Rosenfeld Media’s 2020 Retrospective
‘Tis the season for companies to write year-end retrospectives. It’s a fraught sub-genre these days, given the shitshow that 2020 has been. But retrospectives offer a great opportunity to look back, learn, and plan. Here goes for Rosenfeld Media:
A quarterly review
Our 2020 started and ends on high notes, with a deep, dark, dank valley in between:
Q1: Who’s invention’s mom again?
We launched our third conference, Advancing Research, in late March/early April. Five weeks prior, we’d sold it out. Three weeks prior, we scrambled to convert it to a hybrid event — both in-person and virtual. Two weeks prior, we realized that we’d have to go fully remote. Rube Goldberg would have been proud of how we contorted ourselves to virtualize the conference (livestream goes here, Zoom there, Slack there), but what choice did we have?
Really, it was a huge success thanks to our team, our speakers, and our sponsors. And the conference received very positive attendee reviews, giving us the confidence that we were on the right track with our virtualization efforts.
But there was no time to catch our breaths, because…
Q2: Nuclear spring
…we then tumbled off the cliff, careening from Q1’s growth mode to hanging on for dear life. Like everyone else, suddenly we were reinventing everything: our products, our business processes, and our operations, moving our team from mostly in-person to mostly remote. We were also renegotiating everything, from massive deposits on conference venues to the lease on our office space.
It wasn’t all bad though. We manged to scale a huge learning curve for virtualizing our public workshops, which seemed to go quite well. And we had a huge dollop of gratitude for that ancient of ancients, the book: really, it was a banner year for publishing, with six new titles (crammed mostly in Q2), and book revenue helped keep us afloat.
Q3: Making bets
Summer saw retrenching — aligning all aspects of Rosenfeld Media around the new normal of all-remote and, more importantly, accepting the distressful queasiness of business planning against a backdrop of extreme and constant uncertainty. Yes, we accept it — do we have a choice?—but we’re still not used to it, and I doubt we’ll ever be.
It’s also hard to get used to investing in the future when the time horizon appears, at best, only a few weeks out. Investing begins to feel less deliberate and evidence-based, and more dependent on intuition. More like bets, really.
Given how important conferences are to our business, we decided to double down on the bet that virtual conferences could offer an experience that was the equal of that of in-person events. We experimented with two innovative solutions for combatting Zoom fatigue — sponsor programming and attendee cohorts — at both Enterprise Experience 2020 and the 2020 DesignOps Summit. These innovations showed even greater potential than anticipated — I can tell you that conference attendees absolutely love participating in cohorts, and sponsors were excited to take to the stages we “built” for them. We also began a long-awaited transition to a WordPress 5-based web environment to support all these innovations. A huge lift, but so far, so good.
Q4: What is “normal”?
As I write this, 2020 is just about in the can. We’ve published six books, virtualized our three conferences and ten workshops, dramatically changed how our team works, and even moved into a new office (which we occasionally get to visit). Over recent weeks, we’ve been able to get back to making the “normal” investments that a publisher typically does, like signing new books and workshop instructors.
But even those investments are different in 2020. In the year of George Floyd, we realized (and, to be fair, had it pointed out to us) that our rosters of authors, workshop instructors, and conference curators all looked a lot like… me. Too much so.
Small publishers like Rosenfeld Media are powered by personal relationships, and that lack of diversity correlates with the makeup of my personal network. So, in Q4, we’ve begun the legwork to change that: having conversations with BIPOC, Latinx, and other industry people to grow and diversify the group of people we know and we work with, one person at a time. This is a must, given how much influence we have over who gets to write UX books and present at UX conferences. And the investment is already starting to pay dividends with the rosters of our curation teams, workshop instructors, and soon, authors.
Three brief lessons from 2020
These lessons were hard-won but oh man, well worth the effort.
Lesson 1: It’s good to offer different kinds of products at the same time
In our case, we sell books, conferences, and workshops. While it might stretch your resources, offering multiple kinds of products will help you weather major economic swings because they sell at different cadences and price points. Conferences have been our largest source of revenue for years, but books—the “slow food” of content—really helped us get through 2020. I should note that some of the books we published this year were signed as far back as 2014. (And no, I won’t name names.)
Lesson 2: UX isn’t slowing down
Having first-hand experience with two severe industry downturns (2001 and 2008) that slammed UX hard, I’m relieved — but not surprised — at our industry’s resilience. In fact, from our unique perch as a UX content provider, we’re seeing many indicators of healthy growth. Sure, there are some specific areas and roles that are weak, but that’s always the case. And, of course, job titles will continue to fluctuate (I guess we’re all really “product designers” these days?). But it’s hard not to be bullish on UX after seeing it stand up to 2020 and then some.
Lesson 3: You’re only as good as your relationships
We were fortunate in so many ways throughout the year. The people we serve and work with — customers, curators, authors, speakers, sponsors, vendors, and staff — were kind, patient, and generous with us throughout this harrowing and stressful year again and again and again. I could say that we were lucky, and as my Dad always says, you’d rather be lucky than smart. But the real reason is that we’ve spent years building and maintaining healthy relationships, and this year, when we really needed most of all, those efforts paid off. Once again, it comes down to investing.
Looking ahead to 2021
Here’s the shortest list I can come up with for the investments we anticipate making in 2021:
- More books, more workshops. We were very pleased with how both kinds of products performed in 2020, and, as always, we’d love to hear your big ideas for new books and workshops. Let’s just hope the next batch of book signings comes out before… 2026!
- Launching a fourth conference. When? Q4. What? Top secret for now! But watch this space; we’ll keep you posted.
- Continuing to innovate virtual conferences. Our work on attendee cohorts and sponsor stages has been invigorating and incredibly fun. We’re looking forward to trying out more new ideas in 2021, and working them into the new normal of conferences that’ll arrive when we can all meet in person again. (2022 is my best guess right now.)
- Surfacing underheard voices. We’ll keep refining our curation processes and engaging in the conversations that have already helped us to move beyond the monoculture “celebrity” speakers and authors that pervade the field today. More perspectives means a smarter and healthier UX for us all.
- Growing and improving our communities. We began building communities of interest that correspond to each of our conferences three years ago. They’ve been great, but will be even better in 2021, due to changes to our curation work and to some functional improvements we’re making to our website.
- Keeping true to our emphasis on curation and editing. All of the above require lots of manual work: the heavy duty program and presentation curation that our conferences require, and the intensive developmental editing our authors receive. Both are time-consuming and expensive, but they’re investments, and if you care about quality, there are no shortcuts.
Thank you for being a part of our 2020, and for allowing us to be a part of yours. And let’s all hope for a brighter, shinier, and healthier 2021!
P.S. FU, 2020 (NSFW):
