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Benedict Evans has spent 20 years analysing mobile, digital media and technology, in equity research, industry, and strategy consulting and most recently in venture capital, at Andreessen Horowitz in Silicon Valley. He is now an independent analyst based in London.

Adaora is a product & UX strategist and technology leader with ~15 years leading brand, product, and market growth for tech startups and social impact ventures across the globe. Originally from Nigeria, she’s an MIT alum who’s lived and worked on five different continents; built several successful ventures from the ground up; and speaks regularly about product leadership, innovation culture, and the future of work. She’s currently the VP of Product at PathCheck Foundation. Prior to that, she was VP of Product and Experience Design at MERGE, led the product & experience design strategy for Jumia Technologies, the largest e-commerce operator in Africa; Flywire, a market-leading in global payments; and Cogito, a disruptive AI conversational coaching platform. Outside her passion for strategy and UX, she enjoys building and mentoring cross-functional teams and partnering with executives to build organizational cultures that enable innovation at scale. When Spectra isn’t working, she’s either planning events for her passion project Code Red (a community of tech leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors approaching workplace inclusion with an innovation lens); investing in early-stage entrepreneurs; or, spending time with her partner at their home in Boston.

Mary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both a product champion and department manager. Mary considered retirement 1998, but instead found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word “waterfall.” When Mary compared her experience in successful software and product development to the prevailing opinions about how to manage software projects, she decided the time had come for a new paradigm. She wrote the award-winning book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit in 2003 to explain how the lean principles from manufacturing offer a better approach to software development. Over the past several years, Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and teaches classes with her husband Tom. Based on their on-going learning, they wrote a second book, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash in 2006, a third, Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point in 2009, and a fourth book, The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions in 2013. A popular writer and speaker, Mary continues to bring fresh perspectives to the world of software development.