Conference Reflections and Channel Reset

0:00Boom, hello.

0:01We're back from conference.

0:04I've been back for a while, but um I just took a took a short break post-conference just to reflect, reconnect with people, and also just catch up.

0:12When you when you go to

0:14a conference for a week, um you kind of lose three weeks in the real world.

0:17You the week you went, the week of stuff you should have done, then the week catching up.

0:22Those are all things you just don't get back.

0:24So I spent the last week just catching up.

0:26But

0:27Um I wanted to do this quick video to touch on three things.

0:31I had one finger up then I realized there's actually gonna be three things.

0:35Post-conference reflections.

0:37um just quickly reflecting on sort of the biggest takeaway from the conference itself.

0:42Number two, um

0:44A little bit of a reset that I think has to happen with the channel and I I think I'm gonna say the brand, but I don't really have a brand, but

0:53I kind of do so the brand in general and then number three kind of what that means.

0:58So yeah, let's get stuck in.

1:02So first out of the bat, conference reflections.

1:05I really enjoyed conference.

1:06I think my view is somewhat biased.

1:08I haven't been to conference in five years, so it I cannot separate the euphoria of meeting everyone again.

1:14People I haven't met for a long long time.

1:17them engaging with them and just having conversations I should have been having all these years in sort of one critical mass over three days.

1:24Um

1:24However much I can try and separate that from, you know, the the sort of objectivity of judging the conference, I can't.

1:30So for me I think conference was great.

1:32I think next year I'll probably have a different view.

1:34But I really, really enjoyed it.

1:36Um it was actually really nice to

1:39I think go to the conference where I think even people who've been to more recent conference will agree had already been through what I would call a a couple of uh trials and tribulations.

1:50So the last two years

1:51the conference uh you know took some shots and it kind of missed and I it feels like this conference addressed much of that feedback.

1:58There's so much more feedback I'd love to see addressed um you know some of it

2:03small as you know making name badges a little bit easier to read from afar all the way to just structural things around how the conference was set up.

2:11But to

2:11You know, I'm not a I'm not a conference organizer.

2:13I'm sure the teams think about these things all the time.

2:17Um, and so you know, I'll leave that to them to sort of um uh sort of engage with.

2:21One thing I will say though is about the keynote and about the actual sort of keynotes in general.

2:28I realized when I was there that the keynotes are a production.

2:34They're not keynotes.

2:35What I mean by this is that the keynotes are done very much to be a recorded activity that is played out by many people in the community.

2:44that generates snippets, that generates content for marketing and social media teams to get out there for the next four to five months to really push

2:53sort of this statement about where the product is going.

2:56And so when you sat there in the room, it can feel like you're being performed too.

3:02And there are very few opportunities where actually you feel like you're directly being engaged.

3:06When I did my conference summary, you'll notice there are moments where

3:10in the keynote you know Ryan calls out people in the crowd but then it flips a switch and it goes into sort of the product vision and where the future is going and at that point they're very much speaking to the wider world

3:22not just people who are at the keynote.

3:24And so for that reason, as someone who's there and you're sad in the room, it can feel a little bit quiet, can feel a little bit sort of lonely, even just looking around the room.

3:32You can kind of

3:33chart these moments because you can see when people are on their phones and when people are really dialed in.

3:37You can see all of those moments.

3:38So you know to me it really stood out at this conference and I think

3:42I always just remind people that hey I don't think I don't think everything we see in a keynote is designed to be pitched at you.

3:51Devs on stage, very different.

3:53That is entirely for the people in the room at that moment.

3:56And the main product keynote probably I'd say 80-20, 20% for the people in the room, 80% for everyone else in the world who needs to understand what's going on with Tableau.

4:07Okay, so that's sort of the keynote in conference.

4:09The other the other thing I want to take away from conference is I think this is gonna be this is gonna sound critical, but it's it's it's entirely not.

4:16This is just uh a side effect of I think Salesforce acquiring a a brand and a product.

4:22Um and that is when we talk about features, when we talk about sort of visions, when we talk about how how you build the things that we need as analysts

4:36uh there are sort of two places you can come at it from.

