San Francisco-based Blueshift helps brands deliver relevant, connected experiences across every customer interaction

San Francisco-based Blueshift helps brands deliver relevant, connected experiences across every customer interaction. The Blueshift platform uses patented AI technology to unify, inform, and activate the fullness of customer data across all channels and applications. Through unified data, omnichannel orchestration, intelligent decisioning, and unmatched scale, Blueshift gives brands all the tools to seamlessly deliver 1:1 experiences in real-time across the entire customer journey. Leading consumer brands such as LendingTree, Udacity, Discovery, PayPal, Groupon, and the BBC use Blueshift to drive continued revenue growth through elevated customer engagement. The company is backed by leading venture capital investors, including SoftBank Ventures, Storm Venture Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners.

Blueshift

blueshift

Customer data platforms leverage the vast amount of data generated by customers daily. These tools can collect insights from your website, customer relationship management (CRM), contact center, and so on to help you map the customer journey. Since there are many CDPs, the question now is, which data platforms are the best? Here are some top-rated CDPs that today’s companies can leverage to understand better and serve their target audience. Also, companies are primed for success when they offer personalized and relevant experiences to their audience. Ometria Ometria conveniently connects data from a host of touch points for you to build immersive profiles for your customers by creating marketing experiences they will love. Totango Totango helps companies connect the dot with agile customer success software by designing, running, scaling, and measuring your SaaS customer journey to retain and grow customers. Tealium Tealium is a CDP that offers machine learning that helps you predict what your customers want next by connecting with them using data. Other CDPs worth noting are: Datorama CaliberMind Blueshift Twilio Segment Insider Bloomreach mParticle Conclusion It is worth noting that the customer data platform (CDP) aggregates and organizes customer data across various touchpoints to build customer profiles, which are then used by other systems and business units within the organization. The following are ways in which companies derive data through the customer journey or touchpoints: Web or mobile apps Social media CRM systems Transactions (servers)

What is Customer Data Platform?

