Finnish Azure Tour 2021 deconstructed

In November 2021, we – Jouni Heikniemi, Sakari Nahi, and Jussi Roine – toured four Finnish cities delivering a one-day free Azure seminar in each of them. It was a blast, and it was a success by any measure. The questions on how to run similar events have also been numerous, warranting a later write-up. We now return to how the tour was born, the feedback we got – and the learnings we’ve come up with.

First off, we want to express our gratitude to the awesome audiences in Oulu, Kuopio, Tampere, and Turku. Having you there, coolly physically present between the waves of the pandemic, was great. For us, the overall presentation grade of 4.73 out of 5 was an amazing reward for the week, and we are truly honored that you all found us so worthy of your time. While this post is (also) certainly a celebration of the tour we organized, that success would never have materialized without the awesome audience - you have our gratitude.

Also, we want to extend once more our thanks to our sponsors Microsoft and Arrow ECS, without which the tour with all its free meals and content would never have materialized. The sponsors funded the tour, allowing the speakers to travel for free and the attendees to join without additional cost, with breakfast, lunch and coffee provided. The speakers gained no financial benefit from the tour apart from a handful of burgers (urrp!). In particular, thanks to Roope Sepp?l? and Lukas Lundin from Microsoft Finland, without whose tireless assistance this would never have happened.

For full transparency, here's our scoring on a scale of 1 to 5, city-by-city.

Quotes within this article are extracts from the tour feedback, freely translated by us.

Planning for three guys in four cities in four days

The idea had been in the works for a while. Jussi Roine and Jouni Heikniemi toured the same cities in early 2018 with an Azure primer agenda. While that effort was successful by all practical measures, we were yearning for more. The plans for retour (pardon the pun) were cooking for a while, obviously stalled by the pandemic.

At the crucial planning lunch in late summer 2021, we knew the past had taught us a couple of things. For one, we had learned that the effort was a bit too much for two speakers. This tour was not going to be a teaching proposition. Nor was it going to be a sales pitch, not a repetition of Ignite/Build talks on what’s new in the Microsoft cloud.

Nay, the bar was set higher. Given COVID and everything, people were used to learning online. If we wanted people to come – perhaps at the risk of their own health – we needed to offer something that was unique in a live event. What we wanted to do is to inspire, overwhelm and empower. That requires real-world experience, long perspective, interaction… and energy.

“Inspiring guys on stage. My enthusiasm for building Azure solutions just went up a big notch.”

This is what led us to including Sakari as a speaker from the get-go this time. We knew that Ballmer-caliber stage rage for four days takes (at least) three people, and an epically energetic Azure squirrel like him could never hurt. The three-person approach gave us more time to recharge between our talks, and it gave each of us less scope to focus on.

Agenda-building for an inspirational day

Developers or IT admins? Level 100 overviews or level 400 deep dives? Dazzling demos or sizzling slide decks? These are the questions many event organizers ponder.

We decided to provide an overview of all the most critical and common parts of Azure, at an abstraction level that teaches nobody any practical skills, but that gives everyone a lot of action points to follow up on. We explicitly stated this up-front when kicking the day off: the expectation was that everyone was going to leave with a lot of ideas and a general understanding of the direction things are going in.

”Insanely fast-paced, I both stayed awake and kept up with the flow. Not boring for a second.”

Presentation speed was essential. We knew that it was impossible to try keep a roomful of attendees with diverse backgrounds, skill levels and interests in the loop for a tour of all of Azure. But we also knew that if we kept up the pace, the next interesting thing would never be too far from now, and nobody would fall asleep.

The diversity of the audience also dictated the presentation depth. Going deep was a never an option, as lightning-fast talks at super-technical level are always poorly received unless you have a very niche audience. Being superficial at the level of sales presentations wouldn’t work either, as such presentations often leave deeply technical audiences cold. The missing ingredient often is the real-world experience and advice gained from actual implementation projects, so we wanted to infuse a heavy dose of that.

”I’m just getting to know Azure, and the presentations were immensely useful. I feel that my choice of focusing my career on Azure was the right one.”

