The inaugural Pressnomics conference was a definitive success. It was a conference dedicated to the WordCamp hallway conversations I enjoy having with 5-10 people at each (non-San Francisco) WordCamp. A “birds of a feather” conference for those of us who make our living in the WordPress economy.

I was honored to be asked to speak, and I gave a presentation titled “Great Expectations”. I believe using expectations as a tool for working collaboratively with clients, customers and colleagues is great way to find success. I’ve been taking notes on the topic for over a year, and enjoyed the opportunity to present them.

This was a very different presentation than I normally give. I’m typically walking through code and other technical issues, systematically showing how to do things better in WordPress development. This was a much less concrete topic.

The free-form presentation style I used resulted in each section running longer than it had in my rehearsal. I wasn’t prepared to cut sections on the fly, and regret some of the choices I made there (I wish I’d talked about expectations with free and commercial WordPress plugins). Next time I’ll be better prepared and will have planned in advance what can be cut if time runs short.

I re-worked the presentation three different times, ultimately choosing to tell a series of stories with each illustrating a core element or lesson to consider. I got a good deal of validation about the concepts from other folks at the event.

The slides aren’t that helpful without the commentary, but I’m including them here for the sake of completeness. What may be more interesting would be to post write-ups of the content here as a series (and maybe compile it into an ebook). I may well do this.

View on SlideShare

Check out Zachary Burruel’s recap of day 1, including some notes from my presentation.

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I think many of us at the event were pretty well cooked by the end. There was a ton of great content, which sparked a lot of great debate and ideas for follow-through.

Kudos to Joshua and Sally of Page.ly for putting on a terrific event. I look forward to attending again next year.

This post is part of the thread: Expectations – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.