The one with all the Execs

Planning has never been my thing, but execution (especially logistical) has always felt very gratifying to me. Right from an early age, I’ve enjoyed being involved in events, mostly in a logistical capacity, starting with Diwali parties at my apartment aged 9. Who knew it’d matter 20 years later?

You might already have guessed where this is going… working for a startup never makes me feel like I can rest on my accomplishments, or get too comfy in my chair. My first event was precisely that — my work experience in microcosm. I’m summarizing my key learnings below:

1. Organization is everything
2. Make their problem yours
3. Balance content with contentment

Organize early and thoroughly. Watch as the best laid plans fail. Revert to your backups

A consortium, or any collaborative project(by definition) requires coordination between a group of people or organizations. Breaking it down to a more human level, it also means you need to get a group of adults to gel with each other, and work to address their shared needs.

The event

Unit21 — my company, organized a Fraud summit— an all day event bringing together Risk and Fraud management executives from the largest Fintech companies in the US, i.e., the who’s who of Fintech. No pressure, then.

Another piece of information that’s critical to keep in mind — people don’t openly talk about Fraud. Not least executives that are responsible for the safeguarding of their respective organizational interests, and in turn, their end customers.

Our goal was to create a culture that fostered a culture of sharing. Here’s what we shared (WWW)

• War stories: How Fraud and fraudsters affect their day-to-day lives
• Wins: What’s worked for each of these companies (split into focus groups) to help mitigate threats
• Wine.

Clearly, success at this summit was by no means a fait accompli. Everything had to be meticulous, focused, professional, detailed and yet….simple.

Is that… possible?

The first area we had to shore up was internal points of contact. My colleague on the events team was ... everything. Here’s how we split our responsibilities, broadly speaking.

1. Events coordinator: Make sure its worth people’s while.
2. Point of contact (moi): Make sure there are ‘people’
3. Manager/DRI: Ensure consistency, professionalism and positive brand association.

Our head of events made sure everything was inch perfect — our attendees’ travel, our chosen venue, the setting, the schedule, and the content.

My personal role was to coordinate with clients, help prep them for the content of our presentations, provide insight into our goals and overall, represent their 3am friend at Unit21. Further, we needed to ensure things internally were buttoned up — right from color palettes in our slides to product demos and use cases.

Make their problem the hero

In my experience, the best conversational ice-breakers are often a common love or hatred for things, experiences, people or situations. The success of our event hinged on one thing — focusing our collective energy to talk through our favorite F word (F…raud) and not on any solutions, products or sales pitches.

Every piece of content was geared to accomplish that very outcome. Perhaps my biggest learning as a product-minded person was to keep things simple. Suffice it to say that my first approach, which was to meticulously research the background of every attendee, and try to tailor their content requests, was…. shot down, and rightly so.

You want your attendees to do homework for an event that’s organized by you? What’s in it for them?

How we kept it simple

We split the rather large group of Fraud Fighters into groups of 3 each. Then, we asked them to write down their top 3 Fraud problems, and trends for the upcoming 12 months. What we gave them was Design Thinking-style notepads and pens.

You can’t really read anything — at the request of our attendees!

Then, we talked through these problems and found commonalities, which were driven home by our attendees when we showed them a well-timed product demo.

The outcomes? An API redesign for our Fraud DAO, and some new friends.

Balance content with contentment

We learned some key lessons on how to keep executives engaged

• Surround them with like-minded people: Practically speaking, people love to work talk with folks from their industry. All you need, is a little spark to set things off.
• Focus on the top line and not as much on the details: The devil is always in the details, but it’s less prudent to dive deep when you have limited time to connect with stakeholders that are higher up in their respective organizations.
• Effectively utilize your opportunity to meet with them, but ensure that they aren’t overwhelmed: Remember, this is about them! We staggered our presentations, and provided ample time for breakout groups/ personal networking, and didn’t restrict people’s thoughts or opinions.
• Show your credibility: We invited respected industry titans (outside of just our target segment) to endorse the work we’re doing, and show the attendees its potential value to the industry as a whole.

What success looks like

In the world of Sales, or Engineering & Product, it’s very easy to chase metrics. The next big sale. The next million users. With an event like this, the goal is to align it as closely to a company wide or team-wide North Star Metric, rather than attribute direct goals.

Most (and I mean most) people don’t go to wineries looking to sign vendor contracts. In our case, they came to meet their peers and understand how they could collaborate with these peers. The only metrics we were chasing were

• Exchange of ideas in a safe space
• A memorable experience
• A stronger network…… and we may have hit them all!

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed being a part of an event of this type — It’s rare that someone in the Engineering or Product world gets exposed to the hows and the whys.