These are the slides and speaker notes from a talk I gave in Jan 2022 about effective Lightning Talks and why we developed this culture at Helpshift. I had previously given this same talk in earlier years at least twice. This week (in Oct 2024), the topic came up again, so I am lightly polishing and publishing these notes to the wider audience

Question to the Audience: What do you expect from Lightning talks?

⚡🌩️☁️❓

Audience Answers:

• To learn something interesting.
• If there is a big production issue, people should know about it.
• To learn how other departments are working.
• To teach how we've solved existing problems.
• To share the latest new thing that you learnt, and what problem it solved for you.
• To share general news about the well-being of the team, company, customers.
• To show off newly released product features.
• To show off deployment and release pipeline improvements.

These are all valid and incredible answers. Here are some I thought of as I prepared these slides

The 'Why' of Lightning Talks?

• To make each other better
• To learn about each other and our interests
• To bounce ideas off other smart people, and learn from unexpected sources
• To know what is happening in the company and even in the world

One of the best ways to become better is to actively share everything you are doing.

It is also a strong way to build great culture.

Question to the Audience: What are good lightning talks according to you?

• An interesting bug! Unexpected behavior or Security Exploit
• A debugging session! How did you follow the trail from symptom to cause?
• Productivity tips!
• Hobbies!
• Explainers!
• and so much more.

An idea that we were discussing yesterday: What if we build a search server to consume content from Confluence and make it easily searchable? I have nothing but this idea. Can I write a small bit of code or scripting and show what this might look like on some existing content? That would be a great lightning talk!

The 'How' of Lightning Talks

• When in doubt, keep it short. Ideally, 5 to 10 minutes.
• The longer the presentation, the more polished it needs to be to keep everyone hooked.
• Engaging the audience is a good idea. It's a core why principle.

Feel free to ramble if you are speaking for 5 minutes. People don't mind 5 minutes of not understanding something. 25 minutes of not understanding something on the other hand …

Some hacks we've come up with over time

• A strict moderator, who keeps a running clock.
• Compulsorily talk about Incident Reports. (better follow-through needed here)
• Talk about interesting bugs! (bring Support and Product anecdotes)
• Demo your features/changes. (tell us what you've been up to!)
• Talk to the audience, make it a conversation. Add MEMES!

Notes from the audience:

• Build a story!
• It's okay to talk about stuff outside of work also.

What is LT NOT

• Does not need to be a fancy presentation, we need to reset the precedent here.
• Does not need to be entertaining (though that's good to have)

The 5-min rule guards against something being boring to one segment of the audience. It also lets more people take the stage.

We all agree that we learn more in 2 weeks of Oncall than we do in 6 months of normal work. This is actually a sign that we are wasting our potential. Talking about incidents helps everyone learn!

Fin!

⚡ Thank you! Let's learn together! ⚡

We all agree that we learn more in 2 weeks of Oncall than we do in 6 months of normal work. This is actually a sign that we are wasting our potential, we can learn much more rapidly than we give ourselves credit for. Sharing and teaching what you know makes everyone better! Let's do more of it and get smarter all around!

Published On: Fri, 28 Jan 2022. Last Updated On: Wed, 09 Oct 2024.