Monthly lightning talks at Showpad

A Lightning talk is a concept that exists in many shapes and forms. In essence, it boils down to a short 5–10 min talk that that covers a random topic. They are a popular format for talks that are scheduled at the “unconf” track (track where attendees can speak) of conferences.

A little bit about Showpad as a product

For those of you who don’t know Showpad: it’s a sales enablement platform where we focus on shortening the sales cycle for salespeople. We do this by combining interactive selling experiences with industry-leading sales coaching, and empower the modern consultative seller to engage with buyers as a trusted advisor.

Myself as a software engineer at Showpad

At the time of writing, I’m a software engineer at Showpad for roughly one year and a half. I’ve mostly been programming in PHP and Typescript, working on databases and maintaining our team’s infrastructure in AWS with Terraform.

I’m a member of Experiences. Our team’s focus is to create an interactive way for salespeople to guide buyers through the sales journey.

We do this by enabling them to create Experiences, which gives salespeople an arsenal of interactive channels through which they can guide the buyer.

We also own Pages. Pages allows you to have contextually relevant conversations with buyers, discover new product information, or get sales guidance — all in a modern, visually compelling way.

Showpad as an engineering company

We’re an engineering team of about 100 people where we work in several cross functional teams, ranging from 4 to 8 people. These teams are split up over the main domains of our product. Each team is then split up over one of three layers in which they are categorised based on their position in the product.

Showpad is also a company where culture is key. While this might sound like a cliché, I really keep this opinion close to heart. We have a culture where innovation, progress, fun and learning are at the centre. We help each other out and learn from one another. We’re one team.

So, lightning talks?

At Showpad, we have lightning talks every month. This has been the case since I joined, and honestly, I really like the concept. On the second Friday of the month a session is organised and it really allows for people to work on their presenting skills because they are presenting in front of a relatively large group (40 people, but for most “new” speakers, this is a lot) that they know while also presenting about a subject they feel comfortable about. There is no requirement for the talk to be technical or engineering related, which means people can really talk about their passion.

A few months in and an opportunity arose to host the lightning talks. I now organise them (gather people, make sure speakers are on call, …) and guide speakers that are having doubts about their topic or their ability to speak in front of a group.

A night edition of our lightning talks, where one participant talked about his synthesizers. After the talks, we ended up having a Mario Kart evening with a live dj.

What’s the link between Showpad and lightning talks?

Well, Lightning talks in multiple ways contribute to some of those key points in the Showpad culture that I pointed out before. It allows for innovation because it triggers people to be inspired by other people’s talk, it marks progress every time someone gets on stage and presents as they become better public speakers and it is always fun to have these sessions and everyone learns from it.

Some examples of lightning talks at Showpad

A short introduction into the West-Flemish dialect, and its proverbs.

As I’ve said before, lightning talks are about topics that you feel confident and excited about. It can be about anything, and that shows in the diverse talks we’ve had over the last few months.

We’ve had someone go through a 200+ photo deck journey (in 12 minutes!) where he explained the journey of how he restored a Cadillac for a race he entered. The journey took a few months and the story ended with the car dying the night before the race and they had to take a backup car to participate.

We have data scientists who manage to weave in physics and math into their talks, even when you don’t believe it at first. Turns out there is a mathematical explanation for the sunflower seeds pattern.

Heck, I’ve even tried it myself a few times (eat your own dog food). A talk about West-Flemish proverbs and a literal translation of them. It ended up being a talk with some comical relief as we speak English at Showpad and West-Flemish provers sound… weird, when translated.

Besides eating our own dog food, we also tend to consume pizza during these talks.

So in a nutshell, a personal key take away

Try out lightning talks, be it at your company, your Meetup, your conference or where ever you see it fit. It is a very easy talk format to introduce and it is honestly refreshing and enjoyable for speakers and listeners. We know it’s a format that fits our engineering department, and we’re sure it will fit somewhere in yours as well.