Promując nową wersję programu FogBuzz Joel Spolsky odwiedził wiele miast w USA i kilka w Europie. Na łamach magazynu Inc. podsumował swoje doświadczenia z organizacją i prowadzeniem tego typu imprezy. Wskazówki zebrane są w trzech punktach i dotyczą: podróży lotniczych, prezentacji i niezbędnego wyposażania.
Wybrane wskazówki Joela Spolsky:
- We fly first class. This eliminates lines at check in, so we can show up at the airport later (and take earlier flights, leaving more margin for error). At many airports’ security checkpoints, first class passengers can use priority lines. On the better airlines, our luggage comes out first. And if something goes wrong and a flight is cancelled, as a full-fare first class passenger, we’ll have priority on the next flight out.
- We scheduled most of the travel in the early afternoon, when airports are relatively quiet. Most people want to take morning or evening flights, to avoid wasting the best part of the day, so airports seem to have something of a lull in the early afternoon. This worked well for the world tour schedule: we did most of our demos in the morning, then headed straight to the airport.
- Ban PowerPoint. People don’t want to hear bullet points about all the wonderful benefits of your wonderful software. They want to see it work. They’re smart enough to figure out how it would benefit them.
- The people watching your demo watch TV, they go to football games, and most of the things that they watch are very professionally done and have very high production values. If you don’t live up to those values, you’ll look bad in comparison. I try to watch video of myself to learn how to be a better presenter–recently I realized that it looks surprisingly sloppy when I just let the microphone wire dangle randomly instead of hiding it in my jacket. We have a carefully chosen soundtrack of music (we got a license from BMI to play music in public) to play before and after the demo. All our graphics are professionally done. We even wore polo shirts with a custom embroidered kiwi where the alligator should be.
