Last Friday(30 September 2022) I attended VoxxedDays, looking back and comparing my experience at previous VoxxedDays (2019) it seems the apparent quality has increased but at the end of the day although I was impressed I felt having learnt less, perhaps I know more now so there is less room for new knowledge.
The best presentations are those from people who have struggled with a problem, documented their attempts and failures until they finally succeeded(this might be optional) and then spent time to put together a presentation of their journey, a lesson for the road untraveled by the rest.
Having experiences worth sharing is rare so it is a high bar to meet. The need for presentations is greater than what objectively is able to be produced. Also rarely anyone documents the steps and the failures towards the solution. And even if someone has documented them it is not trivial to create a well put together presentation.
Some times the above process can be hacked, you might find a public story of a person or team that you can use instead of a personal story. If the public figure is important but somewhat unknown this might increase engagement and impact. This was the case in the keynote where the backdrop of the presentation was the story of an agricultural scientist George Washington Carver and this attempts to create products from peanuts(important for the time as they where wasted and people where starving). It got the point across, although it was mention in the presentation that he invented peanut butter it seems it is not corrected.
Takeaways from the keynote
To innovate you have to have a environment of psychological safety so that failure is not punished, and developers are free to experiment. Be careful of deadlines killing slots reserved for R&D, better to book a full sprint with the whole team instead of individual people taking time slices within a sprint. Also an important topic is that of of double wins(or win-win), when you trying to play/experiment or solve something it is common that you also produce a useful result in an other area(win x2). Usually the second win is a welcome surprise, a by-product of experimentation or a product of innovation, and this is something that you can not achieve by actively trying, it can only come as a by-product of giving talented people time/resources and let them tackle problems they think are important or fun.
An other things I learned as the the concept of The Wizard of Oz MVP. You create a product that has a working front-end but the back-end that is the most complex part can be unfinished and use existing manual processes. That is until you prove that MVP is working and its worth the effort to build the final product.
Don’t look behind the curtain!
No good book recommendation unfortunately from this conference. Look forward for the next learning experience!