Developing a conference & community product - with Rory Madden Founder @UXDX

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Product Bakery as usual with Christian on my side and Rory Madden from Ireland. Yeah, today Rory Madden the co-founder of the UXDX talked to us about how his conference moved from a physical to a digital space in the times of the health crisis and the challenges as well as the new things they are trying out to be even more prominent in the future for their audience and community. I would say let's get started. Hi Christian, hi Rory. Hey there. Hi Alex, thanks for having me along. Lovely to have you here. So maybe just on a side note as usual if you guys like the podcast feel free to spread the love, share it on social media and also drop us a message if you have any comments or any suggestion on how we should improve or who we should talk to in the future. And with that said I'm happy to hand it over to Christian for a quick introduction of you Rory. Yeah Rory, happy to have you. So I would like to say that you don't have a traditional background in terms of product experience, but I was just realizing Alex, is there any kind of traditional way to get into product management design or into this world of product? It's a kind of prerequisite. From everyone we talk to usually it starts like, okay, it's not a super traditional background. Like very few people start with a product and go directly into product. So Rory, the same counts for you, right? So you started your career as consultant, you worked as project manager, you worked as CRM manager. So you had a very nice trajectory of different companies that you saw as well as a couple of startups that you founded by yourself. Lastly, you were working for Orion Air and Air Lingus, which is also very interesting. But what I really like to highlight is that in 2016 you became the co-founder of the UXDX. Maybe you can tell us a little bit what the UXDX is. Sure. So UXDX, what it stands for is user experience, developer experience. So it's about bringing together UX into the product delivery lifecycle. So yeah, you touched on it there in a bit of my background. I had the traditional consultancy background working for large companies like Accenture. And I thought I knew how to build products. I thought I knew everything because I had done years of working with big corporate names like British Telecom, Westpac, a couple of different government agencies. And I figured, okay, I've got this. I'm going to go and do a startup. And I created a startup in genealogy of all things. The idea was a kind of a Wikipedia, but for genealogy where anybody could access the world's kind of family tree. And I went about it like I would on a software project. I had the idea, I built it, and it failed. I then started too late talking to customers and figuring out, okay, so I wanted this thing where like Wikipedia, anybody can go in and edit it. But the biggest motivation for the people was they wanted more control. They were worried about the sloppy research that other people would do. So nobody was willing to share that. And the average age of people in genealogy is over 65. They're not known for being early adopters of technology. So that was a lesson for me. It was, I thought I was doing everything right. I did talk to a couple of customers ahead of time, but I had in my head, what I think a lot of people have, which is you're not understanding. You don't see what I see of this product. You don't understand where it's going to be. I'll just, I'll work a bit more and then I'll show it to you. And then you'll understand. Basically, I was putting my own hubris above what I was hearing from my customers. And then I went back into, I did that again with another startup, Trainers, which is a training application. It did a lot better. We were following a lot more in the UX, really trying to build it around our user needs. The challenge there is just in a fitness application, if it's B2C, you really need a lot of funding and a lot of runway because it's all about scale. So we were unsuccessful in fundraising, unfortunately. But those two startups really taught me a lot about the importance of making sure that you're listening to your users before you build anything. And then when I went back into the corporate world, I started seeing all of those lessons that I've learned over the past few years. They're really missing in the corporate world. So that's where UXDX came from. It was the idea that all of the focus was on agile and can we speed up developments? But if there's a quote I love from W.E. Deming and he said, there's nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. And that's what I thought of a lot of people like you're spinning wheels and you're getting faster and faster, but you're building the wrong thing. So it doesn't matter how fast you get. That was the genesis of UXDX. How can we help those corporations shift from that waterfall way of working to more products? And that's what we say to help teams work, move from projects to product teams. And in which form are you doing this at the moment? What we're doing at the moment is, or since 2016, we've run five conferences, five large annual conferences based in Dublin. And the idea is like it's grown quite dramatically. So we had 400 in our first year. We had one and a half thousand last year. This year was a little bit of a hiccup. We were on track for 2000, but the coronavirus changed things around. So we had to pivot from being a physical event to an online event. But yeah, so we've been running the main conferences in Dublin, but we also run community events around the world. So I think those UXDX events running in about 20 different cities now around the world as well. And it's all the same concept. It's a little bit different from a traditional conference or event because we intentionally don't go down a functional route. And what I mean by that is we're not a UX conference. So there's UX Lisbon, there's UX Bristol, there's UX conferences around the world. There's product conferences, mind the product industry. There are product conferences, there's developer conferences, but we intentionally don't want to be just purely around how you can be better in your one function. Because to me, again, it's not about... The inefficiencies aren't at the functional level. It's at the system level of trying to get from start to finish. So that's what we focus on. We get a little bit of everything. So there is all