Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Year: 2020

  • Scaling yourself

    Scott Hanselman gave a talk in 2012 called “Scaling Yourself ” about personal productivity and not burning out.<footnote>As I learned today, he since has given a variant of that talk dozens of times and it probably has improved. However, I saw the 2012 version.</footnote> I would say it’s more relevant today than it has been then.

    A lot of us have been working from home since early 2020. We’ve had to re-arrange childcare, supervise remote learning, take care of family members and adopt new protocols such as social distancing – all against the backdrop of a global pandemic, an economic downturn and social unrest. We are not just transitioning to work-from-home, but rather dealing with multiple severe crises that force everyone to stay at home while still trying to work.

    While Scott’s talk does not solve global healthcare, he has a few actionable suggestions that might lighten the load. Below are more notes:

    • There is a fundamental difference between efficiency (reducing the effort to get things done) and effectiveness (doing the right things). Efficiency will come with time and experience. Effectiveness can be improved immediately.
    • Each week set aside time to define the work that needs to get done. That makes sure that you are working on the right things.
    • Say no/ drop things off your todo list. We can only do so many things and even fewer things really well. Give yourself permission to say “no” or re-negotiate your commitments.
    • “Being busy is a form of laziness”. Instead of taking care of everything as if everything is of equal importance, invest the time to triage work, i.e. make some upfront decision about if this needs to get done, whether you are the best person to do it and by when it needs to get done. Don’t just jump to the conclusion that add it to the top of your todo list.
    • Save your keystrokes: When writing longer instructive emails, consider putting them in a document or a blog post instead. That way you can share more broadly with others and don’t have to repeat yourself.
    • At the beginning of a day or a week, pick three things that you want to get done. As work and life now blends it is even more important to set boundaries and set yourself a bar for success to make sure you don’t end your day without guilt. If you don’t set that bar, your workday will never feel done and you will continuously carry the psychic weight of unfinished work with you.

    Scott does a much better job at telling stories around these concepts. Give it a shot, it’s only 30 minutes that will pay off later: Scaling Yourself – Scott Hanselman

  • Staying clear of Nazis and Sharks – Reflecting on my News Diet

    Staying clear of Nazis and Sharks – Reflecting on my News Diet

    I’ve always been an avid reader of some kind of news. I spent most of my pocket money on PC magazines. When the internet came along, I discovered slashdot.org and heise.de as good sources to keep abreast with tech news. Over the last 25 years, news has become much more available, abundant and seductive. Over time the barriers for news creators lowered. At the same time, growth hacking and click-baiting made it easier to get away with low quality content.

    Kara Swisher once told the story of John Hendricks. He is the founder of the Discovery Channel and in their early days needed to get onto cable networks. So he put episodes on air that drew people in with their sensational nature. His one-line summary was: “Nazis and sharks, that’s what got ratings up”. That was in the 80ies.

    Right now, we have a global pandemic, an economic downturn, social unrest and a chaotic presidential election going on. It’s Nazis and sharks all over again. And I feel fatigued. Recently re-reading an old piece on Wired “How I Got My Attention Back” gave me the last push to rethink my relationship with news:

    There is a qualitative and quantitative difference between a day that begins with a little exercise, a book, meditation, a good meal, a thoughtful walk, and the start of a day that begins with a smartphone in bed. […]

    Attention is a muscle. It must be exercised. Though, attention is duplicitous — it doesn’t feel like a muscle. And exercising it doesn’t result in an appreciably healthier looking body. But it does result in a sense of grounding, feeling rational, control of your emotions — a healthy mind. […] We deserve our attention.

    Craig Mod, “How I Got My Attention Back”, Wired Magazine

    Consume slower and be mindful

    In that regard, news is like food. We long ago reached the point where there is always more. We have to be more mindful of how we consume both food and news. [footnote]Back in the early 2000s I wrote a thesis on the topic of information overload and the internet. Little did I know what came ahead. [/footnote] Cookies, chips and ice cream are always tempting in the aisles of supermarkets. In the same way, there is always something new to read on social media, news sites or newsletters. If we give in to temptation and only consume what is most convenient we will inevitably exhaust ourselves. Ever experienced that empty feeling after watching YouTube-recommended clips for an evening? That’s what I’m talking about.

