Brian Solis is a digital analyst, speaker and author, and has recently joined ServiceNow as head of Global Innovation. We've been virtual friends for a long time, speaking on various stages together about disruption, innovation, culture and digital experiences. I found Brian headed to Melbourne, and I took the chance to grab him for 30 mins and over a champagne we hit some big topics; Mega and Micro Trends; how do we keep up? AI - How do we embrace it? What's going on with Digital Experience? Are we getting it right or wrong? Champagne or Wine? That was an easy topic. Q on Q vs Long Term Vision. How to balance both. Cultural and leadership Empathy. It was a fun chat, and my brain was nicely spent. As usual I wish I had more time.

The story of Dynatrace is a remarkable one. If you listen to this podcast in the entirety you will hear the evolution, from early days, to success, to reinvention, to new scale. But what if the board didn't agree to let the company pivot, right when it was in the midst of leading the market? To allow itself to basically disrupt themselves. What if the team didn't come up with the idea that it had to reinvent itself?For those that don’t know, Dynatrace monitors the performance of applications, the clouds they run in, and the users accessing and using these apps for nearly every enterprise out there. The tech 'heads' call it observability, in that their software can observe all the inner workings of all these applications, services, infrastructure, networks, and everything else in between. And given the world is run on apps, and they are increasingly complicated, it’s a fairly important observation. A single line of code is wrong, and the software stops. And with it, … that companies ability to transact. You’ve seen examples of this, almost weekly, on the news, when airlines are forced to shut down flights, point of sale systems go down, or heaven forbid Facebook goes down. Thankfully the systems that run these systems are getting smarter, with AI, and the likelihood of whatsapp being down is less and less. What a relief. So how on earth do you come up with the monitoring software that debugs the software that runs the world? Where do you start? Why? And given how quickly the world changes, and with it, tech changes, how do you keep pace with all the latest tech, scale, and modern systems. Not easily. Bernd Greifeneder is the founder of Dynatrace. His role now is CTO, visionary leader, and honestly cultural identity of Dynatrace. I was lucky to work with him, and see first hand, not only his ability to grasp what’s next, but to inspire teams to be ready, and to execute on the changes needed to be the best. I joined as a marketing leader in the first wave of APM, I was part of the transformation you will hear about, as well as the successful IPO. Leaving not long after this, in the middle of covid to come home from the US with my family, that’s where I left the story, and I was so keen to find out what has been going on. Turns out … quite a lot.

Christine Yen is not like other CEO's. She's an engineer, that co-founded a company that has gone onto become, not just a leader in an industry, but also a company that defined the industry category - Observability. I have watched and admired the rise of Honeycomb from a very close vantage point. Formerly in my role at Dynatrace, who is also a leader in this observability space, I saw them quietly go about their business, without really ruffling any feathers. The Datadog's, New Relic's, Appdynamics, and Dynatracers of the world would end up in head to head battles. We'd be quick to jibe back about each other's capabilities but Honeycomb seemed to be walking to the beat of it's own drum. It fascinated me to the point that I really wanted to know more. In this podcast, I had a long sit down, with Christine Yen, the companies co-founder and CEO. We talked about the companies origin and original idea, early success, through the challenges with Go To Market, and being a female tech leader. Enjoy. I certainly did.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say "Michelle makes Privacy cool, maybe even oddly attractive." "If you have customers, or want customers, you really need to be thinking about privacy up front. It can no longer be an afterthought." Michelle Finneran DennedyI’ve been thinking about privacy a fair bit. And in talking to some entrepreneurs, that have an app, they are hell bent on collecting data, but haven’t really thought through their data strategy. What can I collect? How? Where is it stored? Too often I hear; yeah well Google and Meta does it therefore I can right? No. I sense a perfect storm might be brewing. The collection of data, the ability to process it, the ability to piece it all together, and the ability to profile people from it. In intrigued me to the point that I thought I really need to talk to someone about it. I don’t mean old mate down at the pub who’s typically response is; Yeah na mate, I don’t really care what they know about me, I’m just not that interesting. This podcast isn’t for old mate. This podcast is for people that are interested in the in’s and outs of privacy from an expert that not only wrote the book on the topic, started the Chief privacy functions of some of the largest companies, but has gone out on a limb, to start her own company hell bent on educating people about privacy and ensuring the next generation of leaders get their privacy strategies, documented, ethically tested, and are sustainably sound. She makes Privacy sound cool. I really didn't think that was possible. Michelle Finneran DennedyMichelle literally wrote the book on privacy engineering that raised a generation of ethical, empathetic, and business-minded privacy professionals. She is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Privacycode.ai, a start-up privacy engineering platform for business-focused privacy teams.Before PrivacyCode, she held seminal Chief Privacy Officer roles at Cisco, McAfee/Intel, and Sun Microsystems. She also served as CEO of the data company Drumwave.She holds a JD from the Fordham University School of Law.Follow Michelle on Twitter: @mdennedy.

Lucie is the Chief Product Officer at digital experience leader Contentsquare. This chat happened in a Paris, after a long day workshopping, and we delve into some really interesting topics; Why Digital Experience is so important Why empathy, and really looking at your digital experience analytics can play a significant role in helping users enjoy their journeys, but can also provide sustainable benefits. Leadership traits, including being raised without gender bias.