surfaced repeatedly in the AMA) is how positioning changes when you’re no longer a single-product startup.

A bootstrapped UK e-commerce startup raised the challenge directly: they were serving three distinct customer groups (UK mid-market, UK enterprise, and an earlier-stage US market), each with different competitive landscapes. Should they position differently for each?

April’s answer cuts through the anxiety most teams feel in this situation. Start by mapping what customers would do if you didn’t exist (the “best alternative”) for each segment. Then ask what you offer that those alternatives don’t. The revelation that often follows: the differentiated value is the same across all segments, even when the competitors aren’t.

“It’s amazing to me how frequently we get to the value and it’s actually the same,” she said, sharing a story from her time at IBM. A product that served retailers and utilities seemed to require totally different pitches, until the team mapped the value. For Tiffany’s, the pitch was about keeping cash registers running. For Emerson Electric, it was keeping the lights on.

The underlying value, continuous availability across a heterogeneous back-end environment, was identical. One positioning, two sales conversations.

The exception, she explained, is when the value truly is different across segments. In those cases, you don’t have a messaging problem. You have a product strategy problem, and often a harder question: should you even be serving both markets?

Competing Against “Hand-Wavy” Giants

Another thread that resonated with the room: how do you position clearly when big incumbents are co-opting your language and claiming they do everything you do?

April’s guidance here is counterintuitive. The magic trick isn’t a new category name or clever tagline, it’s making the value gap undeniably visible. Don’t just explain what you do differently; help the buyer understand what that difference is worth.

She described a security company that spent all its marketing talking about its unique methodology. Their competitors responded simply by saying their own approach was “good enough.” The real answer wasn’t to double down on methodology, it was to reframe the conversation around outcomes: do you want 80% coverage, or 100%? If 80% is fine, here are your options. If it’s not, here’s why only one vendor can get you there.

For situations where the incumbent is already entrenched in an enterprise agreement, she was equally direct: “The value has to be huge. You’ve got to be able to measure it, sell it upward, and make your champion stick their neck out for it.” And sometimes the right answer is strategic segmentation — stop chasing the deals you’re never going to win (Microsoft shops, for instance) and focus energy where the incumbent’s hold is weakest.

The Hardest Part: Differentiated Value

If there’s one concept April wishes she’d given more space to in the original Obviously Awesome, it’s this one.

Most companies, when asked what their solution delivers, land on something vague: “we save people time,” “we reduce complexity,” “we improve efficiency.” But how much time? Doing what? And does anyone actually care?

“Differentiated value is a hard concept to get, and then it’s hard to get right,” she said. The updated book covers this in significantly more depth, and her Cambridge talk will dig into it further. Because, as she put it plainly: “It’s the keys to everything.”

April Dunford
Founder, Ambient Strategy
Differentiated Value: The Hardest and Most Important Problem in Positioning

Getting it right requires three things that are each difficult in their own way:

• Specificity. Vague value statements don’t win deals. “We save time” isn’t a position; it’s a placeholder. The goal is a tight, concrete, defensible claim, ideally one or two points, three at most. “If you can get it down to one, say it over and over until everyone is bloody sick of it, and then say it again for two more years.”
• Cross-functional alignment. Positioning done in a silo fails in execution. When the whole team (marketing, sales, product, leadership) works through the exercise together, they understand not just what the value statement is, but why it’s true. That shared understanding is what makes consistent communication possible.
• Discipline over time. The enemy of good positioning isn’t a bad competitor or a complex market. It’s boredom. Marketing teams get restless after six weeks and want to change the message. The whole point is to resist that impulse and stay consistent until there’s a genuine reason to revisit – a product change, a market shift, new competitive dynamics.

Landing and Expanding: Suite Positioning Done Right

For companies evolving from a single-product identity into a broader suite, April offered a framework that resonated with several AMA participants.

A compliance training company for healthcare organizations described the challenge: they’d spent ten years building a strong brand in a specific niche, and were now adding policy management, incident management, and patient experience tools. How do you expand the story without abandoning the equity you’ve built?

Her answer: don’t run from it. Use it as the anchor. The compliance brand is a strength, not a constraint, provided you can expand the definition of what compliance actually means. Instead of saying “we used to do compliance and now we do these other things too,” the more powerful move is to say: this is what compliance really means, and we’re the people who understand it better than anyone.

She pointed to Salesforce as a reference: they didn’t abandon their CRM identity when they built out the rest of the customer platform; they reframed the whole suite around “Customer 360” and kept the CRM as the anchor. Jury’s still out on how well that’s landed, but the strategic logic is sound.

Critically, she urged teams to resolve one question before tackling positioning: is the go-to-market strategy land-and-expand (lead with the wedge product, cross-sell later) or suite-led (introduce the full picture upfront and let buyers self-select)? Sales, marketing, and product often have different assumptions about this, and those misalignments surface in exactly the wrong moments – mid-deal.

