Keynote at Salesforce Users Conference

I had a great time with the folks from the Salesforce User Group (SF Bay Area). Below are the slides, footage (coming soon), and event description

Slides

[slideshare id=25290411&doc=sfdc-user-group-081413-130815170226-phpapp02]

Footage

Follow Up Notes

Here are a few notes on questions I’ve gotten from the attendees:

Where are the online resources Alex mentioned during the talk? 
There are a few references-
A. Venture Design Template: This is the entry page for the tutorials, examples, and templates Alex referenced.
B. General Resources: This is an overall directory/infographic of the resources.
C. Startup Sprints: This is a (free) five iteration program for implementing new products and projects.
D. Process Design: This is a resource about process design as prep. for enterprise implementations. He’s adding more material to those one in the next couple of weeks.

How do I contact Alex?
I’m available on LinkedIn, Twitter, and email at acowan@alexandercowan.com.  I’m teaching a few courses to the general public this fall and does workshops as well- I’ll post those to Twitter.

Event Description

IT 3.0, Salesforce, and you: A networking event for Salesforce Professionals

Join us for an informative and fun evening that will be the social event of the Summer for Bay Area Salesforce users, admins, developers and partners!

In IT 3.0, enterprise systems are social, mobile, and modular, but most importantly they’re user-centric and adaptive to a degree their predecessors weren’t.

How do you make all this happen in your projects with Salesforce? Alex will walk through recipes for applying design thinking to create better systems and Lean Startup to manage through uncertainty avoid wasted time and effort.

If you’re a Salesforce user/manager, you’ll go home with techniques you can use to improve your projects and organize your teams.

If you’re a consultant, you’ll have a chance to add some of today’s most important ideas and techniques to your repertoire.

If you’re an application vendor, you’ll learn how to develop better products quicker and more consistently.

About our speaker: Alex is the CTO of Leonid Systems, an enterprise software startup with offices in the Bay Area, Washington, Toronto and various points abroad. Leonid works with cloud communications providers on innovative solutions to leverage and growth their franchise. Leonid’s products are now deployed to many of the world’s largest operators which together had over $350 billion in revenue last year. He’s also the Author of Starting a Tech Business (Wiley, 2012), a primer for non-engineers who want to up their game with the latest techniques and foundations concepts in product development.

In addition to our excellent guest speaker, we will have demos from our sponsors, plenty of time for networking, along with drinks and appetizers.

Our generous sponsors will be on-hand to discuss with you how they can help solve your problems and demonstrate their solutions:

About our sponsors:

Mansa Systems is a cloud and mobile technology company headquartered in San Francisco with a distinct focus on Salesforce consulting and developing apps for Salesforce users that fill critical gaps.

Capriza extends your existing web-based business applications to mobile in minutes. No coding, no APIs and no integrations.

Indicee is the leading Salesforce analytics platform. Connect data from across Salesforce and your business for a 360-degree view of sales, service and marketing performance.

AppBuddy‘s innovative productivity applications help users love to work in Salesforce.com. It offers the GridBuddy app on the AppExchange, a spreadsheet-like interface for managing Salesforce data.

FinancialForce.com is the cloud applications company. We focus 100% on building business applications for Salesforce Platform, the world’s leading cloud computing platform from salesforce.com.

RingLead‘s duplicate detection algorithm has been honed after a decade of analyzing large data sets. We’re happy to deliver our customers access to a suite of tools that ensures data quality across their entire organization.

The agenda:

5:30 – 6:30  Networking, with complimentary snacks and beverages

6:30 – 8:00  Demonstrations

8:00 – 9:00  Keynote presentation by Alex Cowan