the best practices in UX and design and dev and products, but it's also about how can we work better together as a team to get things across the line quicker. Sound exactly like our mission, Alex, on our podcast. Yeah, I was saying, this is what makes you the perfect guest for us. One thing that we've always discussed is also the overlaps between the roles. And I think at every UX conference I go, I could easily also send a product manager to, and they would still learn a lot. And I think if you keep it too much focused on the functions, you lose a lot of these kinds of things. But one thing that simply interests me on the naming itself, I think UX is a pretty familiar term to everyone. The DX part itself, I have to admit, I learned about developer experience as a term the first time when getting across your conference. Is this something that you've seen somewhere else, or is this something that is a little bit coming also from you and from your history of looking at it as like developer experience as well? Yeah, it's not something I made up. It is out there in developer communities. They do talk a lot about the DX, the experience of the developers building the products. But the naming is, it is a little contentious because people just stop reading after they see the UX and they go, okay, I'll put that into the UX bucket, which is, yeah, it's a little unfortunate with the naming, but we're going to persist with it. But to come back to what is DX, there's a big movement in development in terms of what's the best way of improving development and what are the best practices. And a lot of that comes down to the developer experience. And what I mean by that is there's a great quote from, it's in the book, Lean Enterprise, I believe, where basically saying... Love that book. Yes. It's a very good book. It's a difficult read, but it's because there's so much information on every page. You should have read a couple of books that are mentioned inside this book to better grasp, right? So Escape the Velocity and Lean Styler, there are so many other books mentioned inside, but yeah. But one of the concepts of the many concepts in that book, I think it was that book, I could be completely misquoting, but it's that developers need to be able to keep the complexity in their head. You need to be able to understand the complexity in your head because once it goes outside, that's when things really start. to slow down. So a lot of practices, and I don't think there's a perfect way of doing anything, but let's take microservices as an example. A lot of that is driven by, let's try and make it so that the code is simple and that the readability and the user experience for the developer when they're interacting with the code is simple so that they're not bogged down and slowed down by that complexity. So that's just one example, but there's lots of others around what are the tooling that the developers are using, what's the way they do it, test-driven development, I'm a major fan of, pair programming, major fan of. So some of those kinds of things as well improves the developer's experience and helps them to work better. It looks like there's a broad range of topics and people who can potentially get in touch with the UXDX. So I would be curious about looking at this whole mission that you have. I'm not only saying the conference. So how did you manage to come up with the idea and start building up this, I would say, big community that you are these days working with? Yeah. So the idea initially came, so after the startups failed, I went back into the corporate world. I just saw that this was a problem, the same mistakes I was making, as I said. And then my partner, actually, she has a background in conference production. So we figured, do you know what would be great? If we can bring our skills together. And so she ran some of the largest conferences in Australia. And yeah, she had run hundreds of conferences, basically, before we started together. So that was where we came up with the idea of, let's get going with a conference. But to me, our mission is to help teams move from projects to products. So the conference itself is just one vector of trying to do that. And I think it's a great one for getting enthusiasm. And after you get, people get excited and they're really motivated after a conference. But then a week or so later, it really starts to die down and deadlines are back and things like that. So it's about how can we keep that motivation going past once a year. And that's the community events are trying to be a bit more regular. We're also looking at working on a framework that will help people to be able to apply. So the biggest challenge is always, that's a great idea. How do I actually apply that? Yeah, I totally can feel or can relate to what you just said. I think the motivation that you get when you are directed there at a conference, it's always so high. And at the end, often you also hear some reminders also on how you could change things. But then it's also very easy to forget that when coming back. Cool. Rari, you talked about also the startups. And I think one major point also on the failure that you mentioned was that you started listening to the users fairly late in the process. And speaking about UXDX, maybe you can talk a little bit about the users of UXDX itself. And if you approached it differently, like when launching it compared to your startups. The way I think of UXDX, so some people might look at it and think, oh, it's a conference company. It's not a technology company. It's not a product or anything. But I actually think of almost anything is a product. Anything that you're selling can be a product. Even services are a product in their own. So when I was looking at who are the user groups of a conference, it's actually, I always thought two-sided marketplaces were some of the most difficult things to work on because you have to build both sides. But a conference is a three-sided marketplace. So just I'm a glutton for punishment. But the three sides of it are, you obviously have the audience. You want to make sure that if you're running a conference, that you have attendees who are coming and they're looking forward to the knowledge that they're going to pick up or the networking, et cetera. But then you also have to sell it to the speakers because the speakers are trying to figure out how much should I devote my time to this? Is it going to be worthwhile? Am I going to get exposure? Am I going to get