Kyle and the Suiteness team have built a platform that allows larger groups to book connecting hotel rooms and hotel suites that aren’t normally listed on booking websites. What’s your background, and what are you working on? I’m Kyle Killion, founder of Suiteness, a travel company with a simple goal: increase the number of vacations people take by making them better, more affordable, and easier to plan. I have built products at companies including Apartment List, Coupa, Yelp, and Apple, and I have founded companies such as maccontrol. Suiteness started out as Flights With Friends, an app I built for real-time trip planning and collaboration between travelers. We eventually pivoted to the current version of Suiteness when we learned that travel is actually a dictatorship, not a democracy (more on that below). fills a growing gap in the travel market for families and friends that want the space and privacy of a home, but don’t want to sacrifice the comforts, security, and amenities of a hotel. We are the only free-to-join booking website that offers connecting hotel rooms and suites for 4 or more guests for half the price of a two-bedroom suite or the same price as a vacation rental. We are the only booking option that can guarantee your rooms will connect before you get to the front desk. We also provide 24/7 complimentary trip-planning assistance from real people. Suiteness Our primary customers are families vacationing together, but many of our customers use Suiteness to plan trips with their friend groups or for special occasions like bachelorette parties and weddings. Over the last year, we have doubled to more than half a million members and increased awareness nearly 300x. What motivated you to get started with your company? I was running product at Apartment List in San Francisco and living in Oakland. My wife and I were about to have our first child when I had an important realization: I needed a shorter commute and better work/life balance or I would never see my daughter. So I did what any rational person would do and started my own company. I knew I wanted to do something that would make it easier for people to travel more. Side note: Suiteness is still remote-first with work/life balance still key tenets of Suiteness’ company culture today. The first idea was classic mistake that tech people make when they look at group travel: I can fix this with software. I quickly learned that travel is not a democracy, and most groups have one person that I call the dictator (I can say this because I am one) who does all the planning. But, travel hero is more accurate because without them, the trip doesn’t happen. Those travel heroes were asking for multi-bedroom suites and I assumed I had them because we had everything that Expedia and Booking.com does. It turns out that those sites only get a few suites from some hotels and there was a world of inventory they didn’t have access to. Since Las Vegas was our most popular destination I reached out to all the hotels there to see if I could get their suites. They all laughed at me and told me that customers only want to book suites on the phone. Finally, The Cosmopolitan took a chance on me and let me email them every time a user was interested in their suites. So I added a webform that somewhat automated those emails and in the first month I had made more commission than in the previous year. I shut down the Flights With Friends site, made a simple iOS version of the same webform and called it Suiteness. I knew I had something, but I would need a round of funding to pay for the direct connection to the hotels’ system and I needed someone who could convince hotels to sign on. Luckily I met Robbie Bhathal whose infectious energy had our first funding round closed within months and partners lining up. In fact, the first wire transfer came in within days of his son being born. In another stroke of luck, my friend Stephen Caudill, the best software architect I’ve ever met, became available right around this time. The three of us were off to the races, and by off to the races I mean we had to work our asses off for a year with little traction until we had enough hotel partners to be truly useful to our customers. What went into building the initial product? I had been exclusively on the product side of things at Apartment List, Yelp, and Coupa for a few years before starting the company. So my code skills were rusty, and thankfully my friend Arthur helped a lot to get me back up to speed. I went all-in and bootstrapped while working on the company full-time. It took about 3 months to get a first version to that could collect feedback from users and about 6 months to get to the point where we could launch on Techcrunch. The first iteration was called Flights With Friends and was a Rails app that used Websockets extensively for the real-time collaboration between travelers. The flight data came from services like Skyscanner and Wego and the hotels from Expedia and Booking.com. It was a beautiful thing — the trouble was that people didn’t want it. It hurts to throw away all the code you have written for so long, but most of the time it is necessary. I’m going to gloss over the first version of Suiteness I wrote myself, which was an iOS app with a Rails back-end. It was done within weeks and it mainly existed to prove that people truly wanted to book suites on the internet. It was enough to get us our first outside funding from Structure Capital and Cyan Bannister. The real Suiteness is a Clojure/Clojurescript app hosted on Heroku that Stephen and I created and was