『I haven't been to a conference in years. I think it's cost me.』のカバーアート

I haven't been to a conference in years. I think it's cost me.

I haven't been to a conference in years. I think it's cost me.

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I used to go to a lot of conferences. Then COVID happened, and I just... stopped. At first it felt like a win. No early trains. No hotel breakfasts. No lanyard. I could watch the talks online in my slippers.It took me a long time to notice what I'd actually lost. And it wasn't the talks.The best part of a conference was never on stageThink back to the last good conference you went to. I bet the thing you remember isn't a slide. It's a conversation.For me, it goes back to my first conference, @media 2005. At one point they did a sort of live blogroll, asking people who wrote well-known web standards blogs to stand up. They called out PPK (Peter-Paul Koch, whose blog I read every single day) and the guy sitting next to me stood up. The poor man spent the rest of the break being peppered with questions by me.I don't remember a single talk from that day. I remember that conversation. That's what conferences gave us: the chance to turn to the person next to us and ask.Those conversations did something your colleagues can't. Your colleagues are great, if you have them. But they work in the same organization, under the same pressures, with the same blind spots. They can't tell you how things work somewhere else. And a lot of in-house UX people don't have colleagues doing what they do anyway. They're a team of one, or a team of a few.Conferences and local meetups gave us that outside view almost by accident. Now most of us don't go. Budgets got cut. Travel got harder to justify. Meetups quietly fizzled out. And nothing really replaced them.And then the job changed under our feetWhat really worries me is that this is happening at exactly the moment we need each other most.AI has changed how we work, and it's still changing. Someone senior wants everything faster. We're relearning research, design and content in real time. And there's almost no established best practice yet, because it's all so new.I'll be honest. I don't know if I'm doing it right. I'm experimenting with new ways of working all the time, and some of them are brilliant and some are a waste of an afternoon.Take prototyping. I've stopped using Figma for it and now build prototypes in code with Claude instead. It made sense at the time. But Figma has changed a lot since then, and I honestly don't know if I made the right call. I don't have time to try every new way of working. What I'd really like is to ask someone who stuck with Figma how it's going for them. And I don't have anyone to ask.I suspect you're in the same boat. That's a strange position for a whole profession to be in. Everyone reinventing the same wheel, alone, at speed.What I've learned from running a communitySince July 2024 I've run Agency Academy, a community for agency owners and freelancers. We meet on a call every week and chat in Slack between calls.What surprised me is where the useful advice comes from. It's rarely me. It's another member who solved the exact problem last month.Unsurprisingly, for a room full of agency owners and freelancers, the topic that comes up most is winning new work. I thought I had a good handle on that in my own business. Then members started sharing what was working for them. Regular meetups with old clients. Hyper-specific SEO landing pages. Ideas I'd have dismissed as a waste of time if I'd read them in a blog post.But I didn't read them in a blog post. I heard them from people in the same position as me, who'd tried them and could tell me exactly how it went. That's very hard to ignore.That's the hallway conversation, except it happens every week, not once a year.So I'm starting one for in-house peopleIt's called UX Insiders, and I'm launching it in partnership with Smashing Magazine. It's for designers, researchers, UX leads and anyone championing UX inside an organization. Universities, charities, government and companies of every size.Here's how it works:A weekly call every Tuesday, 3:30 to 4:30pm UK time. Bring a problem, a question or a win.A private Slack for the questions that can't wait until Tuesday.Every call recorded with a summary, so you can catch up when you can't make it.It's in-house only, so people can talk openly about their organization without worrying who's listening. You apply first, just so I can check you work in-house. It takes about a minute.Founder places cost £49 a month billed annually (£588 a year) + VAT, for the first 25 members. That's less than most conference tickets before you've booked a train or a hotel, and it lasts all year. It can usually come out of the same training budget too, and you can pay by invoice.Nothing is charged until we launch on Tuesday 5 January. If fewer than 15 people sign up by Friday 11 December, it doesn't go ahead and nobody pays a penny.Apply for a founder placeRun an agency or freelance?Then Agency Academy is your place. Same format: a weekly call every Thursday and a Slack full of people who get it. Members even pass work to each other, which has a habit of paying for the ...
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