the value out of speaking at this? Because preparing a really high quality talk takes time. And then there's partners or sponsors, the companies that come along and they might be in an exhibition or something like that. So they're the three sides of running a conference. And you need to be focusing on all three to really fully execute. But to answer your question of how did I go about doing that user research? We intentionally, because we were such a small team, we intentionally decided let's keep our costs down and let's hold on the partners. Well, not 100% holding on them. We didn't focus as much as we did in the other areas. And the rationale for that was we wanted to get our product right because we knew if we had the audience, the partners will come. But to get the audience was going to be the hardest thing. In year one, you're selling vaporware, essentially. You're talking to these speakers, you're convincing them. And we were getting some very senior people from, I can't remember offhand, I should know this offhand who our speakers were in year one. But we got some very senior people from around the world to fly into Dublin to share their experiences. How did you get them? Yeah, because the complicated thing and I think the two sided marketplace is a good example. And we can think of stars like eBay, fake it till you make it. You need to have enough buyers, you need to have enough offer, like people offering it. Like, how do you, obviously, a senior speaker wants to have a big audience, and audience wants to have senior speakers. So how do you tackle that? How do you? What's first? Yeah, so year one is hard. Because after year one, then at least you've got something that you can point to and you've got testimonials and you've got all of the pictures and multimedia that you can share to say, look, this was amazing. You can be this person up on stage. But in year one, it came down to sales. It's pitching the dream of we will have 400 people in the room. It is this target audience. This is the goal. And one thing with the speaker front, we've had so many of our speakers come back to us and say, I really love this concept. I've gone to so many design conferences, or gone to product conferences, or gone to developer conferences. But this concept of getting everybody together so that we can start breaking down the barriers, that really resonates. So fortunately, I guess if we were trying to sell it where it was just another me too conference, where we didn't have a kind of differentiator or something that people really believed in, I think it would have been harder. But our speakers have actually, and they keep offering to come back or to help us, particularly with the framework that I mentioned working on. A lot of our past speakers are contributing to that. So that's a good thing that we had something, a vision that people believed in, and that helped us to get the speakers on board. In year one, did you reach out to people directly, or how did you find the speakers? So in year one, yes, in year one to four, in fact, we did all of our outreach. So in conferences, there's kind of two ways that people approach their speakers. One is what you'll often see is probably more of the expo style and events. The speakers are the sponsors. So they charge people to go up on stage, whereas we've never done that. We never charge people to go up on stage. And in fact, sponsors keep offering us money. And it's very difficult to say no to people when they're offering you money. But what we've had in the past is some people, they've done a bit of a sales pitch. These weren't sponsors. These are just speakers. Obviously, if you're a product manager and you've just released a product, you're very excited about it. But you can go too far and it can become a little bit of a sales pitch. And that always gets really negative feedback. So we, as I said, wanted to focus on the product. And we have the vision for the speakers. So the product was making sure that it was an amazing experience for the attendees. So that's what we've actually spent a lot of time putting together speaker documentation around how to do a good talk. What are the things that people like? What don't they like? And just using all the feedback that we gather after every talk after every event to shape and just show people going, look, let's say it's that sales pitch. I know you really want to promote your product. This is how somebody did it. And they did it really well and subtly. And that got really good feedback and good kind of positive vibes towards the product. Whereas this kind of really hard sell from stage just crashes. So yeah, so that's how we don't do that sponsorship of the sales pitch of the speaking. So what we do then is we go and research and find the speakers who are out there who are talking about the best things. So for, I'd say, even now that we haven't applied to speak, we're still probably 80% of our own custom research and outreach and 20% would be the apply to speak. But it sounds like you also found a way to educate the speakers and to not only use the feedback for yourself, but really also to shape their talks. do speakers perceive this? Are they usually welcoming this kind of feedback? I would put our speakers probably into two categories. So there's the people who have been speaking for years, who are really honed in on their way of doing it. And they're excellent speakers just because they've done it so much. So those ones, we're not as go here, here's just something because often, actually, they're the ones who will ask more questions about who's your audience? What type of message are they looking for? What kind of content has resonated in the past? Because they know that they have to angle their talk slightly different depending on the audience. So we give them some hints, but we don't push too hard with that group because they're very experienced. There are other people who, I wouldn't say beginners, because when we do our outreach, we often look at talks that they've done in the past, but people who haven't done 50, 60 large conference talks. So they're still very eager to learn more. I think it's actually part of the community that if you have the mindset where everything's an experiment, and you're always learning, which is the mindset you need for product development, the people who speak have that same mindset as well. So we've never had a negative pushback on any of the kind of giving people some feedback. It's always been