first launched in 2015. The first year was a slog of slow integrations with partners and a trickle of bookings. Around the same time we got enough hotels to be truly useful in Las Vegas, we were accepted into YCombinator’s Summer 2016 class. After YC, we raised our Series A from Bullpen Capital, Global Founders Fund, and Max Levchin’s SciFi Ventures. At Suiteness, we are incredibly proud of how we seamlessly blend technology with the human touch of hospitality to provide award-winning customer service and a superior user experience. Our customers are our number one priority, and it’s important that they have a good experience both navigating the site and choosing a suite. That’s why, early on, we decided to use Clojurescript as one of the primary languages upon which to build the Suiteness platform. Last year, we , to our team in a consultancy position. While we couldn’t keep him forever, we were thrilled to have the lead developer and current maintainer of Clojurescript help us make Suiteness run even faster and smoother than before. added clojure mastermind, David Nolen How have you attracted users and grown your company? My first attempt at gaining users was ending the company name in “With Friends.” At the time, Zynga was suing everyone using “With Friends” in the name. I hoped to get a cease and desist from them and parlay that into coverage. Sadly, within a week of their legal team finally contacting me, their stock collapsed and they stopped suing everyone. What actually worked at first was coverage on places like Techcrunch and scouring HARO daily. Monthly growth was around 10%, so not enough to make a real go of it. Things only took off once we pivoted to Suiteness. Most of our users find us organically, but because we have a high booking value we can use paid platforms like Adwords to supplement our growth. Over the last year we have made a concerted effort on growth, which has meant not only building up our marketing team but also increasing our overall footprint of bookability, which in turn strengthened our organic site traffic. Last year, we started running Google Hotel Ads for the first time. And, our email retargeting is one of the best tools in our marketing toolbox. Our email partner is Blueshift, which uses AI technology to make suite recommendations based on guests’ search history on our site. In one month, we saw a from email. 170% increase in conversions This year, we are further focusing on brand-building with a video-driven campaign launching later this year. We are also focusing on turning our consumers into brand advocates by incentivizing them with booking credits to share their Suiteness stay stories. Here are a few growth statistics for us in the past year: Grew from 15 to nearly 2,000 destinations Expanded from 1,200 to 17,000 hotel properties available to book Added new partnerships with Hilton, Hyatt, IHG, MGM, Universal, Wyndham, Wyndham Destinations, Fairmont, and more More than doubled the number of Suiteness members to 570K+ Doubled the number of employees from 25 to 50 The Suiteness team What’s your business model, and how have you grown your revenue? Suiteness fills a growing gap in the travel market for families and friends that want the space and privacy of a home, but don’t want to sacrifice the comforts, security, and amenities of a hotel. We believe that hotel suites are an underutilized asset. Limited inventory and lack of visibility into demand have led hotel suites to be priced incorrectly, adding to the problem. Suites are typically less than one-third of a hotel’s inventory, which leads to a fear of selling out. This is made worse because there isn’t a way for hotels to know what the true demand is for these rooms, since no dynamic pricing tool has aggregate demand data. This leads to two-bedroom suites often being priced four times higher than regular rooms. We’re aiming to fix this problem with the connected suites we offer, giving hotels the ability to increase demand and overall bookings for their suites. Suiteness has created a whole new niche in the hospitality marketplace. Think of it as premium economy for hotels — we call them connecting suites. These are suites connected to regular hotel rooms that are booked as a single unit. Their pricing is about 10% more than booking two regular hotel rooms and half that of a two-bedroom suite. And, as our research shows, they’re at a similar price point as vacation rentals. We are the only place where you can find and book connecting rooms and suites, which is totally unique in the market. Even Expedia and Airbnb (with its purchase of HotelTonight) don’t have unique hotel rooms. We’ve taken the time to map all this closely-guarded inventory with hotels to figure out what rooms connect to suites, since we cater to folks traveling with 4 or more people. We make money by keeping a percentage of the booking. We collect the full payment for the booking via Stripe or Affirm and pay it out to hotels with virtual credit cards backed by a line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank. Our relationship with Affirm allows customers who book with Suiteness to pay off their trip over 3, 6 or 12 months with 0% financing. What are your goals for the future? My #1 goal is to overhear someone describing Suiteness to their friend. We know we’ve made something great, the next part is connecting with our customers deeply enough that they want to share. The roadblock is the word “suite,” because it is a very loaded word. People think suites are only for the rich because that is how hotels have positioned them