Running Tech conferences

TL;DR I love tech conferences and in the near future I will attend more of them (if it is even possible 😄) while pausing on the organization.

My last "complex" project for this year will be the Microsoft Ignite redelivery for Italy, on March 26, 2024. Hub & Spoke event across Italy, Guerriglia marketing in Milan streets, multi audiences/multi streams. And I will not even be there 🙁

If you're curious about this specific event here's the link to one of the registration pages and me discussing it and the story behind this article in the Azure Italia Podcast (Italian speaking).

When Conferences were done in 4:3

Take a look at the following Image. Do you notices something strange?

As you can guess from the caption, it is from an era when screens were in 4:3.

In the last few weeks, I've been sorting out several memorabilia, gadgets, and pictures of my more than 20 years of tenure @ Microsoft and I realized that during those years my interest and passion for meeting people and learning new things has been fulfilled attending and in many cases being part of the teams organizing Tech conferences. And oh my, just a glance at my photos archive showed me that I attended an average of 5.something conferences every year and co-organized a couple more, making it almost possible to meet me at 150 tech conferences in the last 2 decades! (meetups and internal ones not counted).

Lessons Learned, connections made

A rant-long blog post about my experiences will be useful to no one if I do not try at least to share some of the two or three things that I learned during those years, purely common sense.

Speakers: Be prepared/seek feedback/engage with the audience. A speaker that does its talk and invariably leaves a conference immediately after is not a good investment for the event. I don't like either speakers that do a variation of the same talk in different conf. I understand that can be complicated, but if you have no new things to share just attend!

Organizers: Put in the shoes of the attendees and work to make the conference a success, especially from a dev/tech/ops point of view. Speakers are important, sponsors are paying for the majority of the expenses, but without a public, there is no event. And no ferocious overbooking on free events. 

Sponsors: Make the booth fun and interesting. Tech marketing can be a hard nut to crack, but engagement dynamics at the booth make all the difference. For the love of god, tech people and tech content. And gadgets, lots and lots of gadgets (in my tenure I had almost 25K t-shirts printed and distributed during the years. Best way to spend marketing money)

Attendees: Be respectful of everyone and everything and interact! Commit to getting home with at least 10 more contacts on Linkedin/Mail/whatever. Content is always available on streaming, real people no.

Continuous learning and conference culture

Up until last year, I had access to a wonderful service provided by Linkedin: Talent Insights. This tool is meant to support recruiting professionals to assess pools of candidates but can give an insight into the world of professionals by country/vertical/city/company. A quick analysis of the Italian market will show that at least 300.000 people in Italy brand themselves as developers/DevOps of some kind. The difference between this number and the people actively attending conferences to grow their network/their knowledge is impressive. I had the opportunity to access not only those data but also to run the Microsoft Developer newsletter for several years and be the budget owner and so the ultimate evaluator of the impact of Microsoft spending in sponsorships and the relative returns. The entire population of devs that I and my team were able to capture from Microsoft and non communities never went over the 10% of the potential audience, and this was not only targeting in-person events but the entirety of the modern marketing strategies applied to reach the "developer personas" in my market. 

Long story short, way more people could benefit from attending conferences but they are not informed/not committed/not willing to invest what in many cases will be their personal time to be part of this ecosystem of learners/practitioners. That's a pity.

A glimpse behind the curtains of big MS events

Organizing a Microsoft Tech event can be a very complex task. For the local/regional ones is not uncommon to have 5 months lead times and 2/3 months of real work for s team of 8+ people, spanning tens of hours of calls and hundreds of mails/thousands of messages. But the real deal is big international events like Ignite or Build. In that, the number of PMs, marketeers, content leads, etc can reach tens of full-time people and hundreds of involved parties. 

For some of those events I had the opportunity to act as a speaker, host some sessions/rooms online and in person, and at least in one case provide a case and content for a Keynote. Two minutes of speech by Scott Guthrie about an Azure Stack implementation took 2 months of work, a couple of visits to a Customer in Genova, and no less than 20 calls to agree on the wording and go/no from the customer! All for a "customer case" that was presented in 2017 and became reality in 2023 😑.

But when you have an event of 250.000 people registered and 200.000 watching the keynote, even a PPT planning deck of 72 slides (!) has its reason d'etre...

Here if you're curious about what took so long to agree. Ah, Carnival Cruise has a nice subsidiary in Genova with cruise ships departing every Saturday from Savona.

A series of posts?

This post is a commitment that I took in my last LinkedIn message leaving Microsoft, so I can say that I delivered on the promise to tell a little bit on this topic. There are so may other pieces of information that make sense to share: agenda creation, gamification tactics, tools to use, that I believe I will create a series of posts on that. Another commitment from the same post was to attend Kubecon this year in Paris and it seems that I'll be able to stay true to myself also on this promise, even having a booth where to present. But this time the topic will be a bit different. Stay tuned if you want to know where you'll find me in the next few weeks/months 😄.