Your bio establishes your expertise, authority, and credibility in your field. If your conference proposal has a speaking experience field, use that field to explain your expertise, authority, and credibility. I like to think of the bio and speaking experience fields as ways to connect with and invite the right people to your session: These […]
You know who your audience is because you framed the proposal. You started with outcomes, and you refined those outcomes when you wrote the abstract. Now it’s time to complete the rest of the proposal, excluding your bio and the title. Bios and titles are different from the rest of the proposal. (Those will be
You decided who your session is for: the people with the problems. You’ve got the outcomes. Now, it’s time to write the abstract. Conference proposals always have a short abstract. Some conferences, such as the Agile 20xx conferences, also have “Information for the Program Team.” You might think of that as the outline or more
Now that you’ve framed your proposal, start with what you want people to take away from the talk, the outcomes. Why? Because too many descriptions are a promise for an outcome or what people will learn. If you’re coy about the outcomes, people can’t select themselves in or out for your presentation. Speakers who say,
You want to present a talk, workshop, experience report at a conference. (Or, a lightning talk, Pecha Kucha, or more.) You have something important to share. How can you create a proposal that the program committee will accept? I’m writing this series to explain how to do just that. The series parts are: Understand who
Consultants who make money speak at conferences. I love to speak. Give me a microphone—I am a happy person. I keep having to turn down speaking requests, both domestic and overseas. I would love to go, to learn and to meet people. Sometimes, I’m not available. More often, I can’t “afford” to do so. Often,
I’m a shepherd for the XP2019 and Agile2019 conferences. I read the proposals, offer feedback, and then shepherd the papers through to completion once we accept the proposals. I love reading experiences. I’m a total sucker for them. Why? Because they’re short stories that reflect the Satir Change Model, the image here. If you’re trying
Many product owners and customers believe they know the problem they want to solve. That fake certainty causes them to define solutions, instead of solving the problem at hand. John Le Drew and I pair-wrote an article describing this problem and how to solve it. See Eliminate Fake Certainty and Solve the Real Problem. Yes, I’ve
I’m writing a geographically distributed agile team book with Mark Kilby. We have a 30-minute timebox each morning to write. (We take time off for holidays, vacations, travel, etc.) Because we’re writing together, we first had to understand what we wanted to write in this book. We created a frame and a story map for
Last year, I was part of a geographically distributed team who wrote the Agile Practice Guide. Shane Hastie interviewed us during Agile 2017. His interview (which was a ton of fun!) is here: Johanna Rothman and Mike Griffiths on the Agile Alliance/PMI Agile Practice Guide. I learned a ton from that writing experience: Geographically distributed agile