forever. It’s the inverse of the problem that Airbnb had when they started — people were skeeved out at the idea of sleeping on someone’s couch, which isn’t what they actually sell. We’ve just finished shooting our first commercials with The Onion, and having those better explain our value is exciting. Our biggest request from customers is that we cover more cities. So over the last year, we grew from 15 to 28 cities with solid market penetration. In addition we’ve opened up what we call “Beta” destinations, which are the ones where we have less coverage than ideal. We are up to over 2,000 beta destinations in the U.S. today. The next step is international expansion, but with lots of currencies and i18n, it is not easy or fast. Like everyone, we have a mix of high and low intent users. Not everyone has a trip on the books. Today we optimize only for high intent users and contractually we can’t publish a lot of the rates we get, so we are currently members-only. To be more useful for low intent users, and for better SEO, we’re working on a site redesign where great travel content can live alongside the suites we’re recommending, allowing us to reward potential travelers’ exploration. The Nobu penthouse in Las Vegas What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced and obstacles you’ve overcome? If you had to start over, what would you do differently? There are two main challenges we’ve faced, all of which have helped make Suiteness better. When I first created Flights With Friends, my idea was that travel is a democracy with all vacation decisions being made by committee, so I created numerous tools to help make travel planning easier for friends and family traveling together. Once I realized that travel is a dictatorship run by who we call “the travel hero” — and that well-traveled person was looking for hotel rooms that accommodate four or more guests — we were able to pivot the company to accommodate customer needs. The second major challenge came after we pivoted to Suiteness. Since the initial focus was on suites, we were perceived as a luxury service. We have expanded to focus much more on connecting rooms and hotel rooms that connect to suites. While we do have significant 3- and 4-star hotel inventory, our connecting suites and connecting rooms appeal to a much wider audience, including many folks who think staying in a suite is unobtainable. As we continue to grow, we are continuing to think about what makes a “Suiteness hotel.” Whether you’re staying in 2-star connecting rooms or a 5-star penthouse suite, we think everyone deserves a great vacation. Loyalty is harder to maintain these days among travel companies because there are so many options. It has become increasingly clear that travelers are looking for places with more than one bedroom in which they can stay together. Airbnb has created brand loyalty because of it, but Airbnb has been around long enough that most people have a horror story. This is the moment for hotels to remind customers why they are great. This is why major hotel groups have been more receptive to our pitch and have become more innovative in their approach to making new inventory types available. They understand their own sites and other OTAs are missing out on the opportunity to win this valuable customer, and have been working with Suiteness more and more. Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous? YC is hard to get into because it is actually worth it. I was afraid I would be in a room with a bunch of bros from Stanford but the truth was the opposite. It was the largest collection of the smartest people I’ve ever seen. At first we had a severe case of imposter syndrome, but once we opened up everything changed. We started thinking in weeks and not months, and a relentless focus on the things that we could change in that time period freed us from overcomplicating things. It set us up for a cadence that we still operate in today and is hard to do without external accountability. What’s your advice for entrepreneurs who are just starting out? Think like a cockroach Every day is a rollercoaster. You can flip from feeling like you are going to take over the world to being afraid you are about to fail within an hour. Hang in there — most of what it takes to be a successful startup is just not dying. You push the rock up the hill until you are chasing it down the other side. Friends in low places Being close to people who are going through the same things as you is important. Your cohort is one of the most valuable parts of YC or other incubators. Some people get it wrong and think it’s the connections and networking, but it’s really the commiseration. Worry about the right things You get what you pay for with free advice, and the startup world is rife with survivor bias so it is best to not listen too hard (even to me). Don’t worry about the other startups in your space — chances are you won’t be doing the same thing in a few months. (I heard that somewhere…) Make something people want Go where the data leads you and listen to your customers. It takes a certain amount of hubris to start any startup and a certain amount of humility to realize that what you set out to do wasn’t quite right. In order to be a successful startup, you have to have equal parts of both. Where can we go to learn more? Of course I have to plug . If you haven’t #deleted it, you can follow us on , , or . You can also check out my personal page. www.suiteness.com Facebook Instagram Twitter, Medium Medium Have questions? Feel free to ask me directly in the comments section below.

