My first #TuringFest

A last minute decision

Earlier this week I attended #turingfest conference for a day. This was a last minute decision largely as I'd forgotten all about it due to all the other pressures of life and work, of late. I was in two minds given the cost of a ticket, and my currently being between roles. Was this a good use of funds right now? I've been to plenty conferences over the years...I'm too busy with family stuff at the moment were all thoughts buzzing around my head.

I tried to book and joined a waiting list. I wasn't expecting to be able to attend at this late stage, but following a tweet from me stating nothing other than I was waiting to see whether I could attend, I got a response advising a ticket was available. Hurrah!

My motivation to go along was driven by my desire for some renewed inspiration, new ideas and thinking, and to do a bit of networking.

Following registration, and a quick dose of caffeine, I was ready to absorb.

Social is scary, but...

The day got off to a great start with a highly thought-provoking keynote "The technology of Better Humans" from the inventor of the hashtag, Chris Messina. Chris brilliantly took us through the social tech evolution, bring us to the situation we are all seeing now and reminding us of the implications, many unforeseen but not all. There is some regret from the social giants, but there has also been a level of "exploiting vulnerability in human psychology". As he rightly pointed out there is a need for greater levels of responsibility, regulation and the need to "address the underlying issues". Much to contemplate there!

Doing product well

I was keen to cover a broad spectrum of topics from leadership, teams and culture through to engineering, scaling and product. Gabrielle Bufrem from Pivotal delivered a great talk on all things product management. Gabrielle stepped through a neat process for how to select features to build and the need for customer and business impact assessment, as well as consideration of the opportunity cost. Ultimately using these considerations and real customer validation to saying no to "features that suck". Bravo.

?We're human after all!

I then shifted from product to people with a super and highly topical session from Dr Emily Anhalt, the Chief Clinical Officer from Beam, looking at mental health and the emotional fitness of leaders. A hugely important topic and one that many of us are now paying greater attention to, and rightly so. I've had my own challenges this year and so this one really resonated with me. The session covered the key characteristics of good organisational cultures, and introduced the idea of having emotional fitness surveys. An interesting idea, I feel. We were also reminded of the importance of "self-care", which for many of us can and does slide as we battle through from day-to-day, but it really shouldn't. We owe it to ourselves to treat ourselves well, and in a period of downtime I have been doing just that.

I was already in reflection mode and ready for lunch, when on to the main Pentland suite came the highly energetic Kirsty Hulse delivering a very memorable talk on "Avoiding Feedback Failure". Giving and receiving feedback has always been hard, especially if it's on the more negative side. I've definitely had my fair share of learning on that front! Kirsty reminded us why giving constructive feedback is important and backed all this up with numerous pieces of data, research and psychology. During the session she presented the idea of the Idiosyncratic Rating Effect and advised that "61% of my rating on you is about me". Well that blew me away! I'm definitely going to be following-up on the supporting references when the slides become available...

Sense & Respond

After a hearty lunch and a unexpected catch-up with an old friend from uni, it was on to the afternoon sessions. These are usually challenging sessions for speakers with the sluggish-after-lunch-crowd, but no such problem holding my attention for the brilliant Jeff Gothelf, author of the Lean UX book and his latest offering, Sense & Respond. Jeff engaged the audience with great content on the need to focus on outcomes and not excess over metrics. Quite right! He also reminded us of the need to:

• Understand your business model
• Take an interest in your customers
• Use the software to learn
• Measure the impact of our work
• Discuss the dangerous edge cases

Wise words, I'm sure you'll agree. One of the points that had most impacting for me was a slide that "simply" said:

Blindly optimising for metrics without considering real-world implications is, at best, risky.

At, worst, it's criminal.

That's food for thought for sure, and tied in beautifully to much of Chris Messina's social technology talk from earlier in the day. I'm certainly looking forward to reading Jeff's book which he kindly signed a copy of for me. What a guy!

Well that's a wrap

...Phew!

This is my first Linkedin article, so I don't want to overcook it, and frankly I couldn't decipher all my notes so my tweets and Instagram posts came in useful for once. I'm not going to try to distil the great Q&A session on corporate social responsibility or touch on Paddy Moogan's refreshingly honest portrayal of the challenges of developing culture at Aira; I'm sure others will...

But why did I choose to share like this?

...because, I'm fired up...again! I've had a lot of personal stuff on this year and it's been a challenge, but this one amazing day reminded me about all that is amazing about the work we do in tech, the possibilities and opportunities, as well as the great communities we're in (the Edinburgh tech scene is buzzing!) and how we inspire one another, but also how we have real challenges to overcome, and responsibilities to face up to. There's a lot going on out there, I don't need to tell you that, but we can get through it together with our desire and willingness to build, learn and grow.

#turingfest #tech #conference #thefutureofwork