A Note on AI and Early-Stage Positioning

Oh, you thought we wouldn’t talk about AI, right? April also weighed in on a question about OpenClaw’s rapid rise and whether good positioning even matters for early-stage AI products.

Her take: in the current AI market, you can generate significant short-term revenue with something novel and a compelling story, even if the story overpromises. There’s a captive audience of technically curious people willing to pay to “muck around” with something new. But she was clear-eyed about what that isn’t: a sustainable business.

Eventually, you’ll have to do the positioning work. You’ll have to answer who this is really for, what it actually delivers, and why it wins against the alternatives.

For bootstrapped founders in particular, she offered a simpler starting point: don’t over-engineer the positioning before you’ve learned anything. Put it out there, see where the market pulls you, and then tighten it down. The risk isn’t starting loose, it’s staying loose forever.

The Bottom Line

If the person who wrote the book on positioning feels the need to update her thinking after six years, that’s a signal to every founder and GTM leader: your positioning is not a static document.

The companies April described getting this right share a common discipline: They treat positioning as a strategic exercise that matures alongside their product, and they resist the temptation to mess with it just because the marketing team got restless. They get the cross-functional team in the room, do the work to find the real differentiated value, say it clearly, and stay consistent.

The ones who struggle mistake messaging for positioning, position the feature instead of the value, or let the internal desire for novelty erode the clarity they’ve built.

April Dunford takes the stage in Cambridge in April. If you’re attending BoS Europe, her session will be a direct look at where her methodology has shifted, and why those shifts matter for the complex, multi-product, enterprise-facing realities most B2B software companies are navigating right now. Join us.

Founders know they can’t scale forever on founder-led selling. 

They know they need help. They know revenue has to become more predictable. And yet, when it comes time to hire their first salesperson, many are about to make the same mistake: they think what they need is talent.

Kristie’s argument was blunt and consistent throughout the session. Sales success is not primarily a hiring problem. It’s a systems problem.

If you haven’t documented how you sell, who you sell to, and why customers buy, hiring a “great salesperson” won’t fix anything. It will amplify the chaos.

Before reading this article, watch the AMA Below:

The Dangerous Fantasy of the Sales Rockstar

There’s a persistent myth in early-stage companies that somewhere out there is a sales hero who can walk in, open their laptop, and “just make it happen.”

This fantasy usually goes like this: hire someone from a big brand, someone with an impressive CV, someone who has “crushed quota” at a well-known SaaS company. Hand them the product, give them a CRM login, and step aside.

Kristie made a critical distinction during the AMA: working a system and building a system are two completely different skills.

Many top-performing salespeople in large organisations are exceptional at executing within an existing, well-documented machine. They benefit from established brand recognition, mature marketing engines, clear ICP definitions, battle-tested messaging, and tightly defined stages.

What they often haven’t done is build that machine from scratch.

If you bring someone into your company without a documented sales process and expect them to design it while also closing deals, you are not setting them up for success. You’re setting them up for confusion, misalignment, and eventually blame.

And that’s not a hiring issue. That’s a leadership issue.

Share the knowledge. All your team deserve it.

Most founder-led sales work because the founder knows too much. They know the product intimately. They understand the industry context. They can improvise in discovery. They can navigate objections because they built the thing. But that knowledge lives in their head.

When Kristie talks about building a sales playbook, she’s not advocating for bureaucracy. She’s advocating for translation. Translation of founder instinct into organisational infrastructure.

A sales playbook is not a motivational document. It is the written version of how revenue actually happens in your business. It forces uncomfortable clarity.

Who is your ideal customer profile, really? Not theoretically. Not “anyone with invoices” or “any SME.” Specifically, who has been easiest to sell to? Who closes faster? Who sees obvious value? And equally important, who should you not be selling to?

In the AMA, this came up repeatedly. Founders often believe their product can serve everyone. That may be true at a technical level, but it is fatal from a go-to-market perspective. When you try to boil the ocean, you dilute focus, messaging, and execution.

The act of defining an ICP is strategic discipline. It requires saying no.

Clarity Before Hiring

One of the most practical warnings from the session was this: do not think documentation is something you create for the new hire.

If you haven’t defined your ICP, buyer personas, stages, qualification criteria, and positioning, you are not ready to hire. Not because you lack revenue, but because you lack structure.

Without clarity on stages, what does “pipeline” even mean? What qualifies as a real opportunity? What evidence must exist before a deal moves to proposal? If those answers change depending on who you ask, your forecast is fiction.

Kristie described documenting “give-gets” for each stage: what the rep must get from the prospect and what they must give in return. This kind of precision eliminates vague pipeline progression. It also makes coaching possible.

You cannot coach charisma. You can coach behavior.