4:40So the the first place is a a a place of understanding, which is

4:44I understand my customers really really well.

4:46I've I have a dialogue with my customers that I've been having for a long long time and I understand their needs very well and therefore I'm able to sort of translate their needs

4:58and convert them into sort of um this really difficult space where, you know, spoken truths and uh, you know, revealed beliefs that c you know can can can actually be entirely different coming from the same person.

5:12Then the other side is this sort of visionary perspective, this sort of idealistic world.

5:18You're building a capability for a future that doesn't yet exist, but you're trying to do your best guess as to, you know, what's gonna be there when you get there.

5:27and what you should expect.

5:28Now, Salesforce very much live in that latter world, yeah, trying to build for the future, trying to build for that end goal and trying to do that in an idealistic way, which sometimes means you have to be bro brave and bold, you have to make decisions about today

5:42that you're not entirely 100% sure of.

5:44But this this is sort of where my point really sits.

5:47Regardless of where you sit with both of those

5:50The number one thing that guides the way you make decision is the intuition you have for the product.

5:57And by that what I mean is

6:00Um if I how do I explain this?

6:03Um if you've played a sport, let's say let's take that.

6:07Sport is a good one 'cause I think, you know, most people have played a sport, and if you don't, you've at least watched a sport.

6:13Each sport

6:15Has a set of rules and a set of dynamics that play out in real term and you know how they affect the game.

6:20You know how they change the outcome.

6:23And without in without that intuition

6:26You can't watch the sport and enjoy it.

6:28So what I'm talking about there is, you know, in football, in soccer, as you would say in America, in in tennis, any any sport you play in golf.

6:36There are certain dynamics which if you don't understand make it very hard for you to enjoy watching and partaking in that sport

6:45However good you might be, however well-intentioned you might be.

6:49And lacking that intuition means you just you don't quite hit that experience in the best possible way.

6:55I think this is where I've arrived at when it comes to the product direction and development.

7:04I'm being very careful with the words I use here because what I don't want to do

7:08It's point of finger at a group of people, because uh things I say sometimes just get you know extrapolated beyond belief.

7:15But

7:16When you're picking a direction, when you're picking a vision, when you're picking an area to go go with with a product, I think Salesforce as a group, as a whole company, is still getting to grips with that sort of

7:31nuanced understanding of the mechanics that really make the brand tableau tableau.

7:37Yeah.

7:37Really small things.

7:38Really small things we've come to expect in desktop.

7:41Really small things we've come to expect in the browser, for example, using Tableau Press.

7:46or Tableau Cloud, there are some sort of learned behaviors, whether it's the way you choose a palette or the way you add a sheet or the way you do something.

7:54That are just intuitive that if you don't understand those things and you don't bring them through in the new product, it actually makes a new thing feel very unfamiliar and very much not the brand of Tableau.

8:07Okay.

8:08And that doesn't that doesn't mean to say you shouldn't reconsider those things and, you know, understand whether you should bring them through to the new product.

8:16If you're building something new

8:18You should also reevaluate how much of that old stuff should you bring forward.

8:22It doesn't make sense to bring it all forward.

8:23Some of those things were designed in a world where, you know, always think of Tableau being designed in the world where in HTML tables

8:31was still a HTML tag element.

8:33Today, I don't I don't know anyone who writes HTML for a stars and B, um I don't know anyone who uses the table tag in HTML n nonetheless even understands HTML because it's kind of being done by AI and all the

8:46automated wonderful systems like Squarespace and Webflare and all that stuff.

8:50No one really writes HTML anymore.

8:53So all of those things

8:57needs to be reevaluated.

8:58But if you don't have the intuition to know what's important, to know what you should take forward, what you should leave behind, and what can you sort of you know

9:08deprioritize because actually this other experience is more important.

9:12If you don't have that intuition, it's really, really hard.

9:14And I think for the first time I'm starting to see this play out in in the vision and everything.

9:20I think this is the sort of

9:21underlying thing that really explains a lot of the decisions that I've sort of been frustrated with and having gone to conference and talked to a ton of people, this to me is the number one point.

