Quartet of Craft: The Pillars of My Proficiency
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A digital backend system for Web Summit
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Product Discovery with WeTranfer’s power users
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A validated concept for WeTransfer’s product evolution
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Item description
Strategic Innovation
Between the years of 2014 —2017, I was a graphic designer for the Web Summit. I worked with the marketing team to create content that would sell tickets, sales and partnerships teams to create collateral that would sell packages, and the production team to execute all the material required to make a 30,000 person, 1500 start-up, 400 investor, 100 speaker event engaging, responsive, exciting and memorable enough for them to return the next year.
After 3 conferences, repeating the same cycles, with the same teams, I began to see the system underneath us all, and figured there was definitely a way we could streamline a lot of it, to improve not only our own efficiency of sales and execution, but also for the growth of the network of attendees, and the propulsion that comes from their cyclical mergence.
I mapped it all, and in a deranged murder scene type of scenario, I showed the fragility of our current sales and execution systems to the CEO. He had had no idea about this reality, and agreed it was worth investing in for the reasons (and more) that I had pointed out.
With a team of engineers, he, I, and a product owner built and shipped a digital system that would replace the manual and disconnected processess of each of the teams, and streamline their communication with each other and the pipelines of people that subscribed to the Web Summit Universe.
That foundational technology would go on to scale the conference from a 30K person event to 80K. It would also go on to be used by the UN for the events they wanted to host with networks of cohorts that needed to be networked for societal and technological prosperity.
What I learned:
It’s a useful skill to be able to see the wood from the trees…
That perspective can be gained from paying attention to what’s going on beyond just your microcosm of existence…
Small Versions are probably better than small chunks…