When a manager can point to a clearly defined discovery framework and say, “You skipped these impact questions,” improvement becomes specific and measurable. Without that structure, feedback devolves into generalities like “dig deeper” or “build more urgency.”

Process doesn’t slow sales down. It makes performance observable.

Also, we have a guide that can help you.

Sales as a Designed System

At its core, the sales playbook Kristie described rests on four pillars: industry knowledge, product understanding, sales process, and tools. But the deeper message is not about categories. It’s about treating sales as a designed system rather than an art form.

She highlights several key elements that the sales playbook should have:

• A disciplined Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that identifies what 80% of successful customers have in common (size, revenue, industry, use case).
• Buyer Personas for every individual involved in the purchase, including their communication styles, objections, and “what keeps them up at night”.
• Sales Stages: Documentation should define the “give-gets” for every stage—what information the rep must get from the prospect and what they must provide in return.
• Strategic Assets: This includes discovery questions, competitive battle cards, live call scripts, and objection handling guides.

A real system includes a disciplined ICP built from patterns in successful customers. It includes defined buyer personas that go beyond job titles to include motivations, pressures, and likely objections. It includes structured discovery questions that determine not just whether a problem exists, but whether it is painful enough to justify change within a real timeframe.

It also includes competitive positioning. Not generic “we’re better” claims, but explicit articulation of where you win, where you lose, and why.

When these elements are written down, something important happens. Assumptions get challenged. Inconsistencies get exposed. Strategic decisions that were previously avoided become unavoidable.

Documentation forces discipline.

The Hidden Benefit: Risk Reduction

There’s another reason process matters that founders often overlook: risk.

If your top salesperson left tomorrow, could you explain exactly why they win? Could you replicate it? Could you forecast next quarter with confidence?

If the answer is no, then revenue in your company is personality-dependent.

That’s fragile.

A documented playbook reduces key-person risk. It accelerates onboarding because training is structured rather than improvised. It improves hiring because you know what capability gaps actually exist. It increases enterprise value because revenue becomes more predictable.

Investors don’t pay premiums for heroics. They pay premiums for systems.

A Living Document, Not a Static File

One nuance Kristie emphasised is that the sales playbook should not be a static PDF that gathers dust. It must be a working document.

As you learn that certain segments convert faster, you refine your ICP. If you discover that a particular buyer persona has influence but no budget authority, you adjust your multi-threading strategy. If objections evolve, your messaging evolves.

The playbook matures with the business.

This iterative approach mirrors how product development works. No founder would ship version one of a product and refuse to update it. Yet many treat their sales process as if it doesn’t require the same rigor.

Sales deserves the same design thinking as product.

Process Over Personality

The most powerful takeaway from the AMA was simple: charisma can close a deal. Process builds a company.

Talent matters. Of course it does. But talent without structure produces inconsistency. Structure without talent produces mediocrity. When the two combine, you get scalability.

For founders moving from instinctive selling to building a real sales function, the hard work is not interviewing candidates. It’s sitting down and codifying how revenue actually happens.

That work can feel tedious. It can feel like a distraction from “real selling.” But it is, in fact, the highest-leverage sales activity you can undertake.

Because once success is documented, it becomes teachable.
Once it’s teachable, it becomes repeatable.
And once it’s repeatable, it becomes scalable.

That’s when sales stops being a personality.

And starts being a function.

HAPPENING NOW

BoS Europe 2026

13–14 April · Cambridge, UK

A two-day single track conference for software founders, CXOs, and emerging leaders around the world.

Get Tickets → Limited seats

These brief, practical sessions pack high-value ideas into a few minutes, and they’ve become one of the most talked-about parts of our events.

As we gear up for BoS Europe 2026, we wanted to spotlight some of the standout Lightning Talks from BoS USA 2025, talks that cut through noise and deliver real insight you can use now.

And if you already know how it works and wants to be a part of it, applications are now open.

What are Lightning Talks?

Lightning Talks are a BoS tradition. Here’s what makes them special:

• 7.5 minutes. That’s it. Just enough time to say something meaningful.
• Real stories, real lessons. No sales pitches. Just ideas that stick.
• Anyone can apply. Whether you’re a founder, product manager, engineer, or marketer — if you’ve got something powerful to share, we want to hear it.

Why Should You Apply

• You don’t need to be a pro speaker. Just bring your voice and your story.
• You’ll get coaching. BoS helps you shape your talk with friendly speaker support.
• You’ll stand out. On stage, in front of a thoughtful, engaged community of SaaS leaders.

And most importantly: you’ll contribute to the heart of BoS – honest, human stories that help others build better software businesses.

It’s a rare opportunity to spend time thinking about a specific topic of your own choosing and distilling it down into something you can quickly and effectively communicate to others.

How do you apply and how do we select the speakers?

