5 things I learned from attending The Customer Conference in London last week (AKA the first event I’ve attended since before Covid hit)

The best way to truly understand the "Why" is through live user interaction.

Most of our world is digitalized; that’s no news to anyone. Even though we (and everyone else) track human behavior all the time, we can't fully understand what potential customers think about our product when they experience it on their own. Watching in real-life how prospects engage with your offering is such a rewarding and yes, sometimes challenging experience. Not only can you refine your marketing and sales messaging accordingly, you also find yourself rethinking your product roadmap and your overall approach to the market. Social media gets you to grasp the what. What a prospect engages with or how they do it. In a face-to-face interaction, you learn the why.

Get inspired by new ideas.

The best ideas come from other people. It can be a colleague, an investor or, in many cases - from our customers. The Startup life is the endless creativity track for creative thinkers and finally going out and meeting so many talented people is just like taking the creativity highway.

Learn from peers.

A big part of being a CEO is being the enabler for your team, so learning from other leaders about their challenges and strategies is a time well spent. Listening to @maranda anndziekonski talk about her “Unique Journey From Growing Up in Poverty to Being a Tech Exec in Silicon Valley, and My Lessons Learnt” was insightful. The level of sensitivity to people and journeys is one of the highest I've seen. And when you have people with you, the sky's the limit. "When you get to a leadership position, make sure you are giving chances as much as you get them" - I'll take this quote with me.

Strengthen your In-Company personal & business  relationships.

 I will be honest here, I was skeptical about the impact of live events at first, I wasn’t sure people will show up, and that the world is ‘back to normal’. I was wrong of course.  But I would say, that even if I was right and the event wasn’t a success, the event preparation, the thought process, the working together as a team on this was fun and fruitful.  Personally, I feel our relationships have strengthened and we have each sharpened our capabilities and product peaches through our time together at the conference.

Being away from the team is building trust.

Being both the CEO and the co-founder of EverAfter, I am involved in so many things in the company, and I like it. Still, this opportunity to be away and let other people own problems, agendas and have interactions without me there is something I should do more often. It’s part of realizing we are growing, and more people take ownership. It made EverAfter stronger by me letting go, just a bit :)