    I realize that being always up to date with the latest takes doesn’t improve my life. The same noise of Nazis and sharks that got John Hendricks onto cable networks is yanking me around. So I observed what works well for me and what doesn’t. Three basic principles emerged:

    1. Slow things down.
    2. Be cautious of news that is less than 24 hours old.[footnote]Especially the 24-hour rule is a powerful one. The German military has a rule that before submitting a formal complaint, you must have slept a night over it. It might seem trite, but it is quite meaningful. Most events that produce knee-jerk-like emotional outbursts look very different the next day. A good night of sleep is a great provider of perspective.[/footnote]
    3. Exercise a bias towards themes that are likely to be relevant a year from now.

    A hierarchy of news

    In the spirit of calming my emotional reflexes, a hierarchy of news sources crystalized. At the bottom is seductive but empty content. At the top we have high octane, rich items that will help me learn. The bottom is easier to access, the top takes effort. The art is balancing the diet with lots of the good stuff and dipping into the snack box every now and then. Here is what works for me:

    Social media – avoid

    I deleted my Facebook account cold turkey in 2017 and haven’t missed it. I install Instagram every few months only to delete it after a day of mindless browsing. I do like TikTok and it is probably the most fun right now. At the same time, it is the most addictive time-suck of them all. I do miss 2004 Flickr with its thriving community. I appreciate WhatsApp as a good tool to keep in touch with friends and family – I only wish it were not owned by Facebook. But in general, I try to limit my time on social media as much as possible.

    Twitter – enjoy in small doses

    I separate Twitter from the rest of social media. Twitter can be helpful when you spend the time and effort curating the people you follow. But Twitter’s quest of showing you more content to keep you engaged for longer often increases the noise.

    Besides, much of Twitter seems driven by the takes that people came up with over the last five minutes. Ultimately, I gave up on Twitter for the most part. [footnote]Techmeme does a good job of curating Twitter content related to recent tech news.[/footnote] Make no mistake, I do miss Twitter. I miss the constant stream of “new”. I miss the randomness, the funny, the smart takes. A lot of links and discussions are valuable. But there is also a lot of pettiness, virtue signaling and divisiveness that I just don’t want to deal with right now. So for the most part, I try to stay away from Twitter and consume it in small doses.

    News sites – consume mindfully

    The trifecta of my daily news site regimen takes me across Spiegel, New York Times and Techmeme.[footnote]Yes, they are biased, but so is all news. Someone once told me that the job of a news outlet is to confirm the beliefs of its audience. While it might sound cynical, it is a good check to keep in mind.[/footnote] I try to not spend too much time on news sites. I also noticed a long time ago an inverse correlation between my level of contentedness and the number of times I refresh these sites.

    To hold myself accountable, I installed Stayfocusd. It is a browser extension that limits time spent on specific websites. The time limits are not that important. What is more helpful is the red icon in the upper right of the browser window. It reminds me to be mindful and leave when I start browsing without intent. It shouldn’t take more than half an hour each day to get the news. If there are interesting long reads, I file them away into Instapaper.

    Newsletters and podcasts – subscribe often and unsubscribe ruthlessly

    My email and podcast inboxes are sacred territories. Once I notice that newsletters or episodes pile up I unsubscribe without hesitation. If I do miss them, I can always re-subscribe. The following newsletters have now managed to stay on my docket for quite some time:

    • Techmeme newsletter: A compilation of the last 24 hours of tech news. They also complement the news with tweet comments from different perspectives. That’s my ground-level view.
    • Ben Evans: A weekly selection of tech news, takes and interesting finds. That’s often the 10,000 to 20,000 foot view on the landscape and he connects dots nicely.
    • Software Lead Weekly: A weekly newsletter about engineering management and leadership. A typical edition contains links to 10-15 evergreen blog posts with commentary. Often those blog posts are a few years old and still hold up.

    The ideal is to consume each new edition within 24 hours.

    Blogs – curate and enjoy

    I still ♥ old-school personal websites or blogs – people with a passion for a topic writing without a schedule or word count target, what’s not to love. Some of the more professional ones like Kottke, Daring Fireball or Swiss Miss deliver a constant stream of goodness. At the same time, there are those gems where people post only every few months. That is OK. I like varied takes from people who have thought deeply and share their point of view because they care.

