You should give a conference talk: Thoughts from a first-time speaker

By Rachel de Jong, Senior Content Designer

You might be thinking, “Hey, I’d like to give a conference talk… but I’ve never done it, and I’m not sure I can.”

Yes? Okay, cool. This post is for you.

This fall, I gave my first-ever talk at Button, the content design conference. I was nervous, but connecting with the community as a speaker was amazing, and I think more people should get to experience that.

I’d like to share a few key learnings to encourage others to give it a try.

You won’t feel ready until after you’ve done it

Don’t wait until you feel ready to pitch an idea, because you won’t. Instead, pick some reasonable criteria that might signal it’s a good time to try.

Here’s what I looked at.

1. Career progression: I looked at the Instacart Design career ladder and saw that soon it would be considered normal — even expected — for me to speak, teach, or publish. That meant it was time to put those activities on my personal roadmap.
2. Perspective: I’d just had a unique experience that somehow everyone could relate to: helping start a content design practice during a wave of pandemic-fueled hypergrowth.
3. Support: Our design org had just introduced tools and processes to help us pitch and give successful talks. I had active support from my managers and stakeholders, and there was space in my personal life.

These criteria helped me realize it was time to stretch myself by pitching an idea. I told myself it’d make good practice, and besides, the pitch probably wouldn’t get accepted, so I had nothing to lose. Right? (Right. Except … then the pitch did get accepted, and the real work began.)

Pitch a talk that would’ve helped your past self

At their best, I think good conference talks:

• address salient problems, efforts, and discourses.
• depict real situations, methods, and results.
• offer insight, clarity, and tools that can be used widely.

I felt I could check all these boxes with my general conference topic (establishing content design during hypergrowth). But how could I really make the talk useful for people?

I asked myself questions like:

• When things were hard, what did I try that made things easier?
• Was there a pattern or theme there?
• Were there tangible actions that anyone can borrow?

It turned out my answers to these questions all added up to a clear point of view: I believe that, armed with the right tools and frameworks, any IC (individual contributor) can help establish a clear contribution model for a new content design team.

My Button talk description as published on the conference website.

That’s what I wanted to share with people: a point of view that would’ve helped my former self take on the challenge.

Remember, your pitch becomes your talk description. Imagine your pitch on the conference website. Would you go to your talk?

Writing a talk is (even) more work than you think

I probably spent 120 hours on this talk, between planning, ideation, writing, refining, practicing, recording, delivering, and answering live questions. (I have 17 versioned copies of the deck.)

For a couple of months I spent all my free time thinking about the talk and capturing stray notes and ideas on post-its, emails to self, and random pieces of paper.

Then I bought a few blank notebooks. I considered some user-centered questions we might ask ourselves when designing any experience.

• Who will come to my talk?
• What will they want to know?
• What state of mind will they be in?
• As a result of this talk, what might they try/stop/ask/tell?
• What are the attributes of a good talk?
• What components might I include? Which should get the most emphasis?
• If this talk turns out well, how might it be described?

This helped me anchor on the audience experience and make sure I was really elevating their needs in every choice I made.

I drafted the talk by hand (twice), assembled a first-draft deck, cleaned it up, and shipped it to the conference organizers to hit my “draft submitted” milestone. At this point I thought my talk was “pretty close” to final. (Note: It was not “pretty close.”)

Want a stronger talk? Metabolize the chaos

After submitting a draft deck, each Button speaker has the opportunity to get 1:1 coaching from Kristina Halvorson, founder of Brain Traffic (and most famous first-user of the term “content strategy” to describe our discipline).

Kristina helped me realize this draft, while passable, wasn’t landing clearly. She also helped me diagnose why.

It wasn’t enough to just tell the story: challenge, actions taken, outcomes. I had to really break it down, restructure it, find the method in the madness.

I had to metabolize the chaos.

It wasn’t enough to just tell the story: challenge, actions taken, outcomes. I had to really break it down, restructure it, find the method in the madness.

This conversation led me to make three important changes:

• Add a recurring agenda slide: To paraphrase 8th grade English teachers everywhere, “tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ‘em.” My first draft didn’t have a recurring agenda slide because I thought it’d make the talk stodgy. I was wrong. I needed this and so did my audience.
• Skip a lot of setup: Kristina guided me back to the “In this session, you’ll learn” section that was promised in my talk description. How could I get there sooner and more concretely?
• Clean up the visual system: I thought my slides were pretty easy to follow, and that the artifacts and templates I was offering were easy to identify. They weren’t. I needed to lean on people with stronger visual design skills.

The hardest part about metabolizing the chaos was letting go of the myth that “more is more.” So many nuances had to be reframed, distilled, or straight-up deleted to make the talk make sense. In the end, this is what made the good stuff really shine.

It takes a village to raise a conference talk

This talk had my name on it, but really, about 30 people helped bring it to life.

I had hands-on help from Instacart design: visual improvements from product designers, rounds of storytelling feedback from content designers, assets furnished by our brand creative team, and indispensable support from ops.

Industry veterans (and experienced speakers) made time to give advice to me, a perfect stranger.

The Button team produced this event with exquisite skill, warmth, and heart, and they made it shockingly manageable, both operationally and emotionally, for a first-timer. (Thanks for taking a chance on me, Button team. I’m your number-one fan.)

Giving a talk for the first time feels like a major threshold. I think you can cross it alone, but you shouldn’t have to. I didn’t have to, and I’ll never forget it.

You’ve got something worth sharing

Here’s what I feared the most, what almost stopped me from pitching a talk: I worried that what I had to say was obvious. Now I see how misguided that was.

First of all, just because it’s obvious to you doesn’t mean it’s obvious to everyone. You may have normalized your own experience.

Second, it might not be that what you have to say is obvious — it might be that it’s relatable. That’s a good thing: a relatable talk shows other people that they’re not alone in facing today’s challenges.

After my own talk, some people told me they’d never thought of trying what I suggested, while others said they had, and that my talk gave them confidence it was a reasonably good solution.

This feedback helped me finally understand that the assignment was never to deliver a masterpiece. All I had to do was add my little pebble to the pile, give something useful to the community.

I bet you’ve got a pebble to add. So — is it time to try?