positive. Yeah. It's like the test and learn approach that you somehow need to have everywhere working in product. I think we are trying to apply this also for our format here, where we also constantly adjust and shift the way we talk, the way we interview. And I also see many similarities on how to build up a podcast versus how to build up a conference, I do have to say. I think a conference is probably a little bit more complicated. Definitely way more effort. I fully agree. The upfront cost is the scary bit. In year one, we're signing the lease for the venue, which is a huge amount of money. You're hoping that you can fill it. That's actually a good topic, because due to this year, many things have changed, I would say. So how are you dealing with the current situation? And also looking forward now into the next years, how is the current concept of the UXDX conference shifting due to the current health crisis? Yeah. So I guess the concept isn't. We're staying true to what our mission is in a way. It's still to help people shift from working in those projects to product teams. How we do that, obviously has to change because we can't have 2000 people in a room anymore. I think when the official regulations, it was 12 people was the maximum size of a gathering in Ireland during the days of our conference. You just need to rent a smaller place. So we had to shift and it was actually, it was really strange. So we, as I mentioned, we're doing community events around the world. And while it's now there's the number of cities that we can't quite physically go to every city. In the earlier years, we went to every single city when we were running those community events. And we were in the States in February in San Francisco, New York running events. And then we kept hearing about this kind of virus that was getting more and more of the news. So then we came back and lockdowns were starting to come. It was in March, St. Patrick's Day is a patron saint's day of Ireland. The 17th of March is a huge day in Ireland. There's a parade, there's lots of parties. And when the government cancelled that, you go, okay, it's serious. Things are serious. When was the moment where you decided or when you realised, okay, we need to shift it and we need to have it digitally instead of like physically? So I'd say around with those community events, so we ran the US ones in February, it was March, April, May, June, we were running another 12 community events through those months. And we immediately went, okay, we're doing online for these community events. How are we going to do this? But we still held out hope. We just thought, okay, it's March, October, seven months away. This thing will be gone by summer, hopefully. You're almost right. Been there. So off by a year or two, but we were holding out hope. We weren't sure, but we didn't make a decision because we just didn't have enough information and trying to track like we were looking very closely at Wuhan and seeing what's Wuhan doing because they're two months ahead of the rest of us or three months ahead of the rest of us. So they started seeming to go well. So we have this kind of optimism, okay, maybe it'll just go a couple of months and then we'll be like Wuhan that seems to be over. But we started running our community events and our community events are a great way, again, back to thinking of the conference as a product. If you're doing a once a year iteration, it's far too slow to be running any experiments because if you run an experiment and it goes wrong, then you've lost a year. And we ran a few experiments in year two. Some work, some don't. And you get the negative feedback and you're like, okay, crap, that didn't work. And it's too big of a scale to try those experiments. So we use the community events as a way of experimenting throughout the year as well. So experimenting with formats, experimenting with speakers, experimenting with kind of different networking approaches. So that's what we actually used our community events throughout the kind of March, April, May, June. We were testing out different ideas and getting feedback and going, okay, that didn't work or it didn't work as well as we wanted to. Let's tweak it here. Let's tweak it there. And that was the beauty of having 12 of them. We were able to make a lot of tweaks and that's what gave us the approach to our main conference. We learned things like you don't want to do, people don't do eight hours in front of a screen. And it's, it fries your brain trying to do that. So we didn't do a full day of schedules. We did a half a day of live sessions and some other things that we learned along the way. And I think it was around the end of May, mid June time. That's when we realized, okay, it's time to call it for the main conference. So we offered everybody who had a ticket, a refund, or they could keep it as well as a ticket for 2021. And thankfully, about 80% of people decided to stick with us, which was great for us because if they hadn't, we would have been in a little trouble financially, but no, it was great. So then we just, from then on, it was pitched as an online event. Do you think the reason why people, the 80% of the people took them because it's usually paid by the companies, or do you think there is this close connection that people say, hey, we really want to be there. We really want to support you. I'd love it to be that they really want to support us. I think a lot of people still think it's harsh when you have a brand name. So people think there's this big company and big machine behind it, but there's only the five of us. So it's a small operation, but I think it was more the people were seeing what we were doing. We were quite transparent about, look, this is what we've learned running all of our community events. We've learned how to do an online event. We haven't, it's not that we're just going to be hopefully throwing up some videos and see whether it works. So we explained to people, we explained the value that they can get. And we always drive that it's about helping that transition. So you have two options. You can decide not to come, but you don't want to throw away the whole of 2020 as well. If there's some ways that you can improve, might as well take advantage of them. So I, while I'd love it to be the altruistic, they're, they're trying to support us. I think it was a bit more of a, just that they were interested in, in what we could offer. I still feel like a lot of people, especially in this