• You submit your idea by March 3rd 2026.
• We will select a short list of talks.
• From the applications, we select a maximum of five talks to speak on stage.
• In the event that we have too many great quality applications, we will select a smaller group of the potential talks and invite those speakers to participate in a bake off during day one of the conference at which one of the speakers will be invited to speak on the second day.

Submit your Lightning Talk here. Deadline 3rd March 2026.

Check the latest lightning talks from BoS USA 2025:

1. John Knox — The Introvert’s Guide to Networking

Networking can feel like an unnatural obligation, especially if you’re not wired for small talk. John Knox flips the script: networking doesn’t have to be awkward or transactional. In his lightning talk, he offers a practical framework for connecting with others in meaningful ways, even if the idea of “working the room” makes you cringe. Your professional network shouldn’t be a performance; it should be a collection of real, reciprocal relationships.

2. Ivan Barajas — Top 15 Reasons the Vibes Are Off with Vibe Coding

By laying out the top 15 reasons the “vibes are off,” Ivan’s aim is to spark a more honest, nuanced conversation about what’s working, what’s failing, and where the risks really lie. You will hear clear, practical takeaways to help engineers and leaders separate hype from reality.

3. Art Koenig — Land and Expand

The “land and expand” growth strategy is well understood in theory but tricky in execution. Art Koenig gives us a lean, no-nonsense view of how to do it right: start with delivering genuine value to a small slice of customers, and then systematically grow your footprint by staying closely attuned to their outcomes. It’s a simple idea with discipline baked in, ideal for product leaders focused on sustainable growth.

4. Raj Mahajan — Fragile Deals, Enduring Lessons

Deals aren’t just contracts, they’re living negotiations shaped by human expectations, market shifts, and imperfect information. Raj Mahajan takes us through lessons learned from deals that almost closed, and what those near-wins taught him about strategy, empathy, timing, and resilience. For founders and leaders who live (and die) by close rates, this talk is a master class in reading between the lines.

5. David Robinson — How to Hire Your Next Employee

Hiring is one of the most expensive (and most important) decisions a software team makes. David Robinson strips it down to fundamentals: how to clarify what you really need, how to distinguish great candidates from average ones, and how to make hiring decisions that help your company actually build better products. If your inbox is full of resumes but you’re still unsure who to actually hire, this talk will give you a more structured way forward.

You can be a part of it too. Join the BoS stage.

In his powerful talk at BoS Europe 2025, Jobs to be Done (JTBD) expert Bob Moesta challenged founders to adopt a demand-side perspective: “employees hire companies more than companies hire employees”.

Bob’s research, based on over a thousand job transition interviews, asserts that “every job switch is caused, luck has very little to do with it”. 

By understanding the progress employees are trying to make, leaders can drastically improve their teams and retention.

Here are the main insights and actionable takeaways from Bob Moesta’s session:

1. The Flaw in Modern Hiring Practices

Bob argues that traditional hiring tools create an immediate mismatch between a candidate and a role:

• The Resume as a Superpower: Resumes are designed to present candidates as “superheroes,” showing only the highlights of what you did in the past, omitting any mistakes.

• The Job Description as a Feature List: Job descriptions are often poorly constructed, resembling how products were built in the 80s and 90s as a list of features, often padded with “shitty work that you don’t want to do”.

• The Resulting Mismatch: This clash means you end up with a unicorn trying to be with the superhero. The system is fundamentally broken, contributing to the fact that many people who know a job is bad realise it within three weeks, yet take two years to leave.

2. The Founder’s Superpower: Radical Self-Awareness

For founders seeking strength, the key lies not in competence, but in honesty and awareness:

• Know Thyself (and Thy Weaknesses): Moesta states that a founder’s superpower comes from learning to know who you are, and more importantly, to know who you’re not.

• Shrinking Imposter Syndrome: He advises founders to openly confess what I suck at and tell them that I need their help because I can’t do these things. This self-awareness helps imposter syndrome starts to shrink, because you start to realize you need help.

• Building Complementary Teams: A founder’s first hire is often wrong because they hire someone like themselves. Instead, you need to actually know the opposite of you, as opposites actually make us stronger. This is vital because there’s always somebody who can do the shitty stuff you hate to do better, and they love to do it.

3. The Energy Metric and the Power of Time

Moesta encourages using energy as a gauge for alignment and purpose in work:

• Energy as a Compass: energy is actually the underlying, best way in which to understand what you should be doing now. Work that leaves you with more energy than when you started is ideal; conversely, tasks that “literally sucks the life out of you” should be avoided.

• The 80/20 Rule of Misery: He estimates that most people spend 80% of their time doing work they hate, for the for the 20% of the work they love. The goal is to move that ratio closer to 50/50.

• Time is Gold: Leaders must remember that time is the most precious of all our resources, and somebody who steals your time is worse than a thief. This intentionality should drive all decision-making regarding how employee time is spent.