    Not every blog is a great one, but the great ones are a true delight. Social media has marginalized blogs. But there are still a lot of good ones out there. I keep track of more than a few dozen of them using Feedly.[footnote]I am still bitter about Google shutting down Google Reader, but Feedly fills that gap for me.[/footnote] Most of them post only a few times a month, so the load is manageable. I pay for Feedly, because I want them to continue to operate and thrive without having to resort to an advertising business model.

    Instapaper – file and read at mydiscretion

    While I’m a completionist, I’m fine with my Instapaper being an ever-growing pile of articles. I know that I will never read them all. But I also know that there is a lot of good, high-octane stuff – healthy and nourishing. It is removed from the recency rat race, pre-vetted by newsletters, blogs and other sources and not judged upon by any popularity counter. I have no idea what anybody else thinks about an article. They are all in chronological order by which I saved them. Articles often hang in Instapaper for a while before I read them. Some of them don’t stand the test of time and I quickly archive them. And that feels good and pure to me. I know that once I have an hour with an iPad on the couch, Instapaper offers something meaningful to read.

    Closing thoughts

    So, there you have it. That’s my news regimen:

    • Social media – avoid
    • Twitter – enjoy in small doses
    • News sites – consume mindfully
    • Newsletters and podcasts – subscribe often and unsubscribe ruthlessly
    • Blogs – curate and enjoy
    • Instapaper – file and read at my discretion

    This hierarchy is always evolving. I’m also always hoping for something that makes it easier. But over the years I have found that “easier” is often a flawed concept. The effort you put into curating your news sources pays off, in terms of being an informed citizen and in terms of maintaining mental wellbeing.

    There is undeniable value in learning about the world, its current state and how we can make progress. At the same time, there is value in maintaining one’s sanity. As with so many things in life, the art is to get the balance right. There are lots of different approaches that work for different people. The above works for me.

    Let me finish with the mantra from Farhad Manjoo[footnote]Riffing on Michael Pollan’s nutrition advice “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”[/footnote] that I found most helpful: Read news, not too quickly, avoid social.[footnote]My wife recommends “Notes on a Nervous Planet” by Matt Haig for more insight and humor on this topic.[/footnote]

    Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

  • Collaborative Fund: Obvious Things That Are Easy To Ignore

    Lots of wisdom in this post on the Collaborative Fund blog (which seems like an excellent collection of interesting posts).

    The post focuses on two core tenants:

    1. It is impossible to feel wealthy if your expectations grow faster than your income.

    2. Few things fuel denial and ignorance like luck, randomness, and change.

    Each is backed up by fun facts and anecdotes like this one about Stephen Hawking:

    In 2004 the New York Times interviewed Stephen Hawking, the late scientist whose incurable motor-neuron disease left him paralyzed and unable to talk since age 21.

    “Are you always this cheerful?” the Times asked.

    “My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21,” Hawking said. “Everything since then has been a bonus,” he replied.

    A useful financial skill, too.

    https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/obvious-things/

    The whole thing is well worth a read: Obvious Things That Are Easy To Ignore

    As always, the important question is: What does it mean for you and what will you change?

  • The dogs won’t eat it – Choosing OKRs well

    The concept of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is deceptively easy.

    • Objectives are ambitious, qualitative and time bound goals of a team. Each objective is typically supported by ~3-4 key results.
    • Key Results are measurable achievements that contribute to those goals. They are business outcomes and typically expressed in terms of adoption, engagement, cost, performance or quality.

    An OKR describes both what a team wants to achieve and how it is going to measure its achievement. “We will achieve $Objective as measured by $KeyResult1, $KeyResult2 and $KeyResult3.”

    At the same time, coming up with good OKRs is hard. One has to identify the few key metrics that really matter and to commit on outcomes (e.g. growth) rather than output (e.g. launching a new feature). That requires judgement, uncomfortable leaps of faith and a willingness to experiment.

    Jeffrey Zeldman tells a great anecdote in the context of Marketing that illustrates what happens if you choose your Key Results badly: The dogs won’t eat it.

  • Hard to discover tips for macOS

    These days I spend little time on macOS, but I’m still a sucker for tips on how to use it better. Tristan Hume collected quite a few of them:

    Inspired by a few different conversations with friends who’ve switched to macOS where I give them a whole bunch of tips and recommendations I’ve learned about over many years which are super important to how I use my computer, but often quite hard to find out about, I decided to write them all down:

    Hard to discover tips and apps for making macOS pleasant

    The list features one of my favorite macOS features: “You can drag the little file/folder icons at the top of many windows.” Might sound unimpressive, but it is one of those things that I dearly miss in Windows. Have a look:

  • Momentum from Day One – Getting Onboarding Right

    Momentum from Day One – Getting Onboarding Right

    Creating a good onboarding experience as a manager is tricky at the best of times. It’s even harder when you are forced to work from home against the backdrop of a global health crisis. It is harder to recognize the challenges of new hires and it’s harder for them to ramp up and integrate in the absence of ambient hallway chatter.