current period, they do try and also support all sorts of businesses. And I think it's probably not 100%, but I think considering also that you have some very consistent returning guests as well, and the strong community, I personally would believe that this is also a portion of the people. Just also looking at the online conference, and I recently spoke to a colleague and we were discussing, especially as there are more and more online conferences, the change also in the way you network and the way things become a little bit like less natural. And I think one point that came up was what is the actual difference between looking at live events on a zoom screen versus looking at some recorded events or recorded like talks on YouTube. So wondering as you are super close to, to the whole topic, what was the feedback after the conference and, and how do you see this topic? Yeah. So we, we did a lot of research on this before the conference. So it was, what are the goals that people have going to a conference? And there's quite a few actual different goals that people are trying to achieve by going. So the number one that kind of outweighs everything is people put it down as knowledge or inspiration. So they're, they want to go there and learn something new or get inspired by, Oh, I've learned about this thing, or the, this company adopted this method and they, they're doing really well. So I'm going to try push it through in my organization because that's going to solve my problems. So it's knowledge and inspiration. The next big category, which is maybe a subset of that one, but it's, what are the competition So a lot of people, they're really just keen on, okay, I work in, let's take the examples from earlier, Ryanair and Aer Lingus, both airlines, airline industry. So it's okay, Ryanair are speaking at it, then I'm going to go to try to figure out how they're trying to tackle this problem because I know that they have the same problem we have. How are they getting around it? The other one would be skills. So they want to learn a new skill. So you might have heard about, let's say, jobs to be done as a way of trying to identify where to focus. But there's a difference between hearing about something and being able to do it. So there's the skills, how can you learn that skill, and networking that you touched on as well is a big one, meet new people, expand my network. And the final, the fifth kind of one is fun. So people come to conferences to have some fun. Like it's a big part of it is come to Dublin, we have some of the best pubs in the world and the nightlife is renowned. We've been there last year. Yeah, I can share they are pretty fun. And the restaurants are so amazing. We had really good food. Yeah, exactly. So it's that and that is like, why a lot of people come choose a conference like I've talked to people who choose their conferences based on the location. But I do have to say when I go to a conference, or when I choose a conference, I really want to have this full package of, as you said, fun, knowledge, getting inspired, but also the time after the conference in form of an after work event or collecting a group of people and going to a nice pub or to a nice restaurant. So it's a very emotional decision making from my side when I decide to go to conferences, not just buying a ticket and wanting some knowledge. It's really like this whole experience of feeling good and connecting to people. Yeah, exactly. And unfortunately, that's the bit that we can't offer with an online event. But when we looked at that, so we broke it down to those needs. And then we said, how are we going to satisfy these? So if we take the example of the YouTube, it was where we can put all of it online. But then we're basically in a way competing with YouTube to a degree. And the big difference between YouTube and a conference is curation. So what I mean by that is on YouTube, you can watch videos and there's more videos than you'll ever be able to watch up on YouTube. But you don't know what's the good one to watch and what's not. And that goes back to what we were talking about before, where we source 80% of our speakers ourselves. So we're spending the guts of the year doing the research to make sure that the people that we're putting together tie the story together and they complement each other. So there's the kind of curation. So we're saying, okay, we think that we can deliver the knowledge and inspiration because it's the same content. The skills, it's workshops. So we're going, okay, I am in favor of physical. I personally prefer physical things, but so many workshops are run through Zoom, Nairo, Mural, like those kind of whiteboarding tools. So the quality, I don't think there's, with workshops, I don't think there's a massive drop between what you can do in a physical room versus online. But networking and fun, now there's the challenge, but we tried and experimented with a lot of different things. So we did, there was one of our speakers, Feroz, I really should learn how to pronounce his surname. It's a difficult, I'm going to skip, but he's very famous in the open source community. He's written a lot of open source modules and web tarns, if anybody's ever used that, he wrote that. And he created a new tool that he just wanted to meet people while in lockdown. So he created something he called Virus Cafe, and it basically, you would log in and it would just pair you with another person on the internet, and you would be given a question to talk about. So you would skip the, hi, how are you, what's the weather like, that kind of small talk. And you would get straight into, do I have a connection with this person? Because you're talking about some interesting topic. So I got in touch with him and we made a version just purely for UXDX. So you would log in, you would get paired with a UXDX attendee and a product question, or something related to UX or design or dev. So immediately you could figure out, do I have a connection with this person? And Alex and I, we just discussed this recently, because the cool thing is the things that are happening by coincidence, right? So you're grabbing a coffee when you are physically at a conference, you see someone, you just start a conversation and for sure on the internet, it's quite harder. But having this question in place that you directly can start talking to is a really cool thing. Especially we Germans, we don't do small talk anyway, we directly jump into topics. Or you don't