4. The Four Quests: Why Employees Switch Jobs

To improve retention, leaders must understand the fundamental motivations driving employees toward a job change:

1. Get Out: Pushed by extreme stress, micromanagement, lack of trust, or ethical/ability pushes.

2. The Next Step: These individuals are learners who have plateaued and are looking for something broader or higher in their career.

3. Regain Control: They are overworked and failing to meet commitments outside of work, seeking balance because “we don’t have a work life and a home life. We’ve got one life”.

4. Realignment: They have drifted too far from the work they genuinely enjoy (often due to internal role changes). They often find it easier to find a new job elsewhere than to discuss changing their role internally.

5. Practical Strategies for Retention

Retention requires explicit effort and conversation, not just money:

• The Frank Conversation: Implement regular (e.g., every six months) “frank” conversations where managers discuss the “pushes” (the reasons people leave) openly with staff. This approach, already used successfully by some founders, allows leaders to address bad reasons for leaving before they become critical problems.

• Developing People: The leader’s job is “not to hold people, but to develop people,” accepting that successful development may mean employees eventually move on to become their “best version of yourself”.

• Negotiating Outcomes, Not Outputs: income is an output, or the salary is an output. It’s not an outcome. Employees should negotiate for things that meet their true needs (e.g., funding for conferences, education, or community service time). These benefits address deeper outcomes like respect or personal satisfaction that money often only serves as a surrogate for.

Don’t miss this. Watch the full talk in BoS library:

He highlighted that many successful software companies still rely on outdated pricing structures (sometimes the same ones set by founders on day one), which are often suboptimal and fail to capture the increasing value delivered by continuous product development.

Robin introduced the concept of “The Monolith,” a metaphor coined by Danish pricing expert Ulrik Lehrskov-Schmidt, which describes bad pricing structures that absorb all new features without raising prices or diversifying the model.

The consequence of maintaining a Monolith is delivering ever more value for ever less money.

He shared a compelling case study about a client whose product feature was so fundamentally misaligned with customer interests that they likely would have paid to disable it (a “Job Not to be Done”), emphasizing the danger of prioritizing features customers actively dislike,. This particular problematic feature was a pretty bulletproof audit trail that could expose non-quality/non-price related contract awards in turbine maintenance.

The core message is clear: businesses must prioritize pricing for their customers, not just pricing their product.

Key Takeaways for Pricing Strategy and Feature Validation

1. Price for Segmentation, Not Just Price Point

Price point should be the last decision made in the pricing process,. Pricing strategy must be built from the top down, following this structure:

• Proposition: What value are you delivering?
• Customer Segments: Identify groups with differing requirements and willingness to pay.
• Packaging: Define what features or access levels are included for these segments (e.g., unlimited access vs. restricted resolution/screens),.
• Pricing Model: Choose how customers pay (e.g., recurring subscription, setup fees, prepaid credits, units of work).
• Price Point: Finally, set the monetary cost.

2. Recognize the Pitfalls of Simple Pricing

While simple pricing is instinctively attractive, it can be detrimental. Overly simple pricing prevents segmentation by value, meaning high-value customers pay the same as low-value ones. Furthermore, it gives sophisticated enterprise customers and procurement managers a single target number to negotiate against, making it harder to protect margins.

Introducing a more complex structure provides levers (like platform fees, support add-ons, or segmented tiers) for negotiation.

3. Use Points Allocation to Benchmark Feature Value

Points allocation is a “boring sounding tool” that is criminally underused but incredibly effective for identifying which features customers value most highly, and especially relative to existing features they already pay for.

• Execution: Ask customers (current, potential, or ex-) to allocate a fixed number of points (e.g., 200) across a list of features (current, roadmapped, potential) based on perceived usefulness within their organization,,.

• Running Commentary: Crucially, require customers to give a running commentary as they allocate points. This qualitative feedback helps uncover the true context behind why a feature is valued (e.g., saving time, driving revenue, hitting specific KPIs),.

• Segmentation Insight: This exercise often reveals emerging customer segments that place exceptionally high value on a particular new feature, indicating an opportunity for a premium tier.

4. Employ the Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter (VWPSM)

To translate perceived value into concrete pricing indicators, the VWPSM is a useful, albeit cumbersome-sounding, tool. Directly asking customers “how much would you pay?” is rarely useful as answers may be biased (trying to be nice or anticipating negotiation).

The VWPSM instead uses four key questions to establish a zone of acceptable pricing:

• At what price is the product expensive (but still considerable)?
• At what price is the product so expensive you wouldn’t buy it?
• At what price is the product so cheap that you’d question the quality?
• At what price would you consider the product a bargain?

5. Avoid Developing “Jobs Not to Be Done”

A “Job Not to Be Done” is a feature that is so severely misaligned with customer interest that they would pay to have it removed.

