Inspiring speakers for an inspiring week of innovation

We would like to extend a huge thank you to Sam Minnée, Niklas Forsdahl, and Dilan Rajasingham for attending Innovation Week and sharing their insights with our Silverstripe’s staff.

Innovation Week is a quarterly event that allows Silverstripe staff to step away from their daily work to explore new and innovative projects. Many of the innovations that come out of Innovation Week then make their way into our products, including Silverstripe CMS. Innovation Week is held over three days and features talks from inspiring speakers to help direct and inform the projects.

We are excited to share a summary of the amazing talks given by our wonderful speakers. They made a lasting impact on our audience with their impressive insights and engaging presentations.

Sam Minnée is the former CEO of Silverstripe and currently is CTO at Frankie. Sam's talk explored the challenges Silverstripe faced in its early days. He gave us a behind-the-scenes look at how Silverstripe CMS was created and the lessons he took away from his journey of innovation. Sam discussed how Silverstripe managed to iterate and improve solutions to adapt them to new needs and new customers. He also elaborated on the “4 Product risks” and how to balance them.

Dilan Rajasingham is the ANZ Head of Customer Strategy at Amazon Web Services. In his talk, Dilan discussed the culture of innovation at AWS. He talked about how Amazon innovates by putting customers at the centre of its products. He shared some of the specific practices that AWS uses to foster innovation like the PR/FAQ process and how to empower small teams to take ownership of their work.

Niklas Forsdahl is Chief Software Developer at Creamarketing in Finland. Niklas talked about how Creamarketing extended Silverstripe CMS to provide a bespoke ecommerce solution to its customers. This included lots of practical refinements like frontend editing or customising the CMS search. Niklas also shared how Creamarketing collaborates with other European Silverstripe CMS partners and a community of customers to foster innovation on its ecommerce platform.

We are grateful to all three speakers for taking the time to share their knowledge with us. Their insights informed many of our Innovation Week projects and the lessons we learned will be valuable for years to come.