    At the same time, it is possible and achievable. Looking back at my own onboarding journeys, I’ve learned a lot from the good, the bad and the ugly. Most learnings are transferable into distributed settings.

    Let’s look at the bad ones first. Once, my new boss told me in our first meeting that he’s moving teams – I just relocated to the other side of the globe to work with him. That was also the job where I did not have a computer or a phone for the first week – particularly funny as I worked for a telco and had to read printed PowerPoint decks for the first week. Another time, I was put into “stealth mode” … without ever re-emerging. Or that time when I did not have a project to work on for the first two months – it was called “being on the beach” and it drove me up the walls.

    But there were also the great experiences. When my new boss walked me through everything by himself – not just giving me the opportunity to ask questions, but guiding me through what he considered important. Or when I arrived at a desk with a brand-new machine including access to all relevant systems. Or the onboarding buddy, who took it as a matter of personal pride to make sure that I had a great start.

    First impressions matter. Starting on the right foot and getting momentum is a great confidence booster for every new starter. At the same time, without guidance, new hires have to work twice as hard to learn what they need to be productive. When working from home, it takes a more deliberate effort to give new hires the necessary experiences and exposure for a solid start. Always remember that it is a bigger deal for them than it is for you. They will remember it, one way or another. Your job is to make sure those will be good memories.

    Below are a few ideas that I collected over the years.

    Get the basics right without fail

    I once attended a conversation with Ben Roberts-Smith, a recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest award in the Australian Army. He shared his view on what separated elite units from other teams: They get the basics right – 100% of the time, without fail, no excuses.

    Being exceptional is not about complex techniques. It is all about making sure that basic procedures were trained over and over so that everybody could rely on them.[footnote]Same with professional athletes. They are able to execute over and over and over throughout each season.[/footnote]

    For onboarding, the basics are as follows:

    1. A welcome mail to your new hire before they start. Give them the opportunity to ask questions, help with logistics (when to be where, what to wear,[footnote]Dress code can be quite anxiety inducing and nobody wants to take a gamble for their first day in the office[/footnote] …) and effectively transition them from the recruiting to the onboarding stage.
    2. Basic equipment is ready before day one. Desk, computer, displays, chair, logins and everything else that is necessary for them to get started. In work-from-home settings, ship the equipment well ahead of time. Also let them know if they have a company allowance to spend on a home office setup. Every person who starts a new job is excited to get going. Make sure they can.
    3. A team member welcomes the new starter. Traditionally that would have been in the lobby. These days it’s a phone or video call first thing in the morning. Welcome them to the team, guide them through their initial steps and answer first questions. This is just an intro. Go easy on them and don’t overwhelm them just yet.
    4. Welcome mail to the team. Include a photo[footnote]If the new starter is fine with it.[/footnote] and a short blurb that covers their background, something light-hearted and what they will be working on.

    That’s it: welcome email to the new hire, equipment ready, greeter at the door and a welcome email to the team. For every new starter, every time, on their first day, with a smile.

    Invest in a starter document

    Standard checklists for the first day, week and month are a good starting point. Take it to the next level by creating a custom starter document for each candidate. The purpose is to help them hit the ground running. It also signals that you put thought into that person’s experience. Topics that the starter document covers are:

