Creating a Conference Track: How I Built the QCon San Francisco Platform Engineering Track

How I approach designing and building a conference track, using the "Platform Engineering Done Well" QCon SF track as a case study

I missed posting last week as I was travelling and conducting final preparations for the “Platform Engineering Done Well” track that I was running at QCon San Francisco. I’m currently sitting in the airport lounge before flying home, so I wanted to share how I approach creating this conference track. The approach is similar to how I’ve designed and run single-track conferences. I’m assuming more than a few readers will be tasked with running a conference or small event within their developer relations or technical GTM careers.

I’ve been involved at varying degrees with running the QCon and InfoQ community for over ten years, with the last five or so focusing more on advising and leadership. I was also a happy community member before all of this. Hopefully, the brand values resonate with many of you. QCon is a top-tier conference with a skew towards software architects and senior practitioners.

Know your audience and their “jobs to be done”

When arranging this track, I was fortunate to know the audience well, having been involved with the community for quite some time. If you’re relatively new to a community, I recommend taking the time to understand the core persona of folks that you intend to attract to the event. I generally look at this from the perspectives of:

• Key role or job function

• Core demographics (location, age, etc)

• Seniority (entry-level, senior folks, C-level, etc.)

I also recommend focusing on the core persona’s “jobs to be done”. This is a well-known and well-used framework, and I find it very useful. However, I’m surprised how many folks don’t apply this to products outside the traditional definition of a “product”. In my mind, a conference and a track are a product, too.

I’ve been an attendee at several conferences where it’s clear that not much thought has been given to what I’m trying to achieve by attending the event. There is often a smorgasbord of talks, topics, and people without much obvious connection between them. Sometimes, arranging a collection of interesting people to talk about interesting things works (and can even be a lot of fun), but this often relies more on chance than design.

As an example for my QCon track, Justin Cormack, CTO of Docker, was the program committee member championing this track. He reached out to me with the offer of hosting, and during our initial call, he made it super clear that we should focus on the people aspects of platform engineering as much (if not more) than the technical aspects.

I knew the audience would be skewed towards platform engineers, infrastructure engineers, and DevOps folks, potentially including several enterprise architects. Most attendees would be from the US, particularly the Bay Area, Pacific Northwest, and Midwest. Most attendees would also be senior practitioners or aspiring senior folks.

After the chat with Justin, I brainstormed the primary jobs to be done as I wrote the track abstract. From my experience of presenting and attending other platform engineering conferences, and also all of the reading I have been doing, I figured some of the core jobs to be done would include:

• Designing and building a platform that developers want to use

• Convincing senior leadership to sustainably invest in building a platform

• Ensuring that the various roles involved with building a platform are aligned

With the core personas defined and rough outlines of the jobs to be done sketched, the next step is to find some people willing to speak to these topics.

Find the people, then the talk

Generally speaking, I focus on the people rather than the talk per se. I’ve found this a good shortcut to avoid bringing in the same speakers as every other event, and it’s also helpful in increasing diversity and being inclusive to new speakers.

Here are some of the approaches I used to recruit the speakers for my QCon SF Platform Engineering Done Well track:

• I connected with the awesome Hazel Weakly through a recommendation from Justin to read her blog that focused on developer tooling. The content was very interesting, and I contacted Hazel for a Zoom chat. We discussed practically all the jobs to be done I listed above, and Hazel had great experience and opinions on these. The rest is history!

• I was introduced to Smruti Patel via Will Larson. Will keynoted at QCon SF and was kind enough to introduce me to Smruti after I presented what I was looking for to spearhead the track and set the scene. Smruti rocked the opening talk of the track, and provided both a framework for and use cases for platforms.

• I discovered Yao Yue from her previous QCon talks. She had expressed interest to the QCon team about presenting her performance engineering work at Twitter, and I reached out for a chat. The ensuing discussion flowed super easy, and I was impressed with the scale Yao had worked at.

Once I’ve found the speakers—bearing in mind both diversity and also the overall narrative of the track—I’ll work with them to create a title, abstract, and talk structure.

Depending on how experienced the speakers are, I’ll also offer topic brainstorming, slide reviews, and practice presentation sessions. In general, I insist on at least seeing the slides before a presentation. You wouldn’t ship a product without at least stepping through the implementation, right? This also catches most of the accidental mistakes or faux pas I see (and it’s always good to remind a speaker of the event’s code of conduct at several points during the talk creation process!)

The final part of the process is to run the track and enjoy all of your efforts! On the day itself, I always focus on ensuring the speakers are well-informed and have everything they need to give the best presentation possible (which ranges from a last-minute pep talk, projector dongles, and coffee or water).

After the event, don’t forget to write up an event summary, too!

Want more conference organizing advice?

I hope this post has helped shed light on how I have designed conference tracks and picked speakers to present at events I have been involved with. Please comment below and let me know if you want more content.

I also offer ad hoc advising and fractional leadership for DevRel teams. Check the “About” page for more information.

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