Create space to celebrate expertise
All year long, our industry plays host to a broad array of conferences, retreats, and meetups. As driven professionals, we flock to venues around the world to connect with the community, get exposure to thought leaders, and feed our sense of identity through the presence of like-minded individuals. We readily accept the cost of admission, travel, and accommodations because, quite frankly, this still feels like the best way to learn and grow. Seeking expertise from outside our own walls has simply become the default approach.
Four years ago though, in an effort to evolve our summer retreats for our rapidly scaling team, I was part of a small group of people at Shopify that proposed an experiment that would end up challenging this idea. The concept was simple: host an internal event, nominate team members as speakers, and give them a stage to talk about the ideas that mattered most to them. We already knew that our team was filled with incredibly talented people, but we hadn’t anticipated how powerful this idea — which we called UX Summit — would eventually become.
UX Summit 2015
By the close of the event, the ah-ha was practically slapping us in the face.
In June 2015, after months of tireless work and preparation, we managed to gather our entire UX team at the Mayfair Theatre in Ottawa and treat them to a day of talks from their peers. Kevin rallied a fight against fragility in the design process, Alaine demystified the strategy in content strategy, Kyle dazzled the room with sleight of hand tricks as a metaphor for managing performance, while Cynthia and Serena delivered personal and thought provoking examples of tragic design. Even I got a chance to share meta lessons on learning to learn as part of a lineup of 14 curated talks that left the room more engaged, motivated, and inspired by day’s end. The results were better than anything we could have imagined.
By the close of the event, the ah-ha was practically slapping us in the face. Through our scrappiness to pilot a new way to bring the team together, we had unexpectedly uncovered a gold mine for knowledge that had been readily accessible all along: our own team. In the years that followed, this little insight would go on to fuel 3 more UX Summits and countless other initiatives.
What we’ve learned
Today, UX Summit has grown to be an annual 3-day multi-venue event filled with talks and workshops for an audience of 400+ UXers. This summer, we even broadened the initiative to offer dedicated tracks for Engineer, Product, and Data, and rebranded the event as RnD Summit. In its latest rendition, this event has all the glam and glitter of a premium industry conference — including state of the art theatres, multi-day programming, speakers and attendees from around the world, TED-level talks (no exaggeration, I swear), engaging hands-on practicals, and of course, plenty of social events in between — but that’s not what makes it impressive. What leaves us in awe year after year is the quality of the content, calibre of speakers, and the inspiring dent the experience leaves on the team.
Dig deeper into the roster and amplify the voices that are less commonly heard.
Here are a few important lessons that helped us get here.
- Look for expertise across your entire team. Your team is made up of brilliantly diverse minds rooted in different experiences, interests, perspectives, tastes, and aspirations. Dig deeper into the roster and amplify the voices that are less commonly heard. It’s not only the usual suspects that have the brightest ideas to share. Every year, UX Summit features a handful of first-time speakers, although you might never know it from watching (due to the next lesson).
- Invest in speaker coaching. Offer structure, mentorship, and a feedback system to help individuals formulate, articulate, and deliver their ideas successfully. There are wonderful speaker coaches out there, but even leaning on the experienced speakers on the team can be hugely beneficial. Our chosen speakers go through 6 weeks of preparation, working with program leads, speaker managers, and speaker coaches to ensure they’re feeling polished and confident by the time they hit the stage — the impact of which goes a long, long way.
- Create the space to celebrate team expertise. Whether it’s a full fledged event, a weekly meeting, or anything in between, creating the environments and opportunities that allow your team’s expertise to shine is critical to their development and that of their peers. It’s an investment that gives back in wonderfully unexpected ways every single time.
Each year, by the end of the event, the audience not only walks away from the event re-energized about their purpose, better connected to their peers, and evermore curious about a wide variety of topics, but the participating speakers also become better communicators in their areas of expertise. In essence, UX Summit has helped many of us solidify and somewhat legitimize our own thought leadership. This in turn has extended into the creation of a handful of insightful articles, public speaking opportunities, and in at least one case, a book deal.
UX Summit is just one example of how we’ve been leveraging internal expertise as a means of making the entire team stronger. All year round, a multitude of internal workshops, events, and programs are hosted and led by the team, for the team. It’s truly one of our most productive reinforcing loops.
If you do this successfully, you inherently empower individual team members to become powerful levers for exponential growth for the entire company.
Similarly, these opportunities for fuelling internal growth exist within organizations of all shapes and sizes. Somewhere on your team is a Gene who’s ready to evangelize the importance of plain language in product content, a Lily who can stimulate the room on designing for all five senses, or a Ryan who can prove with hilarious conviction that boring UX is indeed the better UX.
You know the brilliant minds that make up your team and you should give them the support and space to celebrate their expertise. If you do this successfully, you inherently empower individual team members to become powerful levers for exponential growth for the entire company. Big or small, you can create a version of UX Summit that’s right for you. At minimum, it’ll become a more impactful way to leverage all the investments you’ve already put into external conferences.
Interested in celebrating and contributing your own expertise at Shopify? Check out some of our current openings.
