A quick glimpse at BIN@Porto 2012

Those of you following technology and business events in Europe have probably heard of the 3 day event BIN@PORTO. BIN stands for Business & Innovation Network and this year hosted a bunch of very interesting presentations with key people from Portuguese but also global economy. I was lucky to be invited to participate in one the panels organized by PORTIC - Think Tank for Portuguese Internationalization - organized by our kind and engaging host Pedro Castro Henriques.

The topic of our talk was "Innovation in software products & services" and focus was on software innovation, scalability, quality and mass selling over web & mobile. Before I get carried away with some insights from the events I want to thank Filipa Caldeira from Fullsix, Jose Fonseca from BLIP, Luis Monçao from ROFF, Hugo Magalhaes from EuroCloud - it was great hearing your experience and views!



As I am working for a truly global company it was not difficult to pinpoint 3 key issues to talk about:

• Think agile, Live agile and Develop agile
• Build local awareness
• Establish and enforce quality standards

Not so sure if you, my readers, are really aware of what agile stands for but I would describe it with one word: "change". Be ready to adapt to business needs and get used to constantly changing requirements for your product. Be ready to have your client around you and showing him/her your progress and getting feedback. Because the world has changed in the way we do things, software development has become so fast that you just cannot afford to take 6 months, build a product and then pull the blanket at a gala dinner and show your work to the clients. Unless you want to face their utter disappointment and anger of not delivering what they had in mind.   

My second point was about building global products by understanding the local markets. I am not aware of any complex system (be it ecommerce or something else) being unpacked and launched without any customization. Efforts should be focused on delivering a robust foundation which you can extend and match to local demand. AFAIK developing a monstrous system in the first place to address all possible needs has never achieved its ultimate goal.

And last but not least important going into a new market is sometimes challenging because you have to set the standards and then repeatedly check that people adhere to them. This is to the contrary of established markets where the client is the one complaining about "something not working".

What do you think isn't the last point a bit surprising and Ironic?

Thanks for your time!