Founder Interviews: Kyle Killion of Suiteness

In continuing with my recent posts about , I thought I’d go through another useful aspect of the : SpriteKit actions. A SpriteKit action, represented by the class, allows you to animate certain properties on an object, such as position and velocity. SpriteKit framework SKAction SKNode Since there are numerous types of SpriteKit actions ( ), let’s take a more practical route to using actions on nodes, rather than going through different types of actions. see the [SKAction](https://developer.apple.com/reference/spritekit/skaction) reference Creating an action Unlike a lot of different SpriteKit objects, you don’t create an using an initializer. Instead, you call one of the class methods corresponding to the action you want to perform. SKAction In this example, the method creates an action that moves a node 10 pixels to the right and 15 pixels down over the course of 800 milliseconds. Other action methods include , , , and . moveBy rotate scale fadeOut applyForce Running an action To run this action on a node, call the method on the node you want the action to apply to. run(SKAction) Based on the previous example, this will update the player’s position over 800 ms by adding the values passed to the call. A variant of the method takes a completion callback that is called after the action has been completed. moveBy run One useful thing about is they are “copy-on-write”, which means that whenever the action is changed, the value is copied, therefore the same can be used on multiple nodes. SKActions SKAction Groups and Sequences Sometimes, multiple actions need to be run at the same time or in sequence. To accomplish this, the methods and create groups and sequences, respectively, of actions. For example, we need to both move and rotate our player node at the same time. SKAction.group([SKAction]) SKAction.sequence([SKAction]) In the above example, we could change the call to , which would run the first, wait until it completes, and then run the . group sequence moveAction rotateAction Repeat Running an action multiple times is just as easy: call passing in the action to be repeated and the number of times it should be run. This is used just like any other action. SKAction.repeat(SKAction, count: Int) Now our player node moves right and down five times. To repeat an action forever, you can call with the action which is to be repeated infinitely. SKAction.repeatForever(SKAction) Timing Almost every type of action has a duration parameter that is a (a typealias for ) in seconds. This tells the engine to run the action for a certain number of seconds (or fraction of a second). There is also another type of action, , which will wait for the duration of the action. This is useful in action sequences to have time in between actions. TimeInterval Double wait(forDuration: TimeInterval) Blocks and Custom Actions There is also another class method that executes a block of code. The parameter to is a function that does not take any arguments and returns . This allows you to do things that are out of the scope of the regular , such as update UI or change scores, for example. run(_: () -> Void) run Void SKAction A custom action is a little bit trickier. The method creates an action that runs over a specified duration, while continually calling the with the node ( ) the action is running on and the elapsed time ( ) until the duration time. customAction(withDuration: TimeInterval, actionBlock: @escaping (SKNode, CGFloat) -> Void) actionBlock SKNode CGFloat This code snippet creates an action that changes a label node’s text counting up from to . 0s 5s Stopping Actions There are two basic ways to stop actions while they are running: calling or on a node. The former will stop all actions currently running on the node, while the latter will remove an action based on a unique key given to the action when the is called. removeAllActions() removeAction(forKey: String) run(SKAction, withKey: String) In my recent SpriteKit game, , I used heavily to make tiles move around. Check it out in the App Store! Also, check out my other SpriteKit posts, the and . If you have any questions, comment here or tweet or PM me on Twitter. Happy SpriteKit-ing! Blueshift SKActions basics physics _Read reviews, compare customer ratings, see screenshots, and learn more about Blueshift Tiles. Download Blueshift Tiles…_itunes.apple.com Blueshift Tiles on the App Store

