This September I have the honor of giving a keynote talk at Hatch Conference in Berlin. The talk is called, “Design and (Blank)” which is about my experience at Replit leading Marketing and Design; how there is a new trend of designers leading multiple functions. Nowadays I keep my conference speaking to only one every year but have been doing this for nearly 10 years. In this issue, I’ll share why you might consider giving a talk, how I approach building a concept, and pitching it.

I get asked a lot if speaking at conferences is important for your career. Is it necessary? No, it’s not a requirement at all. I’ll be abundantly clear that not wanting to give a conference talk is totally fine and should not impact your work. However, it can be beneficial depending on what your motive is.

I initially was hesitant about giving talk. It wasn’t until a mentor of mine said giving a talk at a conference is a way to share an idea at scale that can be helpful and community service. That framing changed my perspective. It’s also a way to share awareness of your company brand. You might be recruiting at a tech company or run an independent studio to find new clients.

Creating a talk

I encourage people to create a talk before submitting it or worrying about where you’ll give it. It’s a good test to see if it’s an idea you care about and worth sharing.

Focus on your credibility

Whether you’re speaking at a community meetup or an annual user conference, attendees have one clear expectation: your credibility in the subject professionals can learn from. For example, I’ll never give a talk about training language models. Even though I’ve worked with experts who have, it’s not my direct experience like application layer AI.

When in doubt, go very specific on your niche. The more specific you can be based on your experience, the higher likelihood the audience can all learn something new.

Backlog of ideas

The majority of talks I gave were developed years in the making. They marinated over time as markdown files I maintained. Instead of rushing to develop a talk based on the deadline of a conference, I focus on the idea and then road show it.

Storyboarding

I view the top mistake people make is spending way too much time on refining the slide deck than the concept itself. When I first started, so much effort was gathering assets and designing the layout of the slides. In reality, the slides are supportive for you and what you have to say.

These days I develop concepts on analog cards like I used to develop flash cards to study for a test in high school. This gives me the ability to practice the flow of the talk before over-investing time in building slides.

Road show and pitch your talk

Now that you have a concept you feel excited about, it’s time to get the show on the road. Similar to running a user test, validate your idea by running a concept test. Create a blog post about a snippet of your talk and get feedback. You could also go to a local meetup and share your idea to see what audiences think about it.

If you’re ready to submit your talk, confs.tech is a great resource of upcoming ones that have a call for papers.

Try it

I hope this helps you have a framework for creating a talk. The great news is if you plan to speak at conferences, this framework is also helpful for internal presentations as well.