Short feedback loops âž¿
Designing the Story Telling
Those that know me, know that I'm a very big fan of eXtreme Programming. That Agile mindset is aiming to work in very short cycles, to reduce the time to receive feedback. I started having regular feedback sessions with Victor MartÃn as part of our one 2 ones. It was good to have a second point of view, to help me with the storytelling, and of course, we identified I was going to need support from people from Marketing to give a more professional look to the slides.
Then when Victor and I thought the slides were good enough to share with a small focus group, we shared them internally with a group to collect more feedback. It was a good experience for me, it took a week to collect and adapt the slides to that feedback, and it worth it.
First dry-run
For me, having dry runs was crucial since, at JOTB, the talk would be in English. So it was important to me to feel comfortable, and run as many dry runs as possible. Dry runs are good, basically for two main reasons, first of all, it helps you to get fluent with the talk, and secondly, you can collect immediate feedback to improve, not only the talk but also the presenting skills.
My first dry-run was so positive, attended only by colleagues from my squad, and they were on my same side. We were all at the moment totally new to Process Mining, so they enjoyed the talk, but they were not able to provide me feedback on the technical side of the talk.
Second dry-run with an expert in the audience
The second dry-run was a little bit different, it included people from other squads, and also I invited a Process Mining Ph.D. student. He gave me very strong but honest feedback. That helped me a lot. It was game-changing in the way I was preparing the talk, since that feedback impacted, not only the Story Telling but also the technical aspects I wanted to present.
After that dry-run is when I started to think I was ready for the talk.