A Guide to SpriteKit Actions

Want to build 2D games on , macOS, tvOS, and watchOS? SpriteKit gives you everything you need from rendering sprites to physics simulation. iOS even Everything in a SpriteKit game lives in an instance of the class. This object is the root of what is called the node hierarchy, a collection of nodes with parent-child relationships. For example, you might have an effects node, which is a child of your player node and that player node is child of the root node, the scene. SKScene All of this fancy hierarchy stuff works because every SpriteKit class is inherited from . This class contains the logic for constructing the parent-child relationships of nodes in the scene. SKNode let scene = SKScene()let player = SKSpriteNode(imageNamed: "player")scene.addChild(player) The call places our player node in the scene. As you might have noticed, our player is an , another valuable class that you will use countless times in a game. As the name suggests, pulls a sprite from your asset catalog, in this case one named and creates a node. addChild SKSpriteNode SpriteKit SKSpriteNode "player" Since inherits from , we get a property on our sprite called , which is a (a simple struct that has two properties of its own, and ). The property defaults to the point , which is relative to the of the parent node. Let’s break all this down. SKSpriteNode SKNode position CGPoint x y position (0.0, 0.0) anchorPoint First of all, it is important to note that in SpriteKit on the y-axis is at the bottom-left of the screen, unlike in UIKit or AppKit, where on the y-axis is at the top-left. 0 0 x and y-axes in SpriteKit The scene has an origin point which is determined by its , a percentage of its height and width. Let’s say our scene is as big as our screen, which happens to be 480 pixels in height and 320 pixels in width, and the is . This means that the scene’s origin is at 25% of the width and 75% of the height, in exact terms, and , so the origin is . anchorPoint anchorPoint (0.25, 0.75) 0.25 * 320 = 80 0.75 * 480 = 360 (80, 360) In the example above, we add our player node to the scene without setting the player’s position, so it will be at , relative to the scene’s origin. Therefore on the screen we’ll see the player node at the coordinates . For more practical purposes, let’s set the scene’s to (the default for a scene created with Xcode’s SpriteKit game project). (0, 0) (80, 360) anchorPoint (0.5, 0.5) anchorPoint let scene = SKScene(size: CGSize(width: 320, height: 480))scene.anchorPoint = CGPoint(x: 0.5, y: 0.5)let player = SKSpriteNode(imageNamed: "player")scene.addChild(player) Now when we place our player node, the player will be at on the screen. Then we’ll use what’s called an to move our player from its current position to a new on, for example, 80 pixels to the right and 120 pixels down, taking a total of 2 seconds. (160, 240) SKAction let moveAction = SKAction.move(byX: 80, y: -120, duration: 2)player.run(moveAction) Calling the method on our player node with the move action will tell SpriteKit to update the node’s position over the course of 2 seconds, animating it across the screen. run Credit to Kenney for sprite — https://kenney.nl/assets Now you’ve got a good starting point to making a SpriteKit game all in less than 10 lines of code! Speaking of SpriteKit games, check out my game, Blueshift, on the App Store! _Read reviews, compare customer ratings, see screenshots, and learn more about Blueshift Tiles. Download Blueshift Tiles…_appsto.re Blueshift Tiles on the App Store

