On getting scaled out of the picture

One of the weird things about having a growing company is that--as a founder--you may start to feel a bit disconnected from the guts of day-to-day operations.

For example, I'm no longer a curator of any of Rosenfeld Media's communities or conferences. I'm involved, but I'm not enough of a subject matter expert in areas like #designops, #civicdesign, or #userresearch to truly know how to curate in those areas.

Fortunately, I've been able to bring on curators who DO know these areas. And I get to poke my head in from time to time and see their amazing work.

One such example is the curation team that's putting together Design at Scale 2021: Lada Gorlenko, Uday Gajendar, and Kit Unger. I just had a look at the program (hadn't in a spell), and it made my heart sing. The team took a big picture concept--"design at scale," a challenge that animated our prior Enterprise UX and Enterprise Experience conferences--and broke it into three major themes. These themes are each really a "mini-conference," if you have a look, you'll see that they still fit together cohesively: from craft to tools to people. Put another way, the narrative arc is clear across all three days (as well as within each day):

• Day 1: Ensuring Craft on a Massive Scale with Cornelius Rachieru, Meaghan Waters, Fotina Koutropoulos, Prerna Makanawala, Malini Rao, Sheri Byrne-Haber, and Cennydd Bowles.
• Day 2: The Tools for Success in Enterprise Design with Niko Laitinen, Davis Neable, Guy Segal, Nora Tejeda Hernández, Giovanna Alonso, Joe Meersman, Surya Vanka, and Wendy Johansson.
• Day 3: Keeping People at the Center of an Expanding Enterprise with Matt Stone, Lona Moore, Peter Merholz, Edward Cupps, Tutti Taygerly, Yunyan Yang, Anna Le, Jennifer Kim, and Sha Hwang.

The speakers have been preparing for a couple months now, with help from the curation team and crack speaker coach Nathan Gold. And now we have Nelly Wollenberg on board, working with Karen Corbett, to make sure the content and experience come together seamlessly. Oh, and we're offering attendee cohorts--led by Melissa Burnett--on a first-come first-serve basis.

And my role? Well, as I said, I've had precious little to do with all of this. I just sit here looking pretty. But it's all come out so well, so I'm more than happy to have been kicked upstairs.

Now that I look at it more closely, I wish I was speaking at Design at Scale. Maybe I'm no longer a subject matter expert, but I did co-author a book on #InformationArchitecture for large-scale websites and, for years, made my living teaching workshops on #enterpriseIA! So the "why" of the conference--for people "struggling with too much: too much content, politics, and complexity, and too many features, use cases, decision-makers, and audiences"--really is up my alley. Nice to see my Rosenfeld Media career intersect with the IA work I used to do back in the day. Anyway, I hope it speaks to you; we'd love to have you be a part of Design at Scale 2021.