If you fail to plan, you plan to fail vs no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Let me tell you a story of planning, failure and iteration while it's top of mind for me.

We have just finished two hectic days on the AgileData stand at Big Data London 2024.

It was a big event, with a reasonable level of investment required in both time and dolleros, especially when you are spending your own money not splashing VC funded cash as we were.

I did a reasonable amount of planning for this event, but one thing happened that was unexpected.

Well now with the benefit of hindsight I should have expected it, but that‘s the benefit of hindsight isn’t it.

Big Data London doesn’t charge attendees to go to the conference, it's free.  My understanding is it’s funded by the vendors who pay to sponsor the conference and stands.  As a result in 2023 they had over 15,000 attendees, and this year given how busy it was I assume it was bigger.

One thing most large tech &  data conferences are known for is SWAG. Free stuff that vendors give away at their stand to attendees, it is a master class in waste.  People fill up conference bags with crap they don’t really need and most of it gets dumped in the rubbish bin a day or two later.

I'm ambivalent about SWAG, it’s become a necessary conference evil.  

Years ago the consulting company I founded gave out high quality backpacks at a conference as SWAG, with the suggestion that the attendees of that conference drop the backpack into a box and we would donate it to a school child in need, a child who did not have a school bag.  You think every backpack would have all been gifted, but aren’t humans funny things.  However, that's a different story for another day.

For the AgileData stand at Big Data London I decided we would have 3 SWAG items to give away.

We took 1,148 mini Whittaker Chocolate slabs, so we could help UK people experience what the world's best chocolate tastes like.

The idea was it would be eaten on site, so minimal waste apart from the wrapper (all food at conference needs to be individual wrapped for health reasons).

3,000 ADI Laptop stickers, with 6 flavours of ADI.

Techies and Data geeks like to brand up their laptops, so there was a chance these wouldn’t be binned, but would actually be used.

And 100 packs of poker planning cards, each of the 52 cards customised with a different message of what we do, a unique QR code on each card which goes to a dedicated web page on our website that explains that thing in more detail.  I used these cards as props to help tailor the conversation with each person who visited the stand.

Each card had a flavour of ADI or some other part of our brand design elements and were grouped into 4 colours, Purple for the Personas we support, Blue for the Use Cases we deliver, Orange for the Product Features we have built, and Green for the  Learning materials we recommend.

Again the hope was these would make their way back to the offices not the rubbish bin and actually get used.  To be fair that was probably more hope than reality.

Most of the design elements on the poker planning cards are also on our t-shirts.  

You can see (and buy) those t-shirts over at:

https://ADT.style

I am pretty pedantic about t-shirts,  I have been for a long time.  I don’t like to wear crappy thin t-shirts, the ones that typically cost $3 USD a piece.  I wont buy these cheap ones to wear myself, and so I also won’t buy them to give them away.

I used to buy American Apparel as our t-shirt stock and now I tend to buy AS colour Classic if I can, they are great high quality t-shirts.

To buy one of these quality t-shirt stock and get them printed/branded, averages around $35 NZD a unit.

While I would have loved to give away hundreds of these T-shirts at our stand, buying them, getting them printed, shipping them to the UK, having them held in storage and then finally shipped to the conference stand was beyond the budget I wanted to spend.

Last year I did recce of the 2023 Big Data London conference and I decided that one of the stand location we could choose was being placed next to a queuing area for one of the big theatres.  People queue there for 10 - 20 minutes, and have nothing to do.

So that was where I picked our stand to be:

Our stand was near the end of the vendor hall.  So while we would have some foot traffic of people going to the theatre next to us and we would have people lining up with nothing to do, my hypothesis was we would need an interest magnet to get people to visit the stand afterwards.  Especially as AgileData is relatively unknown in the UK (at the moment).

So I hatched a cunning plan.

What would happen if we had a clothes stand with our t-shirts on it, visible for the people querying or walking by to see?

I think our t-shirts are unique and pretty cool, what would other data geeks think?

So we that what we did, we had the t-shirts out on display.

This pattern was a success, lots of people stopped by and we got lots of great comments on our t-shirt designs.  That then followed on to people asking us “so what does AgileData do?”

I was worried people would think the t-shirts were free SWAG and so we had a poster above the t-shirts that I thought was pretty clear that the t-shirts were for sale. It also included a QR code to make it easy for people to go to our ecommerce website to buy one if they wanted.

And this is where the plan failed its engagement with the conference attendees multiple times.  

First:

I took the screenshot of the t-shirt website when I was in NZ, and so the prices on the poster were clearly in NZ dollars.

This caused confusion for the UK punters.

Easy iteration, cross the prices out.  Then when people ask what they cost, say 18 quid (bargain for a quality and unique data t-shirt right?).

Second:

The fact that they were not free was not obvious.

People would walk up, flick through them to see what there was and then try to take one off the coat hanger and put it in their already overloaded SWAG bag.

Again reinforces the principle that subtle doesnt work and you need to make things very clear if you want people to know something, a principle we need to apply more in the data domain.

Easy iteration, hand write “Display t-shirt only, to purchase please scale QR code below”

So a couple of examples of the plan failing during engagement, and examples of agility where simple iterations fixed the problem.

Third:

People would often ask if they could buy one now, instead of having to order one on the website.

That one we couldn’t iterate on the spot.  

I think it‘s against the conference rules to sell physical things there aka in retail mode, I will need to check that for next time. Taking t-shirts we could sell at the stand would be an interesting idea to experiment with.  (would that make us data rockstars?)

Fourth:

Some people would ask what they could do to win a free t-shirt. I noticed this pattern too late.  

In hindsight I could have got them to linkedin connect with me, and then written out their names, put it into a basket and done a draw at the end of the conference where they could pick a t-shirt they wanted and take it with them.

Pattern idea for next time.

This idea wouldn‘t have been feasible this time even if I had thought of it in time

As I said we are bootstrapping so to save shipping costs, those t-shirts came over from NZ with me in my suitcase.  And because of the airline weight limit I didn't bring any other t-shirts with me. I will be wearing the AgileData branded t-shirts for the rest of my UK stay.

Who knew 18 quality t-shirts would be so heavy.

Fifth:

Disdain…..

It amazed me how entitled data people can be. Thats probably unfair to data people, there are entitled people across all domain, but this post is based on a data conference with data people.

The conference was free, they paid nothing to attend.

They typically all had conference bags packed with SWAG.

When we told attendees they could buy a t-shirt if they wanted one, most people said something like oh ok, and either scanned the QR code or just moved on.

But a disappointing number would actually scowl at us as if we had offended them.

Enough said, no plan to iterate that one anytime.

Sixth:

Humans are funny people, aren’t they?

We had a very small number of cases where when we were busy talking to an attendee, another attendee would try to take a t-shirt off the coat hanger and stuff it into their SWAG bag.

We actually had to ask a couple to remove it from their bags and give it back.

Based on the looks on their face, it wasn’t done by accident.

Funny old thing Data Conferences.

42:

A few things we would change next time, but overall the plan worked well enough.

The t-shirts got us noticed.

We got to meet and chat with some great data people after they had browsed the t-shirts.

And we got lots of positive comments on our branding and the t-shirt designs.  Given the designs for all but one of the t-shirts were based on my ideas, that gave me the warm fuzzys.

Pity selling t-shirts doesn’t pay as well as data work …..

So next time your data teams plan on what they will deliver and how they will deliver it, and then the actual delivery doesn’t quite go to plan, that is ok.

It’s just a plan.

Plans often don’t survive the first engagement with reality.

And thats ok.

Data teams with agility expect this.

They will just iterate, and carry on.