talk. Or we don't talk, yeah, because we work. But that is, you've hit the nail on the head. So the lessons learned, and we really tried to figure out how to do this. So we did in the community events, we did at the end of the day, because that's how we would have done it at a physical event. You'd have at the start of the day, and then maybe a break in the middle, and then at the end of the day. But with the virtual events or an online event, people just go, okay, that's the last talk. They're not in a physical space. So they just close it down and walk away. And they don't tend to stick around for that kind of after networking. We tried lots of like bingo, and kind of table quiz, and just different activities to try keep people engaged and logged in. And to be honest, it wasn't as successful as we would have hoped for it to be. We didn't get the numbers of people to either of those networking activities that we hoped. Because we started scheduling in some of that one on one chats, instead of just leaving it to the end of the day. But feedback after the event, and to your question, I know it's a rambling answer, what surprised us, it was that networking that I just described, somebody described it to me in words of a physical venue. So imagine you're in a physical venue, and there's a door on it that says, meet a random stranger. Are you going to open that door? Yeah. And most people aren't. So it's a bit like these bracelets for dating nights, where you can have like green, orange or red. What does even orange or red mean? If I'm going to a dating event, but yeah. It looks like you have done many of these events, Alex. A different topic. Yeah, but it's definitely tough. It's not easy to connect people. But what are your next plans to continue iterating on this challenge? Yeah, so the challenge was around the kind of, it looks like a blocked door. So how could we, if you can imagine, so everybody who went in, the feedback was fantastic. So the problem doesn't lie with the tool itself. The problem lies in the fear of going into it. It's twofold, sorry. It's the fear, but it's also with an online event, you're competing not against just somebody kind of sitting in the corner having their lunch instead of interacting. You're dealing with, oh, I've got a lull now, I'll check my emails. I'll log in and I'll have a look at a ticket or I'll do something else. I'll read the news. So it's a much bigger hurdle. But what we're doing is we recognize from the feedback that when people do it, it is great and it is a great way of meeting people because you do get that. It's only two minutes. So there isn't the fear of getting stuck there for too long. And it's a great way to know people. So we're going to try to put a window into the room to try and make it more transparent for what's happening in there. So it's less daunting for people to go in so they can see, okay, these people are meeting in there or this is how it's going. Might publish a couple of the videos with permission, just might do some of the meetings of people just to go, this is what it looks like. This is how it actually plays out in reality, or maybe some snippets or something just to try, as I described, instead of a solid door to have a window door so you can see in to make it a bit less daunting to go in. But that's going to be some experimentation over the next, we're actually in Berlin on Wednesday running a community event so we can try some experimenting there. Sounds great. So bottom line of the digital experience, the final thing I wanted to ask you here is in terms of like attendees, did it actually like positively impact because people don't have to travel to Dublin and it doesn't matter like where in the world you are and you can still attend the conference? Being perfectly honest, no, it wasn't positive. So from two factors, one, we had less attendees than if we had run a physical event. So we were on track to maybe even get more than 2000 attendees. Of what we had sold up until March and then literally from March till August, we probably sold five tickets because everybody just played a waiting game and everybody was trying to figure out what do we do. So in the end we had over 1000 people, I think it was around 1100 or 1200, I need to double check the exact number, but we would have gotten to the 2000 had it been a physical event. That did hurt us. And when talking to people who, a lot of people who would traditionally come, they just said, look, it's the networking, it's the physical, it's the excitement, it's the. So yes, the knowledge and inspiration, yes, the skills are important, but for them they felt that the online didn't deliver enough of the physical. difficult for them. So it's about your goals and what goals are we trying to satisfy? So for that group of people, it didn't. But then the group of people who did attend, the feedback that we got was because we experimented, as I was saying, we did pre-recorded talks. So we released them every night so that you could watch them in your own time. And then our half day schedule was actually all panels where you could then, having watched all the talks from the speakers the night before, they'll be on a panel debating because often people will say, okay, one person just talked about something and another person talked about it and they're slightly contradictory in what they've said in their talks. So now they're on a panel together, I can join in and I can ask them some questions. So the people who attended really said it was the best execution that they had seen of a kind of from a knowledge and inspiration perspective. Yes, we have more work to do on the networking. This brings us to another very interesting topic because obviously your product is not only the conference itself, but you also have to some extent a digital product like you have the UXDX site, the platform, especially this year with the whole online event. I think there is much more also of a hard coded product in place. So how did you solve or how did you work on that product? Also knowing that you're coming from a background where you are literally focusing on nothing else than user experience, developer experience and how to generally build good products. Yes, we engaged because our team, as I was saying, there's five of us. So we aren't the largest team with all of the full skill sets. We actually engaged a company called Red Lemonade and they ran some user experience testing of the platform that we had built. So we had a choice