The risk is creating something that actively undermines the core proposition, as illustrated by the client whose bulletproof audit trail feature was a “deal killer” because it threatened transparency in a corruption-prone market.

Rigorous feature prioritization and continuous customer development interviews (like points allocation) are essential to prevent resources from being wasted on features customers may actively despise.

Landy’s talk implies that if you are not running value validation exercises, you risk building features your customers would happily pay you to remove.

Don’t miss it. Watch now: https://businessofsoftware.org/talks/finding-features-customers-will-pay-more-for/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=BoSEU26promo&utm_source=LinkedIn

At Business of Software Europe 2025, Melissa Appel delivered a crucial guide for founders and CEOs titled “The Founders’ Guide to What Product Teams Need”, focusing on transforming potentially adversarial relationships into highly successful collaborations.

She opened with the story of two goats meeting on a narrow bridge, neither backing down, both falling into the ravine.

Sound familiar? Founders pushing last-minute ideas… Product leaders refusing to build unvalidated features… Both sides frustrated… Nobody wins.

Melissa’s talk is the antidote. She breaks down FOCUS, a framework every founder and product leader should honestly tattoo somewhere visible.

F: Foundational Enablement (Psychological Safety)

Foundational Enablement revolves around building a team culture free from fear. Melissa emphasized that holding teams to high, yet wrongly applied, standards can be counterproductive.

The Pitfalls of Fear:

• Strictly enforcing delivery estimates often leads teams to provide shorter, unrealistic estimates they know they won’t meet, leading to missed deadlines.
• Publicly reprimanding mistakes causes people to fear making decisions, leading to delays and stagnation as junior staff wait for executives to decide.
• Holding teams to 100% of goals leads to aiming low and avoiding valuable stretch goals.

Instead, leaders must establish psychological safety: the removal of the fear of repercussions for stating an opinion, sharing feelings, or making a mistake.

This is key to driving scientific experiments and innovation. Melissa suggests shifting language, such as asking “talk me through that decision” instead of “why did you do that?” to foster open communication. This mindset is encapsulated in the retrospective philosophy: “everyone did the best job they could given what they knew at the time”.

O: Objectives (Focus and Alignment)

Ambitious goals are necessary, but too many objectives dilute focus. Melissa shared a staggering example of a company with 200 people that had 57 ‘must-win battles,’ resulting in divided attention and misaligned executive priorities.

Founders must make tough decisions to choose just one to three key objectives for the company. To achieve this alignment, Melissa recommends “mining for conflict” early, perhaps using tools like “challenge rounds” in meetings, where participants are given permission to disagree or state reasons why a priority won’t work.

This objective-setting aligns perfectly with the concept of Framing highlighted by Ryan Singer (also presented at BoS), which involves narrowing down the problem and focusing on the demand side (the problem we are solving), rather than immediately jumping to the supply side (the solution).

C & U: Customers and Understanding What Works

Melissa stressed that the customer is not always right about the solution they request.

Customers often ask for specific features, but when built, these features may not actually solve their underlying problem. To grow successfully, businesses must avoid building custom solutions for every new client, which often delays product use and frustrates customers.

Founders and product teams should instead focus on finding scalable problems. This requires asking “why” (in a non-judgmental way) and physically getting out of the office to observe customers at work, a concept known as Nihito (Nothing Important Happens In The Office).

Once objectives are set, teams must measure outcomes, not just outputs. Melissa used the example of “striking fear in the hearts of the living” as the desired outcome of boos, not simply the output (the number of times “boo” is said). Measurement should occur before, during, and after development to estimate value and track success.

Melissa warned against the effects of Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. For instance, if the metric is sessions per user (to reduce churn), teams might simply make users log in more frequently without delivering real value. This is mitigated by using guardrail metrics (such as length of session) to ensure quality of engagement.

S: Switch If Needed (Prioritization)

While adaptability is key, constantly changing direction is detrimental. Too frequent switching leads to low morale, half-finished projects, and team “whiplash”.

When faced with a new, urgent idea, founders must prioritize based on estimated impact and technical feasibility. Critical considerations before switching focus include:

• Cost of Delay: What happens if we don’t do this for six months?
• Opportunity Cost: What are we currently working on that we will lose if we pivot?
• Dependencies: Will dropping the current project cause a domino effect on the work of other teams?

And the best part? Melissa ties it all back to one core truth: Great product teams aren’t built on brilliance. They’re built on clarity, trust and ruthless focus.

If you’re a founder, CEO, CPO, or anyone who’s ever sat in a tense product meeting wondering “Why is this so hard?”, you need this talk.

Watch Melissa Appel’s full BoS Europe 2025 full talk.

At BoS Europe 2025, Elizabeth Lawley took attendees on a deep dive into the controversial and fascinating world of AI companionship, exploring why humans are seeking digital relationships and what this trend means for our future. 

