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.
Check out Zachary Burruel’s recap of day 1, including some notes from my presentation.
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.
The art of managing expectations will set you free. #pressnomics @alexkingorg
Goal should be never to surprise clients. Always keep them in the loop. @alexkingorg #pressnomics
Our goal is to never surprise a client. #pressnomics @alexkingorg
If your deadline has been hard for more than four hours, see your developer. @alexkingorg #pressnomics
Product features might not be as obvious to your client as they are to you. Look from their perspective. @alexkingorg #pressnomics
Holloween horror stories. Tales of clients and projects gone wrong. Great wisdom from client foibles. #pressnomics @alexkingorg
“How many people have had work delayed on the client end?” Many people raised BOTH hands. @alexkingorg #pressnomics
Loving this understated yet information-dense talk about consulting 101 from @alexkingorg. Hair-raising tales delivered with serenity.
Alex, your talk at Pressnomics was one of my favorites. I’ve always looked up to you and the work you guys do at CrowdFavorite so to hear you tell stories about the trials and tribulations you guys go through was very reassuring to me.
Devin mentioned afterwards that I could have been more explicit that these were the outliers; the edge cases. 😉
I figured people understood that. The learning is in the challenges.