My talk at Women Who Code

I’ve been a long time fan of Women who code, which is a non-profit organisation for womxn to connect, develop their careers and find jobs. I have attended a few online sessions in the past, and what better way to give back than to help others with the knowledge I have! I was very lucky to be invited to give a Technical talk during their two-day online conference called Connect Forward 21. The talk was titled “How I use empathy to design developer-centric products”

The talk is now available on Youtube!

Link: How I Use Empathy To Design Developer-Centric Products

The goal

For the last 4 years, I’ve been designing enterprise, developer-centric products, which has made me aware of all the technical and design challenges in this space, and I wished to communicate what I learned during this time to other individuals, who may be in a similar space or are just curious on how we approach design for dev tools. The audience was software developers, dev managers, designers, PMs and more. A lot of the audience identified as womxn.

Talk structure

During the talk, I focussed on my learnings rather than the design process and tried to supplement my ideas with examples. A lot of my talk was inspired by other talks and thought-pieces on similar topics. I divided the talk into three areas – Empathy, Strategy and Design Principles, and spent the most time on the QnA at the end.

Preparation

For a visual person like me, it is hard to think of the content without the visual direction. However, I encouraged myself to write at least 8000 words before starting any work on the visual presentation. Once I had a draft, I made several iterations to the graphic and illustrative style and the presentation layout, as I wanted it to look aesthetically pleasing and modern. I also wrote a lot of presenter notes but ended up using them only for practice, not so much during the final talk.

My visual conscience led to this clean modern style:

A week before the conference, by sheer coincidence, I went to a workshop called Speakeasy, which focussed on public speaking and I felt energised and confident to take on the talk after that, geared with real exercises to deal with the nervous butterflies. I was able to run a practice session with some lovely Atlassian women who volunteered to help.

After the talk

I thought it was well-received and retained engagement till the end, with over 70 participants on the call (which I am told is a good number for a paid conference) and had several questions and comments. I was elated to receive some personal messages too, like these:

I also got a 100 USD as an honorarium which I will be donating to one of my favourite charities.

What’s next?

I’m open to opportunities! I am so excited to keep sharing what I know and connect with others through this medium. I thoroughly enjoyed this exercise of preparing and sharing our work, and it wouldn’t be possible without the support of awesome colleagues, family and friends!