9:30This to me is sort of the number one, I guess, insight or understanding that I have around

9:36where these debates come from.

9:38We we have all these discussions because we have a different perception on

9:44on where that intuition should fall rather than what it is or how it works.

9:50So um take that for what it is.

9:52Um to me that's sort of the number one thing that understood.

9:55It doesn't

9:56Doesn't mean anything needs to change today.

9:58It doesn't mean that you know Tablet needs to go and find more people who know core better or not.

10:03That's that wouldn't actually help, um, because i i in a weird way

10:08The only way you get better at the intuition bit is actually just working more with the product and building the product more and putting it in front of more people.

10:15So

10:16getting the beaters out, getting everything in people's hand and seeing that feedback come back.

10:20I think there'll be a rude awakening in that process where you'll understand how little you know about a process and people's expectations of that process.

10:27And and I think from there

10:30If you can at least generate a good mechanism to you know sift all that feedback, then I think you'll be in a good place.

10:36So um yeah

10:38I think that's it.

10:38That's all I have for conference.

10:40I'm not gonna revisit conference.

10:41I was really getting worried for a minute that I turned the channel into a reaction channel.

10:47This is why I just didn't post any videos either, because I had lots to say post conference, but I just thought you know what no if I

10:53I do like five or six videos I wasn't gonna do.

10:55It's just gonna turn into a conference reaction sort of channel.

10:58I don't want it to be that.

10:59Um

11:01The amount of people who I spoke to at conference who said, Hey, I love the tips and tricks that you show was really, really overwhelming, but it sort of rung home to me that yeah, people find you not because they're looking for conference content, not because they're looking for your reaction on something, they find you because they get stuck.

11:16stuck on something they go on Google and boom they get you um in in this search so yeah um we'll we'll uh we'll dial back the reaction content now on that front

11:30I had a lot of reflection about the channel.

11:32I think I've done um over 500 videos.

11:35Uh on average, you know, people spend five minutes per video.

11:39So um just doing the maths like

11:42In my head, I always think that's an incredible amount of people to sort of reach out to.

11:47And you know, the videos can be short and long.

11:49It doesn't matter really about the length.

11:51But the point here is that um

11:53the thing about the length of masses is how long it takes to make them.

11:56And I think um the biggest uh uh like uh revelation to me at least after you know asking how the conference was, after asking how the keynote was, the number

12:06three thing that people asked is about how to make the content and whether I did it full time and actually I think to most people surprise I don't do it full time.

12:14I think people who know me well enough know that I don't do this full time.

12:17I do this in a little window between 9 pm

12:21and midnight, when I have time, after a full day's work as a consultant, I'm at Aim Point Digital, um, after being a father of three, after being a husband, after being a a friend and, you know, family member to my uh

12:36close and distant family, after all those things, that's when I make content and I just happen to squeeze it enough in there that I'm able to get some of this sort of output done.

12:45And the video editing and the the production is actually a hobby of mine.

12:50So

12:50I do it because I enjoy it.

12:52I have a camera, I have all this stuff, and I'm just learning how to use it and you know make it better.

12:57You see the production quality, I see that as a challenge in this skill that I'm developing that I then put to use on this channel

13:03to sort of further the content.

13:05So that is all good.

13:06Now that time is very hard to prioritize and I think I've made a mistake in the last six months where I've just decided

13:14every opinion I have, I should put it in a video.

13:17When actually in real terms there's one big problem with videos and that is people don't watch all of them.

13:23And people don't watch the entire video either.

13:26Very few

13:26I think about five to ten percent of people watch all my videos all the way through.

13:32That's a very small percentage of the what 50 to 60,000 people who watch a video every single month on my channel

13:39Majority of people spend roughly 4 to 5 minutes, and the average video on my channel is roughly 10 to 15 minutes

13:46depending on the video.

13:47Now I've been trying to make them shorter and a little bit more punchy and those have worked really really well.

13:51And so I've taken the memo and understood that more three minute videos, more quick videos and also more shorts.

13:58Shorts are b bizarrely very very popular.

