InterConnect draws quite the crowd (Business Insider 2014)

How to Get the Most out of your Conference Experience

After attending InterConnect earlier this year, IBM’s largest enterprise software conference, I have seen what it takes to survive a conference of this size. Making the most of all the conferences you attend can result in great and rewarding experience. I’ve put together some key lessons I’ve learned on how to have truly good time at conferences with your team and org:

Plan ahead

Be flexible and react

Value proposition question cards: one way to gather user feedback.

Making it to a conference in one piece can be half the struggle. You may have sessions to prepare, travel logistics to plan, materials to bring and demos to learn. If you’re fortunate enough to present one or more sessions, there is added pressure to create the perfect agenda and tie all loose ends beforehand. But, agendas rarely go start to finish intact. Your attendees will highly influence the tempo, conversation and topics of your session. After your agenda goes out the window, you can decide to panic, or you can shift focus and react to what the audience is telling you (with words and body language). Being a good speaker is not about you, but about being able to fulfill your attendees’ expectations and facilitating a conversation between people in the room.

To successfully navigate the unknowns of a session, you have to plan for the uncertain. I recommend working with a co-speaker so that you can run through hypothetical scenarios and decide how you plan to react to different situations. You will never be able to address all potential wrenches an audience member might throw at you, but you will both be more comfortable with adapting on the fly. Who said improv is only for comedians?

Listen fully

Look for what is said, and how it’s said

Everyone is going to have their opinions about the ongoings of the conference. You will get feedback everywhere you go: sessions, demos, hallway conversations, customer meetings, etc. It’s essential to document and process all of this information. Here’s the strategy my team has come up with:

  1. Consolidate: we agreed on a single tool to document all feedback. If it was not documented there, it did not exist.
  2. Establish context: make sure to specify not only what was said but where location-wise the feedback came from.
  3. Specificity: clarify what the feedback is directed at — a single part of the UI, customer service, on-boarding experience, design, etc.

By doing these things we were able to document feedback, then do a post-conference analysis to identify patterns easily. Without having a set process and for documenting feedback, we could have spent 3 months making sense of all feedback and relying on our collective memory to remember what was said.

Ultimately, the feedback that you can prove your team received is what counts. At huge conferences where info overload is the norm, documentation is everything.

Do it all

Speak, demo, take notes

Eric Morrow, Troy Bjerke, Yin Rui, and I working together.

It’s easy to focus on the stuff that brought you to the conference in the first place. If you’re in Sales you only do demos, if you’re an Engineer you may do a lot of sessions, and a Designer might focus on research tasks.

However, as a designer the best way to immerse yourself in your product and users is to try it all. If you are running sessions, make sure you also help out in the demo floor (if your product is being showcased). If you are there to recruit sponsor users, make sure you also attend sessions where you can hear what people think and what they care about — basically be a fly on the wall. Wherever you are, take notes, ask questions, see what people are interested in. More often than not, insights will come from unstructured situations like ad hoc conversations, demo peds or from other speakers.

So, embrace everything that happens at any conference that you’re at as a way to increase your professional experience, network, and even small talk skills. It’s funny how many great conversations happen between vendors and customers once the expo floor bars open.

Be nice

Help other with their sessions

If you do things right, you won’t have a lot of free time during a conference that your org is attending. You’ll be running from session to expo and back for days straight. But, any free time you have should be spent helping other people in your team or organization with their sessions or responsibilities. I cannot count how many people came to my rescue to help setting up session rooms, cleaning up, and even getting supplies and water. It was the only way I was able to run sessions on time and be ready for the next to-dos. So it’s only fair to do the same for others. Ask around and see who might need some support. They will be forever grateful. Offer to take notes for them, help prep or clean their space afterwards, support them during demos and ask for anything they might need.

This collaboration helps everyone’s sessions and presentations run smoother and more professionally, but more importantly it builds empathy and team dynamics across your organization. I’d like to think that customers notice this collaboration and that it might inspire them to do the same within their companies. Wishful thinking? Maybe, but I would not do it any other way.

Have fun

At last, everybody is collocated

The one sure thing traveling to conferences provides is the chance for your larger team to be in one place at the same time, which is a rare occurrence. That’s why conferences provide the perfect environment for you to work with others in person. It might be the first time you meet face-to-face with people you’ve only worked with remotely.

So, in the spirit of team building, grab everybody and go sit down with some food or beers at hand. There is no good way to describe the empathy that builds from having a real conversation with somebody you only know from remote collaboration. It might be the only time of the year you get a chance to do so. Just make sure you don’t only talk about work.

We’re all human beings (Watson aside) so be kind to others and enjoy your time together. Soon enough you will all fly away to your respective offices and daily tasks. But if you do things right, you’ll have shared some laughs and memories to reflect on when things get tense and stressful in the future.

When a conference ends, they kick you out pretty quickly.

Esteban Pérez-Hemminger is a product team Design Lead at IBM Studios in Austin. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

Design at IBM

Stories from the practice of design at IBM

Esteban Pérez-Hemminger

Written by

Thoughts (my own) on the intersection of UX design, simplicity & teamwork. Currently: Senior Interaction Designer @ Google, Austin TX

Design at IBM

Stories from the practice of design at IBM

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