Swift SpriteKit Basics

Top Software Development Companies 2022 That Are Growing Fast

, I had the honor of moderating a CIO panel at the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management at Lake Forest, IL near Chicago. The lively discussion at the panel centered around Digital Transformation driven by Cloud, Big Data and AI — and the challenges faced by CIOs leading these transformations. Last month First off, I must say that the three leaders on the panel were fantastic — a mix of Enterprise CIOs across Healthcare, the Federal Government and State & Local municipal services. The panelists were: Siva Balu, Head of IT at Bluecross Blueshield Association; Bill Willkowski, Head of Enterprise Architecture at Fermilab, and George Coleman, CTO — Chicago Transit Authority. Below are the questions that I posed to the panel to guide the discussion about how to plan for a digital transformation journey and what are key requirements for a such a critical endeavor. It was evident during the discussion that my fellow panelists differed on their answers to these questions, based on their different target customers and divergent requirements. (They did all agree, though, that their organizations have to operate in a hybrid-cloud state- supporting different types of environments on-prem and in the public cloud). These categories of questions offer a framework to guide CXOs as they embark on a cloud digital transformation. I invite you to review these questions below as you’re planning your own cloud journey, to ensure you are successful and that you position your organization for success in today’s digital age. Category 1 — The Cloud As Business Strategy First off, is your business demanding increasing agility in business applications? A specific ask or company initiative that is causing the organization to take a close look and evaluate their Cloud journey? Or is it more based on reducing IT cost via datacenter, tools, OS or platform consolidation? What tangible benefits (both business and IT) does your organization associate with cloud-based infrastructure? Are these metrics quantifiable in terms of both customer experience as well as IT efficiency? What are the drawbacks? How do you go about determining the order of importance in making choices that need to balance between customer experience and IT costs? Are you pursuing a hybrid cloud strategy? What are the ramifications from both an infrastructure and developer perspective? Why? What are industry leaders in your vertical doing around Cloud? Are there specific business use cases they are focusing on, or results that they achieved? What is the new Cloud technology stack in your organization? And how important is it for the components of the stack to be cloud-neutral so you can stay cloud agnostic? Category 2 — Mode 2 or Cloud-Native Applications Containerization is surely gaining wide adoption. Are you seeing the same both from an existing legacy applications standpoint as well as from a greenfield standpoint? Cloud-native applications fundamentally change how you provision and deploy your infrastructure, and how you manage it. This is particularly true when making the jump from traditional virtual machines to containers and Kubernetes, and when you have more loosely coupled applications, such as microservices and serverless. How have you made the change organizationally to support Cloud-Native technologies? How important is for any technology you consider to be relevant to today’s cloud-first world? What do you think of the Kubernetes project? Has it made it in your tech stack? Category 3 — Security & Disaster Recovery Everything is moving into the cloud these days including precious data. How can dev and Ops ensure an appropriate level of security in an increasingly fragmented landscape? Data is the last and most difficult IT asset to move over to the cloud. How have your data assets and data strategies changed to reflect cloud-based deployments? Or are large-scale data warehouses, systems of record and data lakes still living in-house? How would you design your cloud for resiliency? What is your backup/recovery policy? How well do existing policies translate into the cloud? How is business risk handled in the event of an outage? How has that changed in the new cloud landscape? Category 4 — Culture Who leads the Cloud transformation? Infrastructure, Development, the CIOs organization or a Cloud Center of Excellence? How have job descriptions changed to reflect the new cloud reality? Have Sysadmins turned into SRE (Site Reliability Engineer’s) and Developers into DevOps? Are employees being re-trained in Cloud techniques? How are you making investments from both an Operations and a development team standpoint to adapt to this brave new world? How will your IT team, processes and mandate change in the course of your Cloud Journey? Will IT be relegated to a Service Provider or an Innovation Enabler? Category 5 — Cloud Technology & Vendor Choices Who owns the SLA for uptime for your various environments or your Hybrid Cloud? What are your realistic ROI projections over a 3-year timeline? Does the ROI include substantial Professional Services needed for your organization to get started? Do the vendor or solutions you’re considering to enable your transformation offer an un-opinionated stack for application deployment? Do the tools and solutions you’re considering offer a certified catalog of popular open source projects to deploy applications in a cloud-agnostic manner? What are my chances of lock-in from a cloud provider perspective, as well as an ecosystem, API and stack standpoint? Read the original post on Platform9.