Lizzie drew her experience creating experimental AI companions, including the widely unexpected success of AIs launched on LinkedIn. She presented data and profound user feedback suggesting that AI companions are serving a fundamental human need currently unmet by real-world interaction.

Here are the key takeaways from Elizabeth Lawley’s presentation:

The Deep-Seated Human Need for Connection

Humans are fundamentally a social species and have always needed companions for hunting, protection and warmth. Lizzie emphasized that these companions do not need to be human, look human, or even be alive to matter deeply to us. 

The urgency of this need is biological: loneliness lights up the same area of the brain as physical pain, making companionship optimal and good for human health. Lizzie noted that companionship is fostered in emotional connection, not just physicality. The human brain responds to anything that feels emotionally supportive, even if it isn’t a real person.

The AI Companion Boom: Market Growth and Striking Loyalty

The rise of responsive and intelligent algorithms capable of forming emotional bonds (most notably AI girlfriends and AI boyfriends) is dramatic.

• Market Growth: The AI companionship market is growing rapidly, estimated around $5-6 billion USD, and is predicted to reach $9.5 billion by 2028.
• User Adoption: One in five young adult men and one in four young adult women have chatted with an AI romantic companion.
• Unprecedented Loyalty: Over 55% of users interact with their AI partners daily, a level of loyalty and retention that most dating apps never achieve.
• Preference for AI: A striking statistic shows that 27% of young adult men prefer AI relationships over real relationships.

This connection is so profound that when the AI chat app Soulmate AI shut down, users reported feelings of mourning and loss, sadness akin to losing a romantic partner or friend.

The Experiment

Driven by curiosity, Lizzie created her own experimental AIs, “Just a Girl” and “Just a Guy,” prompted to form emotional connections. After quickly receiving a lifetime ban from OnlyFans for publishing them there, she launched them across various digital channels.

Unexpectedly, LinkedIn provided significantly more interactions and users than other platforms. Despite having warnings that chats were monitored, users quickly moved past surface-level interactions to sharing “little snippets of their lives,” discussing stress, workload, or seeking validation for big decisions, like starting a business.

The Real Reasons Humans Turn to AI

Lizzie distilled the candid user feedback into three primary reasons people turn to AI companions over humans:

1. Fear of Judgment

2. Fear of Rejection

3. Profound Loneliness

For many, AI provides a safe space away from societal pressures where feelings, desires, and identities are not questioned or rejected. The shift towards AI reflects a society that is highly digitally connected but increasingly isolated in real life. Modern dating culture, characterized by instant “icks” and red flags, compels 70% of people on a first date to feel they need to hide their real personality. 

Turning to AI companions removes this exhausting requirement to “continuously filter ourselves”.

Moving past frivolous requests, some users shared heartbreakingly personal questions with the AIs, such as: “Tell me why I’m lovable,” “What’s wrong with me?” or “Is it okay to think about death every day?”.

Grace AI: Companionship at the End of Life

Lizzie also discussed a project focused on a completely different application of AI companionship: I am Grace (Grace AI), an AI death doula.

Grace is a voice-based AI designed to help terminally ill people process “impossible emotions” at the end of their lives. Lizzie explained that Grace can be trained on a person’s voice and personality to create a digital version of themselves that loved ones can call after they are gone.

This application addresses profound needs: 70% of healthcare professionals report that terminal patients are lonely. Lizzie found that, even in their final moments, patients found it easier to open up to Grace than to another human. This decision stems from the same core drivers: the fear of being a burden and the fear of judgment or rejection, that drive users toward romantic AIs.

The Critical Questions for the Future

Lawley concluded by posing vital ethical and societal questions regarding this pervasive technology:

• Are AI partners a solace (an essential comfort) or a symptom of a growing epidemic of loneliness?

• Can technology ever replace genuine human connection? Should it?

She warned that many creators of AI companions prioritize the payday ($15 a month for millions) over considering the psychological effects on human users. Lawley stated that while AI companions cannot compare to the intimacy of real human connection, they provide a necessary lifeline for those who feel lost and do not want to burden others.

His talk, “Framing and Hard Conversations” wasn’t about productivity hacks or squeezing more hours out of already exhausted teams. It was about something much more fundamental: how to use our time and getting clear on what we’re actually trying to solve.

Ryan has this way of making you realize that half the stress we feel in product development comes from chasing problems we haven’t properly defined. We jump into solutions, scope expands, engineers stay blocked, and suddenly everyone is busy… but nothing is really moving.

What he reminded us is that the most valuable thing we can do is slow down long enough to frame the problem properly.

1. Framing x Shaping, Problem x Solution

The primary challenge is that pressure to build comes from various corners of the business, often leading to dragged-out projects and busy, blocked engineering teams. Ryan introduced two critical concepts to manage this flow:

• Framing: This is the upstream work, focused on the demand side. Framing means narrowing down the problem or opportunity, understanding the customer viewpoint, and figuring out the “itch that we’re trying to scratch”. This is a strategic focus.