14:00They're very hard for me to justify because the format of the screen is not quite suited to sort of, I think, the way I like to record, but nonetheless, that is something that's gonna have to change.

14:10Um and then a lot of my thought pieces, reactions, as you said, um a lot of them don't have to be videos.

14:16A lot of them could just be written content, um, a lot of them could be uh something brief um i in a different format.

14:23So

14:24Post-conference I reflected on this and I thought, you know what?

14:27I need to make more impactful videos.

14:31I need to get the thoughts

14:35That I think should always be videos written and shipped and not make the video.

14:40Just let those thoughts be written somewhere, share them, and for the people who really enjoy them, they'll still have access to them there

14:46But I also need to meet this need and this is something very interesting.

14:50The amount of people who I talk to who ask me a an opinion about a topic

14:55that I already made a video on was very interesting and I I kind of would I s a couple of times I flipped up the video and I said, Hey, here it is.

15:03And they were like, oh when did you make that?

15:05Like six months ago.

15:06I was like, oh okay, wow, I missed that.

15:07It was like

15:08Yeah, it makes sense, you know, YouTube won't always show you all my videos as an algorithm and if MrBeast turns up it's gonna show you one of his videos over mine.

15:16That's inevitable.

15:17But the thing I need to solve for is that

15:21I need to sort of start creating content in different formats.

15:25And I've put this off big time.

15:27I've I've really put this off big time.

15:30And the website's probably one of those one of those things.

15:33Um anyone who ever starts a website project will tell you that you always realize you've bitten off more than you can chew.

15:39And this is me with my website.

15:40I think

15:41I'm now a month and a half uh a year and a half into trying to sort of update it and I got stuck on fundamentally just how to organize content given how many videos and stuff I have.

15:51So

15:52That project I think has to come to the fore and I need to rethink it to think about a website that hosts both video and written format in a in a way that is easy to search.

16:06and easier to find on the internet.

16:08So those are sort of the two things.

16:10There's also AI and a bunch of other things to sort of throw into that mix that are, you know, gonna make this super interesting because

16:17Um I also don't want to just become like a a content farm for an AI AI service.

16:22So um that doesn't mean I'm gonna put it behind a paywall, it just means I need to think more creatively and more

16:28Useful about what is valuable to you versus what is valuable for a search engine versus what is valuable from like a

16:35an indexing perspective.

16:37So you you have to be able to find it, but you also don't want it to be designed entirely for the machine.

16:42You want it to be designed for the end user.

16:44So just playing around with different formats, different platforms, mediums, substack, all of these things

16:49Trying to find a good vehicle for which I can send content out, some of it written, some of it video, some of it a static website, and that's easy to use.

17:00So that brings me to my final point, which is this is gonna take time.

17:03I think for the first time in a long time

17:08I will probably only make the overview video of 25.

17:142

17:16I I have to do this because I feel like I'm making better quality videos that are more important.

17:24The first one is I'm doing a uh a masterclass with Kirk on the data model.

17:30That video uh we've we spent two and a half hours recording.

17:35It's taken me ten hours so far just to get through the initial edit

17:40and then I'm gonna spend probably another three to four days total doing things like animation, polishing it up, getting all the zooms in.

17:48That to me is where the real value is.

17:50And I've seen this, um, you know, lots of people make comments about other

17:54YouTube channels and other types of content they enjoy.

17:57And I think it's we fall into this sort of rabbit hole to think that, you know, people sit in different niches.

18:02But I'm of the opinion that look I've demonstrated how you can make content and a lot of people have stepped up and also started making videos and I'm going to continue to learn from other people about what works.

18:12And I'm going to follow in their footsteps.

18:14So I will make long form videos more like Donabel Santos, you know, try and go for the 40-50 minute uh things.

18:21I will brand them myself.

18:23So with Kirk, we're calling this a masterclass.

18:25This is sort of I think

18:27how I do things differently.

18:28I I I put a little effort into branding.

18:30That's I guess just where I come from.

18:32But um we're gonna try and really go for some of these formats.

18:36There's a chap called Barra.