    1. What success looks like: Write down your expectations for the first 30 days. Outline what you expect the new starter to be able to do, have completed or responsibilities they have taken over. Don’t gloss over it, but put thought into it and write it down. In remote settings skew those goals more towards building relationships. Google’s study about successful teams revealed that a key driver of success is psychological safety. Team members should feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of others. You can only get there if you know the people and the culture of the place. That’s more difficult in distributed settings. Set checkpoints around building relationships, getting to know people and learning how the organization works.
    2. People to engage with: A list of people to have conversations with and suggested topics to talk about. Not everybody is a social butterfly and born networker. That’s why it’s important to have suggested topics to talk about. It can make the difference between an awkward chat and the start of a great collaboration.
    3. Critical documents to familiarize with: These can be wikis, strategy memos, notes from the last code review, etc. Any artifacts that show what is important for the team and how the team operates.
    4. Mentoring: To set the new team member up for long-term success, encourage establishing a relationship with somebody more senior outside of the team. While the best mentoring relationships evolve organically, it helps to kick-start the process and identify a potential mentor. Ideally, they are 2-3 years ahead of them. If the gap gets bigger, most people develop a rose-colored nostalgia filter and become less helpful (“We were hungry, broke, and miserable. And we liked it fine that way!”).
    5. Core meetings: What are the regular meetings that this person should attend. Those meetings are a good opportunity to experience team culture, get context and get exposure to other team members. Be mindful of invites in work-from-home arrangements. In the absence of ambient hallway chat, a new hire will never find out about a meeting if you don’t explicitly let them know.

    A starter document takes time to compile. It is an investment and that pays dividends in terms of getting your new team member started on the right foot and building meaningful relationships right from the start.

    Assign a starter project

    A big driver of job satisfaction in the initial few weeks is the first project that a new hire works on. Set them up for success. It should provide the right mix of challenge, learning, contribution and opportunity to shine. Having a starter project can be the difference between second guessing your job decision and creating a feeling of belonging and emotional safety.

    It should be the exception that you don’t have a starter project. In those rare cases, explain that you are still identifying a project and that you want to set them up for success rather than keeping them busy. For the first few days that can be OK. But after a week, there should be a project that they can dig into.

    Let them own the onboarding document

    The onboarding document is a team-specific collection of “all the things I wish I had known when I started here”. Below are some ideas for inspiration:

    1. Checklists for the first few days
    2. Link to professional development framework, career paths, expectations for each level, …
    3. Highlight projects: artifacts from the best projects of the last 2-3 years.
    4. Common data resources: how to access tools, industry data, telemetry, repos, …
    5. Helpful links in the company intranet. The lunch menu always makes this list.
    6. Link to the company org chart.
    7. Printer instructions and how to fix common problems with your machine and how to contact the help desk.
    8. Most commonly used acronyms.
    9. How to get to the office, where to register the car for parking, …
    10. Company discounts: most companies have deals with local businesses. Either list them here or link to them.

    The onboarding document should cover all those questions that one might be embarrassed to ask, but that everyone has.[footnote]Basecamp has published their Employee Handbook, which is a good source for inspiration. Clef has done the same. [/footnote]

    Starting an onboarding document is always hard. Start small and have the team collectively create a first draft, the 80% version. Then ask each new starter to be the custodian of the onboarding document for the first 30 days. Let them fix links that went out of date, add the stuff they found useful and clean up the structure when things got out of hand. Ask them to present their changes at a team meeting. That way, everyone benefits from their changes. Over time, that document will get better and better.

    Check-in often

    Throughout onboarding, stay in touch with your new team member. Now that we are all working remotely, this is critical. They haven’t built their network yet and might feel lost. Include them as much as possible to avoid unpleasant surprises.

    Be available and respond in a timely manner. In addition, put formal check-ins into the calendar after the first week, the first month, the first quarter and the first half year. Schedule them well in advance, listen carefully and answer their questions.

    I recommend assuming some of the responsibility for new hires to hit their 30-day goals. It’s much harder for them in remote settings, especially if the company is not a traditional distributed company. Pay attention and do your part (e.g. inviting them into meetings, making sure they get exposure, warming up contacts, …). Otherwise your new team members will have to work that much harder.

    Last, but not least, encourage your new team member to come up with things that should be fixed at the 30-day check-in. After a while all of us develop blind spots with the status quo. Having fresh eyes to point out things that are broken is an opportunity to reverse-engineer a better onboarding process.

    The 180-day check in might seem odd, since the new team member no longer feels “new” and is fully immersed in the team. Reflecting on the first few days with a bit of distance means that people are no longer starry-eyed and bushy-tailed. I had quite a few people tell me “When I started, I thought it was my fault that [X] didn’t work, but now I know that this part is broken and needs to be fixed.” [X] might be a system, a process or the attitude of a fellow teammate, who forgot how challenging the first few days on a team are.