Obviously, we never covered everything. We could’ve had a lot to say about DevOps, IoT, state of IaaS, governance, and so on. The idea was to pick topics that people often seem to face whenever they start with Azure – whether it’s their real first start, or if they’re starting something bigger, driving up the organization’s usage of the cloud.

“Excellent overview of Azure. As an IT Pro, I now understand the developer mindset a bit better.”

Interactivity at breakneck speed

This was always a community event. We specifically said we wouldn’t evangelize, but rather offered brutal honesty - and expected the audience to do the same: interrupt us when they doubted us, ask when they were unsure of our points. And they did.

Our whirlwind cadence didn’t leave that much room for real interactivity – more than a handful of questions per presentations always forced us to condense the talks. That said, even that quick interaction was positively received, and it spilled over into the breaks and even some social media exchanges. The exception was Sakari’s much-loved PaaS overview talk which was a whiteboard-style exercise with lots of audience input all the way. We believe that even if the interactivity was pretty time-constrained, it still served an important purpose.

“I don’t think a single question went unanswered despite the blistering pace. The speakers followed up during breaks if necessary.”

Of all the improvement suggestions we got, the one that stood out most was the ask for an evening party. First, attendees would’ve appreciated some time to let the talks sink in, and then have further chats with each other and the speakers. Second, the COVID break has obviously generated a need for physical encounters. We had no resources to cater to these needs now but will remember the request for the next planning round.

“A workshop and an evening party would have been great. Also, everybody in the audience introducing themselves in the morning would have been interesting.”

The logistics of a tour

We travelled together, and that’s key. For most of the trip we sat in trains, cooped up together in a relatively COVID-safe cabin, going from city to city. This was different from 2018 when we flew back home between each city.

While leaving the family (and work) for four days was a complex thing to do, it’s also fair to say that the tour was better because we did. The time we spent together allowed us deep reflection into the past day and the next one, some egoistic toasting after an outrageously positive piece of feedback, and a chance to develop the presentations into a cohesive whole where each part would support the previous one. Each morning we kicked off with a better grasp of what we were doing, and that showed.

We believe that this concept required the speakers to spend a lot of time together. Even though our presentations were prepared quite individually (a necessity given our grueling schedules), the time spent together set the tone for the entire event. We all were more confident in passing the baton to each other, more judicious in our use of time, more prepared for questions at the edge of our knowledge. Even though the three of us share quite a bit of history over the previous years, we’d attribute at least half of the smoothness to the fact that we simply lived the tour full-time for those four days.

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Final words and future promises

The feedback was staggeringly positive. Three key factors seem to have sealed the deal: smooth and high-energy delivery, authentic real-world experience, and interactivity. We don’t think it was the facts that made the difference: the same ones have been said before. The stories we told were valuable but not unique.

Ultimately, we believe the most important ingredient was the way the stories and facts were entwined into a story of Azure-based projects and companies: a realistic, experience-backed vision of what could be. Several attendees said they found the day energizing because they saw how fun and enlightening Azure projects can be, and saw brief glimpses of an overall vision - not just one we had, but one they could implement.

“I liked that the presentations weren’t too detailed, but rather introductory with lots of good ideas and thoughts left hanging for later self-learning.”

We are committed to keeping the concept alive, though the actual possibility of another tour is obviously dependent on getting the sponsorship stuff done right. We specifically encouraged the attendees to send us feedback, as we believed that this feedback would make future events more likely to happen – both by us and others, both from the speaker and the sponsor perspective. This article summarizes our findings and hopefully supports our conclusions.

During the tour we vehemently denied the existence of any plans for future events, which we honestly didn't have. But granted, it was hard to not think about it. Just as we (only Jouni and Jussi at that point) were arriving in hometown Helsinki, we couldn’t resist talking about schedules. Spring 2023 bubbled off our lips just as we stepped off the train into the chilly winter weather.

So far, no plans and nothing done about it, but a bunch of good memories and a barrel of energy slowly refilling for another round of explosive ignition. Thank you everyone!