Where To Next? Our Top Three Takeaways From Web Summit 2022

We had a fantastic time at Web Summit 2022. It was great to catch up on the issues across our industry that really matter, focusing not just on what we all do with technology, but also why we do it, and if we’re doing it in the best ways for our customers, and the wider world.

Why did more than 71,000 people come to Web Summit? They were looking for technology-based approaches to solve their unique challenges. As a 30-year-old tech company with origins in Ukraine, SoftServe has both long-term and very recent experiences of living in a world with challenges. It’s made us ask the same question as other attendees, and Web Summit itself — Where to next?

Since we got back from Lisbon, we’ve been thinking of some answers, and here are our top three:

1. Plan from the very start how to stay ahead

Speaking to startups at Web Summit, it was confirmed that time to market is their most important thing — their game changer. This means speed is everything. But at the same time, technology startups want to do everything themselves in-house, and as their technology is their IP — their most important element — they take special care of it.

Balancing speed and specialization as a startup means you can’t rest on your laurels — because everyone else will be doing what you’re doing — as fast, or even faster, than you. You only had to step into a Web Summit session about blockchain, and the cryptocurrency startups that have branched out from it, to see what happens when a sector becomes bloated with lots of companies all doing the same things, as quickly and cheaply as possible, based on an unsustainable core idea.

Like you, we want to keep ahead of the curve, work out what lies on the next digital frontier, and pass that knowledge on to our customers. Knowing what’s coming next helps us improve time to market for our customers, adding new features to keep things moving at speed. This also tends to improve the service value for our customers’ own customers.

Of course, we also realize that it’s beneficial for startups not just to have conversations with people who’ve been around for a while (hi!), but also to directly leverage some of their skilled people, as well. Which leads us to our next point…

2. Find the best talent and nurture it. Because talent is everything

There’s much being said, especially in a post-Covid world, about “the long resignation” or “quiet quitting.” From our conversations at Web Summit, it turns out companies are struggling to find (and keep) engineering talent in the midst of this.

This obviously has an adverse effect on both USP and time to market. If you keep losing your best people, you have to keep starting all over again in important ways, and that’s time and resources you could do without losing.

We’ve learned that investing in talent — really investing, not just saying you do in a blog — makes that talent stick with you.

That’s why SoftServe has its own university. It’s not a gimmick — it means our people can access all the expertise they need, and that we have experts to teach it — who can also keep learning for themselves in that environment.

It helps us refresh our technological outlook. For example, right now, SoftServe University has a focus on aspects of IoT that follow customer demand and market needs — and that’s available for anyone to take advantage of.

When you add in internships with several Ukrainian universities, we’re seeing talent that’s not even entered the industry, but spends time with our R&D teams, or our advanced technology group, so we can all learn together.

Our partnerships with other technology firms mean not only do our people gain knowledge from the wider enterprise market, but also take part in absolutely bleeding-edge research and development with seriously cool scientific institutions.

Nurturing talent is kind of our superpower — we are part of a community operating at the very edge of current technologies, and helping to bring it back to the center (and to our customers!).

This results in a feedback loop of passionate SoftServians constantly inspiring our customers with solutions they need, and in customers who see the value in keeping SoftServians around for the next project — which makes the loop ever tighter.

We’ll stop tooting our own horn now, but keeping your people engaged and curious works — we’re living proof of that, and it’s something we like to shout about.

3. Use tech for good

This was the big issue at Web Summit this year, considering the challenges we are all facing globally now, be it environmentally or geopolitically (and, as we mentioned earlier, SoftServe definitely knows a little about that second one).

Most of the organizations we spoke to at Web Summit are doing fantastic things with tech to help the world. Over in the U.K. BT is building drones to fly around fixing its telegraph poles. This, cleverly, delivers a financial benefit as well as a sustainability benefit. If a drone makes the journey, an engineer doesn’t need to drive there, and can spend their time doing something more useful for BT, while saving on carbon footprints.

Especially brilliant was Queen Rania of Jordan, whose fireside chat in the main hall saw her talk about reclaiming humanity in the face of technology, and utilizing it in the best ways. She linked that to the fight against fake news and refugee crises. Queen Rania made the point that we are all, ultimately, refugees in a global sense.

At SoftServe, our Open Tech charity crowdsourcing platform currently supports over 400 volunteers as they try to change the world through various projects. And since February 2022, our Open Eyes charity fund is helping the people of Ukraine during the current crisis, not least transporting 29 ambulances across Europe and refitting them for aid on the front lines.

We’re proud of our work to make things better, and it was lovely to meet kindred spirits.

If you’d like to speak to us about anything we’ve covered in this wrap-up of our experiences at Web Summit 2022, we’d love to hear from you.