Speaking at the conference is a great way to establish “Thought Leadership” in your organization as well as build your personal brand and reputation. It can be a great way to market your products to engineers as well as showcase your company as a great place to work helping with recruiting.

Yet there are challenges with speaking too. Speaking can be expensive, especially if you factor in preparation and travel time, Engineers who have the wisdom to share also may be afraid of speaking publicly, finally scouting relevant conferences and getting acceptance may be challenging.

In this Article, I wanted to share some tips about addressing some of those issues.

Encouraging Engineers
In my experience, while many Engineers initially fear public speaking, most end up loving it after having done a few talks as it gets a fantastic motivation boost and is a great way to meet like-minded people. It is intimidating to speak at a large conference, especially if English is not your native language so it is often a good idea to start small – create opportunities in your company to speak in front of your colleagues, perhaps “Lunch and Learn” sessions – speaking in front of a small group of colleagues is a lot less intimidating. Encourage Engineers to speak at local events, in their own language, and provide them some swag to give out at those events, so their talk is appreciated even more. Many Engineers love to attend conferences and having a talk as a condition to attend more conferences can also be motivating. For example, you may have a policy to pay for one international conference a year for educational purposes but allow two more with qualifying talks. Having a database of slides and recorded talks can be very helpful too, as doing a version of a proven talk can be easier than needing to write one from scratch, especially for junior Engineers.

Dedicated Speakers
Many Tech companies employ Developer Evangelists or other roles who have to speak at events as a major part of the job. While those can be effective, especially for larger organizations I think relying only on them would be a mistake. Having Engineers speak allows them to better understand your product users and customers as well as keep a pulse on the industry. It also allows your users and customers direct access to deeper expertise those speakers bring, this is especially valuable beyond prepared presentation content – Q&A session as well as “hallway track” – various informal discussions taking place at the conference.

Reducing Preparation Costs
As someone who has done hundreds of talks, I can write presentations rather quickly, especially if it is high-level presentation, not require some research, benchmark, or demos. It is uncommon though for speakers to spend 40 hours or more preparing for their first talk, which is expensive. How do you improve it? First, do not make the mistake of delivering a single talk only once. Create a great talk, or a few of them, and take them on the tour. Customize the title and a few slides to be more relevant for the conference audience. Remember while you may be delivering this talk for the 10th time, it is very unlikely there is a large overlap in the audience, and even if it is, so what? It is even better if you can share talk content among the speakers – both as the full slide deck as well as source material to be able to pick relevant slides, demos, and snippets. Some engineers may be wary of “stealing” someone else content – to address it you should explain you’re all part of the same team and the talk materials are no different from the source code you write – everyone in the company can build on it.

When writing slides from scratch you can rely on modern AI tools, like ChatGPT to assist with ideas of the topics to cover, generate images, slide layouts, and even presentation flow. This industry is developing very rapidly these days with new tools and features released every month.

Ensuring Quality
When you think about Talk Quality it is usually about Content, Slides, and Delivery. Internal review of the slides and the opportunity to deliver a talk internally or at a smaller public event before a big conference is a great practice. It is also great to have someone with design skills to help engineers make their slides look good, assist with illustrations as well, and check the language, especially for non-native speakers. You also want to ensure you have a high-quality slide deck to use as well as a database of consistent imagery to use.

Encouraging Community
Open Source projects tend to have community members who would love to talk about it. This is fantastic as it can dramatically broaden the reach and third-party speakers are considered more unbiased. It also can be very cost-effective. While you may well see some third-party talks even if you do nothing you can dramatically increase participation if you have some program of support and encouragement. Depending on your budget you may provide some Swag to wear and to give away during talks, provide a stipend and/or cover the travel to the conference, provide expert access to review their talks, or do test runs. You can even give them access to the same Talk database your staff has access to so they can create better talks faster.

Let’s now talk about some tools/techniques and practices you can use which can be particularly helpful.

Talks Database
I mentioned “Talks Database” several times through this article, let’s now describe it in the more details. Talks database is the database of talks – editable slide sources and if available talk recording for talks delivered by company staff and possibly community members. It should be searchable database so it is easy to find content about particular topic. The biggest challenge with such database is not setting it up but having a discipline to upload the content in such database upon delivery.

Events Database
The “Talks Database” can work very well together with the “Events database”, where you collect Events that are relevant to your organization, and record presentation deliveries and feedback – if you’re considering submitting to some event it is fantastic to know if someone from your organization or community spoke there before, what their experience has been, what expect from the audience, etc.

Speaker Database
Especially for larger organizations it is great to maintain the “Speaker database” – their location, languages spoken, topics they would be interested in covering, etc. This way you can match speakers and conferences for the best outcome.

Matchmaking and Submission Service
While you may have some success with Engineers scouting relevant conferences and submitting talks to them, it tends to miss a lot of opportunities. Engineers, contrary to their belief, may well be unaware of many cool conferences (I tell this from my experience), and they also may not be good at following submission process, and meeting all deadlines and requirements which can reduce the chance of acceptance and negatively affect motivation. It is great if you have someone who provides the logistical support to engineers – for larger organizations this may be someone at the internal Community or Marketing team, for smaller organizations you can utilize external contractors, such as the team at Underdog Consultants.

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