Open Tech Calendar

We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup Episode 16.

Mode 2 is a regular meetup about IT innovation within large companies across central Scotland. We're sponsored by Infinity Works and episode 16 is hosted by Hymans Robertson.

Each meetup will feature two short talks and a chance to connect with IT innovators in a relaxed environment with free beer/wine and pizza. The talks for this meetup are:

1: Hilde Frydnes, Head of Product, Mallzee

Hilde has worked with product, marketing and understanding users for more than 10 years. She is Head of Product at Mallzee, a retail tech company with a popular shopping app that allows retailers to gain actionable insights on early-stage product performance. Hilde has previously worked at Skyscanner, Google, Macs Adventure and as a strategic marketing consultant. Hilde believes that if you put the user first (and maybe give them some cake), everything else will follow - although you have to work hard to get there!

“But what do you really want? 7 top tips to get practical insights about your users and their needs and desires”

How do we understand our users and what they want from our products? Creating enjoyable, sticky user experiences that audiences keep coming back to is hard. But we can make it easier by making sure we don’t plan, design and build our products in isolation. Talking to our users, gaining insights from their behaviours, digging into the data and making educated guesses that we can test and verify - that’s the secret sauce of building better products. Hilde will tell you 7 practical, tactical and strategic actions you can do - right now! - to give your customers a better experience of your business and your products, and give you that competitive edge.

2: Neil Crawford, Head of Technology, Findmypast

Neil is Head of Technology at Findmypast. He care's deeply about continuous improvement and how they can create sustainable and happy technology teams that have space and freedom to innovate. He came up through games qa, then games programing then made the jump to web technology for the past 10 years. He blogs on the Findmypast tech blog and is an active member of the local meetup scene in Dundee, Scotland.

"True North & Technical debt"

At Findmypast we constantly bickered about the way we worked, what problems we had and how we should fix them. What we needed was a direction and absolute clarity for decision making when it came to improvements to our system of work. We settled on creating our own True North, a set of guiding engineering principles. In this talk I’ll explain how we reached consensus on our True North principles, and how we’re putting them into practice today.