Build a learning organization - tech talk

One of the first few initiatives I started in KMS was the Monday tech talk tradition. Nowadays we almost have one tech talk every Monday. Sometimes we have too many topics that we have to add another tech talk session on Thursday. We record all the tech talks for folks who cannot attend, and for presenters to review their speeches. Team members use tech talk opportunities to brag about their achievements, share their technical innovations and best practices, and practice public speaking skills. It is no doubt a good thing, right? But it was not like that when I started the Monday tech talks. Engineers are not the type of people who are naturally inclined to talk comfortably in front of people. And AWS engineers are usually very busy. Why do they want to spend another hour to talk about things they already know? The first round of tech talks I had to encourage, beg, coerce and sometimes trick people to do the tech talks as favors to me. One mental break through I had was a story I heard from another AWS director. A common excuse for people rejecting to do tech talks is “I don’t have time to prepare.” So the director said: “Don’t prepare. You have something to share, just start talking.” But he would record the talk and later give 1 or 2 feedbacks on what went well and what could be done better to get the message out. I tried the same idea and it worked. KMS tech talk is a safe, internal, friendly venue for team members to share and learn together. It is not the Principal Of Amazon style formal talks, or external ReInvent talks that need hours or days of preparations. It is an open mic stage! But I always try my best to give some constructive feedbacks to presentators. When I hear about something cool from a project, I often ping the project lead: “how about a tech talk about xxx?” For folks who are shy about presenting publicly, I offer to go over their materials and do a dry run with them. There are common pitfalls of tech talks: 1. Talk too fast 2. Try to cover too many things 3. Too high level, no substance 4. Too much details, listeners lost in the weeds 5. No interaction with listeners I find tech talks are great venues to practice Customer Obsession. It is not just “what you can or want to talk about”, it is “what listeners should and can get out of your talk, then work backwards from there.” Gradually tech talks in KMS become important data points to evaluate engineers’ readiness for the next level: have they done tech talks? Another important benefit of tech talks I should mention: “The best way to learn is to teach, and tech talk is a way of teaching. “ As the organizer of KMS tech talks for five years, I did many tech talks myself. I can attest that I often gained deeper level understanding about a topic while I was talking about it in front of people. “The more you give, the more you get back.” That is the motto of tech talks.