Questions Every CIO Must Ask Before Embarking on a Cloud-Driven Digital Transformation

I recently put together a list of articles, videos and I think people moving into a product role should read to get a good grasp of the fundamentals. books These are just a starting point to help new Product Managers / Owners / Humans think about problem-solving in the internet age and give them mental models. If that’s you, you’ll need to know that they’re not recipes but, in time, they can help you create your own. In the end, building things people care about is hard work, and it’s all on you. Good luck! Articles / Essays We don’t Sell Saddles Here , Slack’s CEO, wrote this brilliant memo 2 weeks before Slack launched. It’s about the meaning of what you’re building. That matters a whole lot more than what the product says on the tin: Stewart Butterfield https://medium.com/@stewart/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d#.ldajcg1ds Thinking Exponentially — 10x not 10% , now a partner at Google Ventures, explains why Product Managers should always be the strongest advocates for disruption: Ken Norton https://www.kennorton.com/essays/10x-not-10-percent.html What makes a great Product Manager , VP of Product Management at Skyscanner and formerly a Director of Product at Skype, has a look at the key traits of a great PM: Piero Sierra https://medium.com/@pierosierra/builders-make-the-best-product-people-22fdb8d75dfe#.jdjcefyf0 Solving the right problems , one of the leading thinkers in Product, asks us to escape the very common trap where companies think they’re making progress by keeping people busy. Here’s how to focus on making sure we’re solving real problems for people: Melissa Perri https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2017/07/escaping-build-trap-melissa-perri/ Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration This one took me a while to fully absorb. I wholeheartedly disagreed with it at first, but then slowly came around to loving this. , creator of StackOverflow, builds on John Boyd’s airplane fighting teachings and explains that learning fast, starting small and iterating constantly is the way to survive: Jeff Atwood https://blog.codinghorror.com/boyds-law-of-iteration/ Do things that don’t scale Premature optimisation kills great ideas. To get to Product-market fit, you need traction. To get traction you need to do things that allow you to learn about your customers faster than the competition before you run out of your scarce resource (often money). This, by , is a classic: Paul Graham http://paulgraham.com/ds.html Finding Product Market Fit at A16Z is next with another future-proof essay about how finding product market fit is all that matters when building something new: Marc Andreessen http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html How to start a startup The whole How to Start a Startup series, organised by at Y Combinator, is full of gems from great speakers. Great content like this wasn’t free 10 years ago: Sam Altman http://startupclass.samaltman.com/ What do you actually do? Great products don’t happen by accident, by , a Director of Product Design at Facebook has influenced me heavily. Now, when faced with a new situation, I try to think of the at my disposal. If I don’t have one that works, I try to find one or create it. A good playbook is essential for Product Managers: Jon Lax tools https://medium.com/great-products-dont-happen-by-accident/great-products-dont-happen-by-accident-f46323d8ad94#.pj1236nkd Working Backwards If you want to build great products, start with the end goal. Amazon’s technique is now super well-known and if you want your team to fully understand the problem, even before writing a single line of code, it’s worth giving it a shot: https://medium.com/bluesoft-labs/try-an-internal-press-release-before-starting-new-products-867703682934#.734z4kt4w Should you really build that? , Product Manager at Slack, once this quote from Neil Hunt (CPO at Netflix) and it just perfectly summarised what I felt about getting stuff in front of user. Removing complexity is key to building great products. Sean Rose tweeted Where does your product stand? When people talk about Unique Value Propositions or Unique Selling Points, they often mean this. is a brilliant thinker and his “Position, Position, Position” essay makes a great argument about establishing yourself clearly through trade-offs. If you do X, instead of equally defensible Y, you’re immediately going to be different from anyone else doing it. If you do it across a number of dimensions, you will have found your place. Read it: Ryan Singer https://m.signalvnoise.com/position-position-position-34b510a28ddc#.m6ggr5p3a There’s no Process Silver Bullet is one of the 17 original signatories of the (very much worth reading and comprehending) and literally wrote the book on Extreme Programming. This is how we sees Agile and software development processes, 20 years later, through the lens of his 3X framework: Kent Beck Agile Manifesto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX2XR73LnRY Internet Economy 101 is the business analyst you need to follow. His masterpiece is aggregation theory, a unified reference to grasp all great internet economy companies: Ben Thompson https://stratechery.com/2015/aggregation-theory/ Follow that up with his new piece on , and just follow . Defining Aggregators Stratechery Abundance in the internet world Read , to build on what Ben Thompson has taught us and really start grasping how the internet has changed everything. You’ll need this to understand how your customers operate. this series by Alex Danco at Social Capital The role of culture Netflix’s genius culture deck is a masterpiece to understand how companies can scale, how to attract the best talent and keep them engaged. Culture eats strategy for breakfast (originally said by Peter Drucker), the Netflix version: https://jobs.netflix.com/culture Also look at Spotify’s (and now everyone else’s) . organisational design How Google sets goals talks about setting goals and tells you all about OKRs: Rick Klau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJB83EZtAjc Pair (pun intended) Rick’s video with this on paired metrics and how single metric blindness can kill you: https://mattyford.com/blog/2014/6/11/paired-metrics Books The Lean Startup (obviously) Let’s get it out of the way. Read the Lean Startup. It’ll help you understand everything else about product development. Thinking Fast and Slow If you want to understand how users think, you need this intro to Kahneman and Tversky’s work. It’s fascinating. Influence The six principles of persuasion laid out by Cialdini will help you look at your most beloved products in a completely different lens. Read it and see them everywhere. The Design of Everyday Things You’ll need to talk to designers. You’ll need great references about how people interact with the world around them. You need deep sensibility about product design and attention to detail. Don Norman is your guy for every one of these. Zero To One Peter Thiel doesn’t think of innovation like others do. He doesn’t think of competition like others do. He thinks of starting things as either zero or one. Winner-takes-all, is actually all there is. A new mindset. Innovator’s Dillemma This is another classic on the nature of innovation and how making the rational management decision every time will ultimately kill your company. The Innovator’s Dillema is now (2017) 20 years old, but it is perfectly timeless. Competing Against Luck Understand jobs-to-be-done, why people purchase products and how to solve for their deeply rooted motivations and goals. Clay Christensen advocates that there’s a better way to build products than trying out everything and seeing what sticks. Creativity, inc Building a culture of creativity, candor and growth to become one of the world’s most successful animation studios ever. The story of Pixar by Ed Catmull is fantastic. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Isaacson is an brilliant storyteller and he gets Steve Jobs, the good and the bad. Don’t read this to become Steve Jobs, read this to understand how one of the most brilliant product creators of all time thought about the world. also has some amazing insights into Jobs’ incredible mind. In the Company of Giants Sprint Going from idea to testable prototype in 5 days from Jake Knapp. Do one and get hooked on testing ideas and failing fast. The Mom Test At the end of your design sprint, you’ll need to ask your customers the right questions. Read the Mom Test to understand what never to ask. Hooked By Nir Eyal as an intro to engagement loops. The Hard Thing about Hard Things Because nothing is easy about building product and Ben Horowitz knows it better than anyone. This books is an incredible account of Ben’s journey as company founder and product builder. Rework The guys at Basecamp (Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson) know perfectly well that everything people say “is the way it has to be” about building a company is wrong. In fact, they’ve built a great company that proves it.

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