    Last words

    So, there you have it:

    1. Get the basics right without fail
    2. Invest in a starter document
    3. Assign a starter project
    4. Let them own the onboarding document
    5. Check in often

    First impressions matter and a good onboarding experience makes the difference between a highly engaged, confident and productive team member and an unnerved employee that feels disconnected. They need to work twice as hard to recover from a failed start. While the bar is raised in the middle of a global health crisis, a good onboarding experience is still achievable. Companies like Automattic and Basecamp who have been working with distributed teams by default show the way.

    Always remember that this is a much bigger deal for them than it is for you. They will remember it for a long time.

    Photo by Braden Collum on Unsplash

  • Nike ad: You Can’t Stop Us

    We are finally watching The Last Dance. In the nineties, while it was impressive to watch Michael Jordan from Germany and New Zealand, it must have been amazing being immersed in the frenzy up close in the US.

    Nike’s brand machinery was a big part. I was surprised to learn that it only kicked into gear with Michael Jordan. Good to see that they still got it:

  • The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

    What seemed like a goofy post turned out informative. I learned a lot about principles of interface design, in particular about differentiating and organizing interfaces.

    What could cause 400 WWII pilots to raise the landing gear on their B-17 bomber just before touchdown? Catastrophic pilot error, or something more fundamental?

    It was the psychologist Alphonsis Chapanis who first suggested that the high rate of crash landings might be the fault of poor interface design. The adjacent landing gear and flap control knobs were identically shaped. The pilots never stood a chance.

    His temporary solution was to glue differently shaped strips of rubber to each switch, enabling blind operation by touch alone. This gave rise to the idea of shape coding and a system of differentiation still being followed in aircraft cockpits today.

    The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

  • The Curse of Knowledge

    Matthias Ott with a great story that starts with him trying to guess songs that his kid claps (spoiler: it’s a losing proposition).

    When you have an advance in knowledge over someone else, it can be difficult to recognize this gap and act accordingly. This phenomenon – that we falsely assume that others have the background to understand – is called the curse of knowledge.

    The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that can be observed whenever people want to convey information. The readers of your article, the students in your class, the participants of your workshop, the listeners of your podcast, the people at your next meetup, the clients in your conference call, the users of your interface – they all don’t know what you know and are therefore missing context. Always. And while you are confidently talking and explaining like a pro, people actually don’t understand you as well as you would hope.

    The Curse of Knowledge · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

    Even if you know your audience intimately, each conversation should start with setting context. This can take many forms, but it is necessary to establish a foundation from which you make your point. If you don’t start from a shared understanding everything else will be an unnecessarily hard attempt to be understood.

  • Software is eating conferences – Microsoft Build and the digital transformation of conferences

    Software is eating conferences – Microsoft Build and the digital transformation of conferences

    May is traditionally the month where the big tech companies host their developer conferences. Google, Facebook and Microsoft all have their gatherings with Apple quickly following in June. When COVID hit, many in the tech scene wondered what would happen to conferences. The traditional format brought thousands of people together in one space to mingle and exchange ideas in close proximity. That no longer works in a COVID world.

    All the big tech companies responded differently. Facebook and Google decided to wait this year out and canceled F8 and I/O respectively. Microsoft and Apple decided to go ahead and take Build and WWDC online this year.

    Impressions from Microsoft’s Build

    Microsoft was the first to come out of the gate last week. Their Build conference heavily leans towards developers. It’s typically held in Seattle with around 7,000 attendees, big rooms, expo floor and lots of space for the community to meet. Within the last eight weeks, this huge event was re-imagined for the virtual space. And it has been an innovative interpretation of an all-online conference: a 48-hour non-stop event with presenters from all four corners of the world. Yes, here and there minor seams were showing, but Microsoft was pushing the envelope and for a 1.0 this was very stable.

    You could choose to either follow the main events in a streaming player or switch to one of the smaller sessions that were held in Microsoft Teams. Those smaller sessions had the benefit of being more interactive with polls and Q&A with the audience. Prior to the conference, attendees could compile their schedule and were able to navigate the entire conference with little effort from one event to the next. That schedule also made it easy to re-visit sessions after the show. That was especially relevant for those sessions that were held at 2am, which most people don’t want to follow live.

    No question, it is different than an in-person event – you miss the applause and excitement of the audience when their particular announcement is made or meeting like-minded people in the hallway. But the format also offered an opportunity to show a more relatable side. Presenters in their own home, kids popping up in the background, pets becoming part of the conversation. I loved the excitement especially from some of the more junior program managers that were presenting out of their bedrooms. It all felt authentic and different from the highly polished on-stage performance of past conferences.

