Sharing, learning and connecting at Turing Fest

Turing Fest offered two days of practical insight into building, growing and leading successful businesses - from startups to high-growth tech companies. There was a lot to take in so, for those who couldn't attend or missed some presentations, here are the main insights we took away with us.

Maria Gutierrez, VP Engineering, Twitter, talked about building the operating system of a healthy and responsible tech business. As a business, it is vital to prioritise and assess risks. These three building blocks were discussed in harmony. When one of these elements isn’t working, the business fails:

• Execution (principles that we apply to make decisions)
• Goals (mission, vision and strategy)
• People (values and behaviours)

Ian Graham, Director of Research at Liverpool Football Club, talked about how data analysis in football has skyrocketed over the last ten years. Ian discussed the challenges the industry has faced, lessons they’ve learnt along the way and the combination of skill and luck in the game. Analytics have allowed them to map expected goals and goal chance which means they can ultimately put specific seasons down to ‘bad luck’. It’s not about improving performance, it’s about maximising performance to reduce cost. When looking at a players minutes on pitch vs goals and assists, data allows us to identify skill.

Asia Orangio, Founder and CEO, DemandMaven, delivered the cheekily titled ‘Finding Growth Opportunities When Sh*t Hits The Fan’. Asia addressed how it’s essential to find growth opportunities when things don’t go to plan. 

The pandemic turned our world upside down, this included the way customers viewed certain products and their need for them. Asia discussed a client case study where their product had previously been marketed on features, with a focus on simplicity, however it demanded a switch to quality and reliability.

Asia was tasked with overhauling their website to compete with competitors which previously had greater UI/UX and also fixed their onboarding and retention. Once she’d identified their ‘North Star Metric’, the value that is directly attributable to customer behaviour, they streamlined their third-party app process, updated product guides and onboarding emails. This resulted in a 20% increase in connection rate, 3x lift in sign ups to trials and 4x lift in revenue.

To wrap up day one, Andrew Clark, Product Director at Kin + Carta, partnered with the team at Amplitude to host a product meetup at Indigo Yard, Edinburgh. The first Edinburgh Product Club saw a room full of product enthusiasts chatting and learning from each other. No pitches, just good conversations with free food and drink.

So that’s our wrap on Turing Fest 2022. We’re already looking forward to the next one and if you’re keen to see more, check out these short videos:

Turing Fest video 1

Turing Fest video 2