when we were going online. There's a couple of companies out there that are online kind of platforms where they say you can run your virtual conference. And it's funny how they pivoted it before the exact same products beforehand. They were saying, I can't remember what their pitch was, but it was, you can run a, it was the website. You can just build a website for a conference. And then suddenly all their branding changed to, you can run an online conference with us. But I tested it because I had looked at those products and none of them had given the experience that I wanted, both from the end attendee, as well as the ability to maintain it. Because we have our systems for tracking all of our content and our building our schedules and agendas and speakers. And then none of these systems had APIs that I could easily integrate that with. So you have to do double entry and we tried it one year and things got out of sync and it was a bit of a mess. And then the other thing is, if we had decided to go down that route, it would have been a vendor lock-in. As I'm saying, I wasn't happy that the experience for the user was great, but had we gone all in with one of these tools, that would have been it. That was going to be our experience and we'd be at their mercy. And I'm a big fan of, buy when it's not your differentiator. So don't build everything in house. A lot of companies fall into this, we're going to build our own custom things. Buy when it's not your differentiator. But for us, the experience at our conference is our differentiator. It's one of our differentiators. The content is definitely a differentiator. But if we can't deliver a good experience, and it comes back to what I said at the start, our focus was on the product, on making this an amazing event for people to attend. So if we don't have control of that, I thought that was too much of a risk. So we went down the custom build route and that's where we got... We did have some mock-ups. We used all the kind of our learnings from the event to do some mock-ups or talk through the goals with Red Lemonade. They put those into prototypes, went out, did some user testing and validated. We made a lot of changes from that user testing. It was really informative. Red Lemonade did a great job at doing that. And then that's what influenced basically the product that we had. I would describe it as an MVP product for the main event. It did exactly what we needed it to do. There were definitely some bugs that we needed to fix on the day. But again, that was just so useful because now we have learned so much from running that our next iteration, which will be out in two weeks, is leaps and bounds above. And we'll be running our APAC conference on that, all of our community events, as well as our APEX conference in March. So by the time it comes back around to October, that system will be battle-hardened. Amazing. But so do you develop then in-house, if you say building it your own, it's like how many people from the five people are developers? Yeah. So our five people is myself and Catherine are the co-founders. So Catherine has the conference production background, and she's also looking after sales with the partners. We have Jovi, who's our kind of head of operations. So she looks after all of making sure that all the events run smoothly and making sure that we do our jobs as well. She holds us accountable for what we say we're going to do. Louise looks after a lot of the marketing and PR, and Neil looks after video production and marketing as well. And Louise helps a lot with the research for what topics we should be chasing with as well. So most of the people are focused on the production and the marketing, which is coming back to, as I said, where we invest in the product of making sure that it's an amazing experience for people and then getting the attendees there. So my role, I'm the one who has the most product development experience. So I do a lot of direction of where we should be focusing and setting the agenda in terms of topics. But I also do all of the development myself. I shouldn't. It's a bad idea, but we tried outsourcing through things like Upwork and those kinds of things because we're not big enough. We don't have enough revenue to hire a full-time Western prices developer. So we tried it, but I was spending more time fixing bad quality than it would have taken me just to write it myself. I wrote most of it myself. And we actually found one good developer, Mariusz in Poland, who you could probably say he's the sixth member of our team because he pretty much works full-time now. Quite intense days then. Yeah. It's now that I've got my two weeks countdown to get this out. I've got my list of all the pages that need to be done. But the conference bit is all working now, up and working on the new version. It looks a lot slicker and I've re-architected it. So while I say build don't buy, or build when it's important, buy when it's not important. I fell into that trap massively. I custom built my own CMS at one point, which was the most stupid thing you could possibly do because there's so many really good high quality CMSs on the market. So that I've fallen into that trap, but I've learned the hard way and I'm never going to do that again. Talking about your experiences and doing stupid things, what are the three things that you have learned over the last two years that you want to do better now in the future? I'm going to use an example from when I was consulting at Aer Lingus. So my role there was mobile program lead was my title, but I was looking after the website, the mobile apps, or a lot of the website, the mobile apps and the API team. And part of my remit there was to do this transition from working in projects to working as product teams. And what I learned there was while the steps and what people need to do, there's not a huge amount of controversy there. There's no best practices, there's no one right way, but there's a lot of good practices that people can follow, but it's down to people. So the biggest challenges I had were not technical in any way. And I made a few mistakes by trying to push through some changes without going through the people kind of change route. So I would say my number one biggest learning was you have to get people on board, you have to spend the time. And it can be frustrating because you go, look, I know what needs to happen, but you're not going to get it if you try to push for it. You have to convince people