Meet Magento UK '21 - Alejandro Mondragon, Osvaldo Spadano, Vinai Kopp, Maša Prastalo, Brian Mapley & Olena Tkacheva.
In this article, we take a look at the next round of talks from this year's Meet Magento UK 2021. With only two day's to go until the big event and still a lot of content to cover, there is no time to waste.
Alejandro Mondragon & Osvaldo Spadano
Merchant track - 1.50pm -2.25pm
Akoova fireside chat: Lean thinking for retailers
'The customer is always right!' is a phrase that anyone who has ever worked in retail will know is complete nonsense! From experience I can tell you that customers are not always right, however, I can also tell you that they are always important.
In this fireside chat, Osvaldo Spadano will be talking with Amazon Web Services' Alejandro Mondragon about how Amazon is keeping customers front and centre in all of their decisions and how they are helping other retailers do the same.
Is this session for me?
If you are a B2C company, then this will be great for you. Even if your not, there is never anything wrong with learning how an industrial giant like Amazon goes about making decisions.
Who are Alejandro Mondragon & Osvaldo Spadano?
Alejandro Mondragon is currently the Principal of retail business development at Amazon web services. Before this, he was VP of global retail at GFK, a Managing director for Kantar TNS, an associate at A.T. Kearney, senior consultant for Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, Market and Sales Optimization Manager for Carrefour and a sales advisor for ExxonMobil. He is also the winner of the prestigious Developer Connection award for the coolest last name.
Osvaldo Spadano began his career as a Network and Systems Manager for Consorzio Mario Negri Sud before Co-founding and working as Technical Director of Prestige. Since then he's been Internet Systems Administrator at M.A.I.D. / The dialog corporation, Network and systems manager at Virgin Net, Co-founder, CTO and Executive director of Venda, Treasurer and Management team member of the London central and Westminster branch of the Chartered Management Institute, Co-founder and CTO of Storesco Ltd, CTO of YOOX, CTO of Alexandalexa.com and, for the last eight years has been Founder and CEO of akoova.
Find more on Alejandro & Osvaldo by following the links below.
Alejandro Mondragon
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexmondragon/
Osvaldo Spadano
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/osvaldospadano/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/ospadano
Vinai Kopp
Technical track - 1.50pm -2.25pm
Hyvä Themes - a developers perspective
During this session, Vinai Kopp will share his experience with Hyvä Themes, from, you guessed it, a developer's perspective. What does he think of them? Are they easy to use? Are they easy to develop? Will they be able to cope and keep up with the demands of a growing business using the ever flexible Magento system? Find out in this talk.
What are Hyvä Themes?
As the title suggests they are themes created by a company called Hyvä. But what's interesting about them is that they are built from scratch to use as few dependencies as possible to third-party libraries and keep the tech stack light too.
These new, simpler to learn products aim to reduce complexity, better performance, increase developer UX and provide a more affordable alternative to those who can not, or will no not, move over to PWA.
Is this session for me?
As a developer, if you are looking to broaden your repertoire or want to be able to offer your clients more options when it comes to faster eCommerce then this is the talk for you.
As a merchant, if you are looking for an alternative to PWA or the themes already out there then you will also find this session helpful.
Who is Vinai Kopp?
Vinai worked as a developer at Blitztrade GmbH in Germany for five years before going it alone as a self-employed developer and consultant for almost eight years. After this, he became Senior technical manager and evangelist for Magento before spending the last seven years as a self-employed trainer, developer and consultant.
Find more on Vinai by following the links below.
Vinai Kopp
Twitter - https://twitter.com/VinaiKopp
Website - http://vinaikopp.com/
Hyvä
Website - https://hyva.io/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/hyva_io
Maša Prastalo & Brian Mapley
Solution track - 1.50pm -2.25pm
From startup to stratospheric: how businesses are using payments to drive growth
A reoccurring theme over the last few years has been user/customer experience. The art of tailoring your website, store, social media and content with both existing and potential customers to give them the best experience possible when interacting with your brand and, in return they talk, tweet, support, shop and naturally promote you to the rest of the world. Some have adopted and mastered this art, some, sadly, have not.
During this seminar, Maša Prastalo and Brian Mapley will be investigating ways for you and your business to make the payment process interesting, dynamic, simple and effective, all with that end goal in mind of converting the casual shopper into the loyal customer.
Is this session for me?
If you run an eCommerce store and have problems with a high cart abandonment rate or want to change/introduce new payment methods to your store then you are in the right place.
Who are Maša Prastalo & Brian Mapley?
Working as a Relationship Manager at Guardian business services for almost three years, Maša spent a few months at Tate Digital as a Digital partnerships manager and later as its head before moving onto Adyen where she has been the Channel Partnerships Manager for the last two years.
Brian has spent most of his career working within the banking world. For four years he worked at Yorkshire Bank as a Bank manager and later as an area sales manager, Clydesdale bank as their merchant acquiring manager before returning to the Yorkshire bank as the relationship business manager. From there he became the payments partner, east region for Yorkshire and Clydesdale bank before moving onto Adyen, where he began as the UK mid-market sales manager and is now the head of mid-market UK sales.
Find more on Maša and Brian by following the links below.
Maša Prastalo
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ma%C5%A1a-p-bbbb9299/
Brian Mapley
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-mapleyuk/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/MappersGKAcad
Adyen
Website - https://www.adyen.com/
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/adyen/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/Adyen
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/AdyenPayments/
Olena Tkacheva
Platform track - 1.50pm -2.25pm
Headless Commerce with Magento PWA Storefront
Not much exposition needed on this one as it's another of those 'does what it says on the tin' kinda talks. Olena will be taking you through what headless commerce looks like when using the PWA storefront coupled with your Magento site.
Is this session for me?
If you are already running a PWA storefront and want to pick up some tips, are a developer looking to learn some more or are thinking about PWA's and how that might work for you then this is the session you want to be watching.
Who is Olena Tkacheva?
With almost 20 years of experience as a business analyst on customer self-service systems & marketing campaign provisioning systems for Incom, business management systems & project coordinator on unified application platform at Ciklum, Olena is now a project manager at Magento.
Find more on Olena by following the links below.
Olena Tkacheva
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/olena-tkacheva/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/gella
Our final thoughts...
Customer experience is the common theme for this round of sessions and given how important, dare I say vital, it is to all our businesses this may be the most influential of all the time slots so far and I do not doubt that there will be watched and re-watched many times over.
As usual, thank you for supporting us here at Developer Connection just by reading this article. Until next time, stay safe and have a great day.
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