    The attendance numbers were impressive: 230,000 registered conference visitors (30 times more than in previous years), 65% from outside of the US (vs. 20% in previous years) and 500,000 views for some of the sessions such as the Imagine Cup final judgment. All of that was pulled off within eight weeks. By Microsoft’s own statement they accelerated two years worth of evolution within eight weeks. It felt like a bigger leap as it’s hard to imagine online attendance becoming a first-class experience by 2022. It sure did feel like one in 2020.

    The road ahead – a bigger tent is a better tent

    One cannot help, but wonder what that means for conferences going forward. It feels reminiscent of Clay Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation playbook. At first innovation happens in the low-end with good enough products, serving an audience that cannot or does not want to afford the traditional premium products. Over time, innovation and technological progress improves the experience of those low-end products and outpaces customer needs. In other words, the low-end products become viable or even superior substitutes for the premium product for an increasing number of people. It has happened in many industries from communication, displays, electronics, photography, … you name it. For a while we had an overabundance of companies digitally disrupting everything from dry cleaning to juice production, not everything successful or necessary.

    One of the areas that seems to have been exempt from digital disruption was the conference sector. Even big flagship tech conferences continued to be held in a fairly traditional format. Presenter screens became bigger and events were streamed online, but the main event has largely remained a physical one. That is no longer possible. And while traditional conference visitors are pointing out that a virtual conference is no substitute for meeting in person, virtual events are leveling the playing field and make it possible for whole new audiences to attend.

    The barriers of participation have substantially been lowered, in terms of money (conference tickets, hotel, airfare and associated costs), time (just think about the time spent on airports, planes and taxis) and overall hassle (organize trip, time away from families, …). Interacting with fellow attendees from Nairobi, Melbourne and Karlsruhe showed how much more inclusive conferences can become when reimagined online. The Microsoft Build numbers seem to confirm that it paid off for them as well. If this was the work of eight weeks of scrambling, think about where we will be in a year, let alone five or ten.

    As always with disruptive innovation, it might look like a toy for now. But if you squint you can recognize a path forward that will create a superior experience for a meaningful part of the conference ecosystem.

    Into the unknown – let the experiments begin

    It was interesting to see Microsoft experimenting with different formats: the newsroom with anchors, pre-recorded demos from people’s homes, live-sessions with audience interaction and Q&A. It all felt like the birth of something new and it was definitely appealing to see them push boundaries and try out new things. To get a feel, just have a look at Scott Hanselman’s keynote, which was fun, entertaining and informative – 45 minutes well spent. Taking a step back, it only feels natural for Microsoft that they seamlessly transitioned out of their 48 hours of non-stop programming into the newly launched LearnTV. LearnTV is a traditional broadcasting format where they stitch together existing live and pre-recorded content, combining previous conference presentations with Twitch sessions, Channel 9 interviews and whatever else is there. The boundaries between conference and day-to-day broadcasting are starting to blur.

    While this is certainly true for the flagship tech conferences, the jury is still out there about what will happen to the major trade shows and smaller independent tech conferences. The former are indeed heavily reliant on in-person interactions which are still hard to replicate online. Given the level of investment in standing up such shows and the newly associated risks, only time will tell how that space is going to evolve.

    Independent conferences have probably been hit hardest given the massive disruption in their economics. We’ve already seen O’Reilly shutting down their conference business – not just putting it on hold, but shutting it down indefinitely. Those kinds of conferences have always been a labor of love that barely broke even, if at all. In an all-virtual setting they are increasingly competing with online learning providers such as the Udemys and Masterclasses of this world.

    A crisis is a terrible thing to waste – Paul Romer

    The conference sector and all its adjacent ecosystems have been hit hard by COVID. While we see digital transformation being accelerated in most sectors, conferences let you watch that digital disruption in real time even more clearly – both the bad and the good. As with every crisis, this one is no exception in that it offers opportunities. Therefore it is not surprising to see A16Z, the high priests of Software eating the world, investing in this space. With Run the World, Bevy and Hopin we have an emerging category of startups that are trying to fill this gap in the world and redefine what conferences will look like in the future.

    More than ever, we are living in remarkable times.

    Photo by Samuel Pereira on Unsplash