As I sat in a restaurant at the Venetian Friday afternoon grabbing something to eat before heading to the airport I realized that I hadn't been outside in the daylight since Tuesday afternoon... 3 days... yet, although I was ready to get out of Vegas and get back home I didn't seem to mind. Usually when you go to conferences the meeting rooms and discussions get kind of old quickly. I have to say that everything I saw and all the discussions (well, most anyway) were extremely interesting and really, there weren't many times that I wasn't learning something or having an interesting dialogue. Glad I came, would come again for sure. So, below are just some quick summary points of the conference.
Mix it up: I really liked the fact that this conference is intended to bring together creative, tech and business. It's not just a developers conference as one might expect from Microsoft. I think that's why there is so much discussion around workflow, process and collaboration - it really does become a discussion about how these 3 disciplines can better work together. Of course, most of the dialogue was centered around how Microsoft tools can aid in this collaboration but it wasn't as much a religious Microsoft message as I'd expected.
Cool Stuff: We saw quite a bit of new things at this conference. From the announcements around the launch of ie8 and some of the new features it will support to demos on the surface machines. The Deep Zoom functionality that Chip just posted about is pretty amazing as well. I wish we would have had this option when we built the Nine West site. One of the standout demos really is the NBC Olympics site. I honestly think it's going to change the way people watch the games this year. It's really amazing... You'll have to wait to see the site but it's incredible - You could pretty much smell the fear of the Olympics CMO as he talked about what a huge endeavor it's been and how they are counting down the days until launch.
Workflow and Process: A lot of recurring themes, comments, issues, discussions around how to best collaborate and work together and how to build a better product. I loved all these discussions... they are discussions I have at Tribal, discussions I've had at other companies I've worked for and I'm sure discussions that we will always (hopefully) continue to have. It's exciting to be able to talk to people from other agencies and not only realize they are facing the same issues (no surprise there) and talk about how they are approaching them, how they are altering their process, what has worked and what hasn't. We have new tools that enable us to work more collaboratively (Axure, the Microsoft tools, etc..) and more efficiently and we have clients who are becoming more and more savvy, forcing us to have more transparency into how we work. I'm most impressed with the companies who have actually formalized some of the newer steps like Tear Down meetings or new roles like Integrators into their processes. They may find these additions to greatly help and they may find they have to change again, who knows. I do know that it has caused me to think about how we at Tribal can work to formalize some of these steps and improve our process as we move forward. I don't think that the 'process' is going to be a particularly pre-defined formal one either (like Agile, waterfall, etc...) I think it will be a creative mix of many different approaches and one that will have a fair amount of flexibility and allow for frequent change.
Where are all the women? OK, I have to throw this in as kind of a serious note. At the end of Paul Dain's panel Chris Bernard threw out a "surprise question" - He asked "What is wrong with this picture"... the answer: No Women. There are a ton of women in this industry yet there were not so many at Mix. I had a couple of conversations with Miscrosoft people about it and although we tended to laugh at the long mens room lines and the Halo 3 pit I see it as an interesting statement about Microsoft as well as an opportunity in the future. 1) Microsoft is typically thought of as developers tools - they are now wanting to offer a creative suite and a much broader offering... they will have some room to grow in educating their audience to this fact. You could even tell from the line of questions in most of the panels - yes, there were some designers in the rooms but mostly it was a technical slant for sure. 2) Project Management and Process tends to have a high percentage of women and these discussions dominated a lot of the dialogue at Mix (not to mention it's one of the key messages they communicate about their products). Where were the PMs? There weren't many at all actually. I would like to see Microsoft offer either a track or a greater number of panel discussions about how you actually bring these pie-in-the-sky discussions to life in the real, practical, world we all work in. What do these project plans look like, what do the estimates look like, how do you resource and allocate teams - the panels that focused on workflow were packed every time and leaving them, all the follow up discussions were "wow, great ideas but how are you actually making this happen" (message to Chris Bernard: I will happily sit on this panel next year). 3) Demo something with a female target. All the demos were really cool but centered mostly around a male target - I would love to get a JAG example demonstrated in the keynote (ok, I'd settle for a breakout session). It'd be pretty sweet none the less. The female target online is enormous and one of the fastest growing... address it!
Fun, yes. Educating, absolutely: Of course we had a great time at this conference. We also learned a lot about what Microsoft is doing, what other agencies are doing and what our competitors are up to. Usually we are extremely tight lipped in our industry about 'how' we do our jobs. At these conferences though, one of the main purposes is to kind of pull back that curtain and have an open dialogue. As I said before you may not learn anything totally 'new' but it does make you think more about what we do and how we could do it better. It spurs a lot of creative thinking and it renews your excitement for what a cool industry (and great company) we work for. So I would encourage anyone thinking about going to one of these conferences to do it... not just Microsoft of course, there are plenty to take advantage of including some really great discussions that we learned are happening at the Illinois Institute of technology... It's not Vegas but I'm sure it'd be pretty interesting.
-Nicole
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