18:38His channel is called Data with Barra

18:41He has a 24-hour Tableau course.

18:45And I looked at that and I was like, my word.

18:48Like that is that is dedication.

18:50But the thing is

18:52Um, you know, Barra himself started a channel and he was partly inspired by some of the content I make.

18:57Yeah, actually at the very beginning of one of his videos

18:59He talks about exactly that and I'm hugely inspired.

19:02He's inspired by me and now he's done something great and now I'm gonna be inspired by him.

19:07So I'm gonna build off that.

19:08I'm gonna build off that energy and I'm gonna really try and

19:11sort of go into this place where I don't think people expect me to make videos of.

19:15So you don't expect me to make a video like Andy Kriebel or a video like um you know

19:21Data with Barrel, Donabell Santos.

19:23There's so many different people making videos and content now.

19:26I can't really pick out them.

19:27You don't expect me to do that?

19:28That's because I just haven't tried and I think I need to start trying just to

19:32push the boundaries of what I can do and understand what works for different people.

19:35So um the first way you'll see that is shorts.

19:38That's probably going to be the most immediate one.

19:41You'll then see that with longer sort of masterclass style videos.

19:45So you've seen my crash course in Tableau Desktop hugely popular.

19:50I need to redo that for prep, desktop, server, cloud.

19:55I need to do it for all the core products and Tableau next.

19:58Um and then having gone through all of that, I'm gonna be very sort of deliberate about how I

20:05group and structure content so that I can use those assets as I make the video to repackage them into different formats.

20:13So once I've made a masterclass on the data model, once we've made content let's say on 25.

20:182 uh as an overview.

20:20I'm going to be able to take that, chop it up, do a written piece, take that, chop it up, write something for Sabstack or Medium, take that, chop it up, maybe do a webinar on it

20:32sort of be try and try and be more present in the community in different formats rather than just video because I recognize not everyone is a video person so I have to sort of grow myself and I have to do more to kind of

20:45uh push out into those areas and then a big a big challenge a big challenge that I've set myself is I do want to write a book.

20:54Now I've been so so against this for lots of different reasons

20:59But I think there's a way to do it that can really shake things up in the way that we write books in the Tabla community.

21:05Um, I'm I'm in discussions with a publisher and I'm really challenging the publisher on the way they want to do things.

21:11I'm really challenging them pushing the boat.

21:13on what they want to do.

21:14Like I went through their publisher contract and I tore it to shreds.

21:17I sent them about eight of eight different things that were broken about it and

21:22you know they responded.

21:24I think they've just never been really challenged on that thing.

21:26So um I really want to change the way this works.

21:29And I don't want to ditch my principles about access and accessibility.

21:34I'd love to be able to write

21:36something that is both accessible, affordable to everyone, but also maintain like fundamentally

21:45free to certain people who still need the resource.

21:48So I think there's really interesting ways you can play around with the model, with the it's sort of the economics model around publishing.

21:54There's a few ways you can game it

21:56And I think that's going to be something fun to look out for.

22:00Not anytime soon, but definitely over the next five years.

22:03That's sort of the challenge that I've set myself to take all this knowledge I know about Tableau.

22:08And do something that I don't think many people have done, which is to give the genuine overview of the entire Tableau platform and a bit of the history.

22:16in one place in a really sort of nice concise format.

22:19So yeah, look out for that.

22:21Look out for those thoughts.

22:22If I nudge you about it, um please, please engage me.

22:25I'd love to to sort of have your opinions.

22:27But

22:27Yeah, I thought I'd do a quick video.

22:29Um, no editing, just put this here, post it out, post-conference.

22:34If you're into it, great.

22:35If not, um that's fine.

22:37Let me know what you think in the in the comments below.

22:39I'd love to know your thoughts on some of this stuff

22:41And yeah, uh we'll get back to making videos very soon.

22:44The next the next video will likely be this masterclass with Kirk, probably in the next week and a half to two weeks.

22:50So

22:51Unless 25-2 comes out in between now and then, that will probably be the next video.

22:58Thanks for watching.

22:59I'll see you in the next one.