Pros:
- The events team absolutely crushed it. I’ve organized many events at Google and have gone to many conferences and I felt that the organization of this event was on part if not superior to other events I’ve seen, also San Jose is great place to have it in. No risk of being mugged.
- Meeting the Sales, eng, product, customer success, marketing, UX, etc. teams was great. Putting faces to names is always great. You have a mighty team backing your product which brings incredible credibility to what you do and you should probably have more youtube videos explaining more about your team because that eases concerns that you aren’t working with a fly by night tech company.
- Shout to my handler Brandi for doing a great job.
- I enjoyed the break out sessions, speaking to the person running the moveworks copilot (guy who wore a grey sweater and had impeccable knowledge and comedic game), and the two people who ran the new Moveworks Exinsights dashboard, i forgot what it’s called, was great.
- The speakers were great.
Cons (Super minor, but missed opportunity for moveworks):
- As someone who loves rap and ghetto blasters, the bass was on par with a hip hop concert and feels weird when you got nerdy execs taking the stage. I much prefer this to some lame corporate jingle, but just dial the bass down. Having the DJ there was great, you should bring him back again, great guy, just turn the music down a bit so people can have real conversations. I’m semi hard of hearing due to rap, so having to scream louder to speak over folks is tough. I know it’s a balance, but for my events I always erred towards ambiance and soft music to break awkward tension over “Hey it’s a night club!”
- More customer round tables with open Q&A for the main event the better that is unscripted, you can even tell the execs this wont be recorded so we can dive deep into why its so hard to enact change in any organization. I don’t care about presentations as much about how great so and so company is doing now becaues we all know under the hood the company has its own unique challenges and blockers, that are ignored so instead we can hear a sweet story on how great things are when internally they are still dealing with real issues. The real issues, which aren’t glamorous give people case studies on how to actually implement moveworks:
- How to overcome internal obstacles to launch?
- Why having a VP champion and a delegated subordinate to enact the VP’s mission is critical to push things forward?
- Why your (the company using moveworks) should only have at max 6-7 folks on the moveworks enablement team instead of inviting 100 different folks that dont know what they are doing and can only stop change.
- The importance of understanding no product launch is perfect and how to message that.
- How to get internal teams in line and push back on requests that go against your core launch product roadmap? Everyone wants to launch perfect in corporate when launching good enough is at least a toe hold so you can gain market information and improve the product over time.
- Etc. etc, i think you could have more real talk conversations that would lead to more sales because I had customers come up to me to tell me, “Hey jordan im struggling with xyz internally, how did you get over that obstacle to launch?”
Anyways, great conversation, thanks for having us.
