19 November 2021

Our Partnership with Turing Fest 2021: Key Takeaways from the Event

Turing Fest Expo Booth

Subscribe to our informative Newsletter

Learn about new product features, the latest in technology, solutions, and updates as well as company news.

GearedApp Team

After a long couple of years of virtual networking, live-streaming events and online exhibitor booths, Turing Fest 2021 was back with a bang. This year’s event hosted some of the industry’s biggest names in tech… in-person! 

The GearedApp team were delighted to not only attend this year’s event but partner with Turing Fest hosting our own expo booth too. 

Read on to discover more about the event, who attended and our key takeaways from Turing Fest 2021. 

What is Turing Fest?

Turing Fest is Europe’s best cross-functional tech & growth conference. We know, that’s a bit of a mouthful so let us explain what that really means. Compared to many other conferences which have a focus on sales and recruitment, Turing Fest has an emphasis on education and is all about learning about tech and how to grow your business. Over the three days of the conference, there were over 40 speakers talking about everything from marketing to coding from some of the world’s leading corporations and business leaders.. 

Turing Fest’s values are – build, grow and lead. This mindset fosters interdisciplinary networking and learning from one another. At the end of the day, we are all in business together so it’s all about helping one another out. At GearedApp, we are all about making friends within the business community and working together. 

IMG 20211104 123151 620 1 1 e1637326270153

 

Our Partnership with Turing Fest 2021

Partnering with Turing this year, we had the opportunity to share our Tech for Good values with the tech community and build our network of entrepreneurs. Cofounder – Lara, Marketing Manager – Rachel and Digital Project Manager – Kirsty spent two whole days at Turing running a GearedApp expo booth and finding out more about our connections in the industry. 

As an ethical small business we like to look after the environment, actively thinking about our carbon footprint and the impact we make on the planet. Thus, we strayed away from the usual throwaway plastic merch, instead opting for more sustainable options, handing out packets of wildflower seeds and asking everyone to scan our QR code so we could donate to a charity on their behalf. 

Who Else Was There?

We were so lucky to have some great expo neighbours, with our booth right in between Ooni Pizza Ovens and FreeAgent. Innovative startup, Gigged.AI were right across from us with Modulr, Current Health and FanDuel just around the corner. It was really great to spend a couple of days alongside other entrepreneurs getting to know their team and learning from one another. 

There is nothing better than spending time with other like minded entrepreneurs finding out their story, how they have succeeded and what we have in common. 

Marijana Kostelac

 

The Insights Shared

Over the two days at Turing there were dozens of insightful talks on a diverse range of subjects across the industry, from leadership to marketing to coding. Here’s a few of the lessons we learned at Turing 2021-

Darina Garland – What’s Work For? Passion, People, Purpose and Pizza

Darina Garland talked through her journey building Ooni Pizza Ovens, and how culture has been so important to her. The biggest highlight for us was seeing a short clip of their morning meeting with a member of the team playing his guitar and singing to the team At GearedApp, we are a small and friendly team so our people and culture means everything to us. Listening to a successful business leader talk through the importance of culture was super insightful for us. It really is all about your people.

Marijana Kostelac – Shipping Content that Drives Growth

Marjana from Freelance Bold gave an insightful speech on shipping content that drives growth. One of the main takeaways we took from the talk was her insights on the use of buyer personas. Her advice- “stop categorising your buyers by age, sex and marital status”. Marijana went on to discuss how she defines each piece of content under three categories of job – sales enablement, search optimisation and thought leadership. Often when thinking about consumers and how to target them, marketers and business leaders get stuck on simplistic personas. However,  two people of the same age, sex and marital status may not react in the same way to the content we produce. Marijana’s talk highlighted how we can better target our audience and made us think more about our own marketing as a company. 

Saielle Da Silva – Building Stronger Product Cultures

During Saielle’s talk, she discussed how strong product cultures are founded on psychological safety – one of the most crucial ingredients in teams that outperform their competition. The lessons we learned from Saielle centred on how we as leaders can create safer spaces for our team, both in their daily interactions and within experimental projects. It really highlighted how we can support our people’s ideas, allowing us to jointly create better products for a wider range of users globally.

Izzi Smith – Website Sustainability: Knowing the Impact & Taking Action

Izzi’s talk on website sustainability drew in on our view of the internet, emphasizing how the web is often seen as an entirely eco-friendly tool. The internet comes with a plethora of Co2 emissions, and Izzi educated us on the small things we can do as business owners to reduce our carbon footprint, such as reducing image sizes and limiting the number of pages on our website. These changes not only reduce our impact on the planet, but they can help improve user experience too. To find out more about technology and its impact on the planet, read our blog post

Conor Winders – Scaling Engineering Teams

Conor Winders, EVP Engineering at Administrate gave some fantastic insight into the best ways to scale engineering teams. From evaluating performance using a 9 box performance metric, to communication between multiple scrum teams. We loved hearing his suggested approach to connecting functional roles within scrum teams via “chapters” and “guilds”, to promote consistency and continuous learning across a scaling company. Conor’s insights are definitely something we will take into the future as the team scales beyond one scrum team.  

Saielle Da Silva Speech

 

What We Took from the Event

Not only did Turing Fest 2021 remind us of the importance of meeting people in person, we took so many useful insights from entrepreneurs across the globe. From expanding our insights on culture to learning about the internet’s carbon footprint, we took so much away from the conference. 

The connections we made throughout the event were invaluable and we are so grateful to be back sharing our tech for good values with the community. We honestly cannot wait for more events in the future, and are already implementing lessons learned from many of the insightful interviews, speeches and panels we listened to during our two days at Turing. 

 

Build Brilliant Apps with GearedApp

GearedApp’s in-house team of curious self-developers work with organisations big and small to develop digital solutions that will make their difference to the world.

Our friendly team of pros will be with you from our initial sit-down chat all the way to releasing the finished product. Discover our process to find out more about how we work.

Get in touch today to find out how we can help turn your awesome ideas into a digital reality.