it might take a bit longer, but you'll get there quicker. If that makes sense, it takes longer to get started, but you end up getting to the end quicker. So that'd be my first one, that in technology, it's all about people. It's not about the technology. Yeah, absolutely. Number two would be, and this is a kind of a double-edged one, because I did waste a lot of time building, custom building a CMS and things like that, I redeveloped my skills. As you mentioned at the start, in my background, professionally, I've been a business analyst, I've been a tester, I've been a project manager, program manager, but since I was in school, I've been developing. So I had to relearn a lot of the best practices that I'm talking about and re-implement them. While doing that, building that CMS and stuff, while it was a waste of time, the value it gave me in terms of learning meant that now I'm able to build a high quality platform. And so I actually think, and a lot of people will say this is crazy, but if you have a hobby project or something, rebuild it too. three, four times. So rebuild the exact same thing because every time you're going to make it better. And what I've seen a lot of people do is they'll do something and then they'll go, okay, I'll go on to my next project and I know how to do that, so I'll just copy that over. But you're copying some really bad code over. And the same with designs, like redesign it or look at it again, because it's only when you keep iterating on the same thing that you really start to learn. Now, obviously you can't do that every day in your job, but it's one of those things that I think if you can, while it does seem like a huge waste, I think, and it's back to, this is our core value proposition, so it's enabled us to do it. And number three, be ready for the unexpected. I think this one is from this year. At the start of the year, the plan was all around, and I alluded to it a few times, the framework that we're working on to help people implement this change. And it was, okay, I'm going to spend the first few months, and I was making some really good progress in February, but then priority shifted. So we had to move to running this online platform. But yeah, it's just be adaptable. If we had just pig-headedly said, no, I'm going to finish this, and it would have been great, I would have finished that, but we wouldn't have had the learnings or been able to run the events online that we had. So it's be adaptable. Nice. And I do believe that this year was a great wake-up call for the whole product community when it comes to being flexible and adapting to change. Yeah. All right, cool. Then Rory, I think that's a wrap for the call today. So it was lovely to have you here. One final question that we always have to ask, if people want to find you on the internet, where can they find you? So Twitter, it's RoryUXDX and LinkedIn, I think it's Rory Madden. I'm not sure what my, but if you look for Rory Madden, you'll see me there. Yeah. And on our website, we've got a chat button. So I tend to pick those up as well. Great. I'm an easy person to contact. Yeah. We will make sure to link all the links from you and the UXDX in the episode description. And with that, thank you very much, Rory. It was a pleasure talking to you and we wish you all the best for the upcoming community events, as well as hopefully a physical event as well, where definitely Alex and I will join in person. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It was great fun. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I was actually surprised about the information I've learned about your dating behavior, Alex. Yeah. Unfortunately, these times are, no, luckily these times are over. I really have to say luckily, actually. But honestly, that was something that I never really understood this concept of, and they have it in many, like, I've seen it also on conferences. Oh, happy to socialize. Leave me alone with a wristband. And usually the most interesting people are the ones that have the, leave me alone, because the ones that are like in your face, oh yeah, let's socialize. Let's socialize. Yeah. Yeah. But moving away from, from the dating conferences, dating word, I have to say, I, I could have talked for another hour with Rory. It's super interesting topic, super relevant also, especially today and super relevant also as we just recently discussed how you have to change strategies and change also the direction of the product in his case, not the concept, but like really the how, the execution of the concept. So super interesting. And usually the people that have the most stories to share are the ones that had their own companies that failed because there is no way to learn faster than hitting a wall with a company and starting over again and applying all these learnings. And what I really like is that he said he's still, well, the whole UXDX team still stays with the mission, but they are gonna change the way how they enable people. And this is something that I really like. So the mission is the same, but we just need to find other solutions on serving the same value or even a bigger value than we have done it before. And the current health crisis is definitely a big wake up call for everyone at the moment to really rethink what you're doing, to be able to adapt fast, but still planned and structured enough to survive in the future. And the initiatives they are taking are, I hope the right ones. He was super honest on sharing what works and what's not working. And I really love this experimentation in community events. It was such a nice thing to continuously iterate and improve on the current format. Really nice way to go to the next level. It's good that you don't need to have an app and some A-B tests. Everything can be a product and you can or you should use every single opportunity to test and learn and to iterate the way you work. Absolutely. And this is exactly what we're doing here at the Product Bakery Podcast as well. So I just want to repeat what you said at the beginning. If you liked this episode, feel free to share it with your network, with your friends, with your colleagues. Alternatively, you can also give us a like on social media like LinkedIn or Instagram, or alternatively the old fashioned way you can write us an email to hello at product-bakery.com. Did I miss something Alex? No, I think that's it. And the only thing missing is to wish everyone a beautiful day or evening. And the great outro music.