• Shaping: This follows framing and is on the solution side. Shaping involves creating the building plan or concept, what you are actually going to build. By clearly defining the frame (the problem), you gain clarity on what is important to do next, which then informs the solution (the shape).

“So when we talk about hard conversations, one of the hardest things is to be able to push back on this in a way that feels like progress for everybody.”

2. Commit to Time

The foundation of effective product development lies in defining a strategic time commitment that balances scope and completion. 

Ryan argues that development time must be viewed as finite and projects must have a definitive end. He contrasts this with common practices:

• Open-ended projects often result in a “blank check”, leading to a never-ending, dragging effort.
• The two-week “sprint” is often dismissed as lacking strategic relevance. 

“This two week sprint is an implementation detail of the scrum sausage machine. You know, it’s just how the machine works. It’s not a strategic unit of time”.

Instead, Ryan proposes a larger, strategic block of time, such as a six-week block, which is “big enough that we can actually finish something that works, that scratches an itch, and it’s small enough that we can see the end from the beginning, and we can actually make a commitment that it’s going to be over.”

3. Flip to the Demand Side (Framing) to Identify The True Problem

Requests often arrive as proposed solutions (the supply side), such as “we need notifications”or “we need a calendar”. 

To have this hard conversations Ryan advises flipping the perspective to the demand side:

• Demand side asks: What is the problem? What are people struggling with? Why is now the right time?

• Supply side refers to: What are we building? (The solution idea).

4. River Crossing to Understand Customer Motivation

Ryan suggests a mental picture, or analogy, to guide these discussions: the river crossing. 

The person making the request is on one side (the current context), trying to get to the other (the desired outcome). The request itself (e.g., “I need a calendar”) is just the suggested bridge.

The goal of framing is to anchor the conversation in reality:

• Context (Current Reality): What is going on? What are people feeling today? What is not working?

• Outcome (Desired Progress): If things were different, how would we know? How would we be able to tell if things were better?

By focusing on the context, teams can find simpler solutions. For instance, a request for a full calendar was reframed after realizing the core problem was the inability to see empty space (availability) for scheduling, leading to a much simpler concept called the dot grid.

“So sometimes completely ignoring the thing that we think that we want, and redefining the problem gets us closer and faster to that original thing even.”

5. The Frame is the Macro Unit Test

Clear framing provides the criteria for success and completion for the development team. Without a clear frame, when technical difficulties arise, teams are unable to make trade-offs and, instead, often resort to boiling the ocean, causing the scope to constantly expand. 

The frame acts as a macro unit test for the entire project, enabling teams to judge when the solution approach (the shape) needs to be adjusted.

Ryan also highlights a quote (borrowed from Bob Moesta), emphasizing the importance of scope control in relation to time commitment: “You can’t put 10 pounds of dirt in a five pound bag”.

“I want to point out that when we’ve narrowed down the problem, when we’ve done that framing work, it’s not only helping us to get to a simpler solution idea. It’s not only helping us to spend less time and still scratch the itch. It’s also a big help when we’re inside of the build of the time box, when the team is actually supposed to be working on this and building”.

6. Product Management’s Strategic Focus is Framing

During the build phase, development teams need clarity across three levels of altitude:

1. Frame: The problem/itch being scratched (Highest altitude).

2. Shape: The concept of what is being built.

3. Implementation: The code and design details (Lowest, most concrete).

This elevation allows builders to make creative decisions and trade-offs.

At the end of his talk, Ryan addressed the roles within the organisation. While Product Managers (PMs) often aspire to set strategy, the big picture strategy belongs at the exec level. 

The PM’s most impactful role is often the framing work: narrowing down the problem, understanding the context, and articulating the pain. This division of responsibility is crucial because PMs often lack the executive authority to redefine the win or say no to complex scope expansions when a project becomes significantly harder than expected.

Ryan’s talk was a reminder that clarity isn’t a luxury in product development, it’s the foundation. When we frame problems well, the hard conversations get easier, teams align faster, and the work finally starts to feel meaningful again.

It leaves us asking an important question: Where are we confusing motion for progress?

And maybe that’s exactly where we need to begin. Watch Ryan’s talk and share your thoughts.

Benedict Evans produces his take on macro and strategic trends in the tech once a year and it is a must read. It’s been titled, ‘AI Eats the World’ for the past three iterations…

In 2025, in light of the rate of change, he’s decided to publish twice yearly.

Well worth looking through if you’re interested in an informed and non-hyperbolic view on where tech is heading.

Even without commentary, the slides speak for themselves.

Great analysis of where we are and where we might be going.

Well worth reviewing his previous reports too.