Giving a webinar – Lessons learned

Last week I spoke at the 6th ALE Bathtub. The ALE Bathtub is an interesting format: It’s held approximately once per quarter and each time 4 speakers present for 20 minutes each. The webinar format allows people from all over the world to tune in.
(ALE is the “Agile Lean Europe” network. I forgot why the webinar series is called “Bathtub”, sorry.)

Here’s my lessons learned:

  • You get to meet interesting people (organizers and fellow speakers)
  • We used GoToWebinar: Handling questions and the chat could be solved better, but it’s still a valueable tool
  • Trying the tech out beforehand pays off (feeling more secure and less fumbling around)
  • It’s weird to have no feedback whatsoever – Everyone but the presenter is muted and I closed the GoToWebinar panel (that shows questions and chat) because it irritated me on top of my slides. Very strange and disconcerting not to have any feedback loop
  • Prezi is not a good tool for a webinar – My audio broke off during every “slide” transition and I got to know this relatively late (see previous point ;))

For what it’s worth, you can find my talk about “Handling 3rd level support in Scrum” here.

A big thank you to the organizers and my fellow speakers for making this a very pleasant experience. BTW, the current organizers are looking for new fellow organizers 🙂

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