1© 2016 The MathWorks, Inc.

What we learned from #CMGimPACt Conference Attendee Interviews

By Anoush Najarian • MATLAB Performance Team • MathWorks Boston CMG • #CMGimPACt Conference Committee • CMG Board of Directors @anoushnajarian

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TL;DR

▪We interviewed with ~40 #CMGimPACt attendees▪Questions we asked:

– What brings you here?– What is going well?– What can we improve?

▪What we learned:– Why did our attendees come CMG? • To build a community, to learn, to present– Continue to offer a variety of content– Open up access • Improve (conference) website. YouTube/simulcast. Papers to the people!– More rich case studies, best practices, tools– More vendors • Vendors help us learn about tools and best practices – Improve outreach • More people and companies can get value from CMG. Advertise

smarter. Target executives, too.

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How we prepared this report, and how to read it

▪Why are we doing this? • To give our community a voice, to generate ideas that will help CMG grow

▪What did we do? • During every meal and break, stop by a table, ask a set of questions to each member of the group, and take notes

▪How did we produce this report? • We analyzed our notes using Contextual Interviewing techniques.

▪ Legend– Something we’re great at– Something we’d like to improve– An idea“” “direct quotes from our interviews”

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Why do we come to CMG? To build a community!

▪ “Reunion”▪ “A family”▪ “Connect, network”▪ “Meet people like me”▪ “Here because of Claire!”▪ “Friendship, community”▪ “Building a network”

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Why do we come to CMG? To learn!

▪ “New ideas”▪ “New information” ▪ “Get better at what I do”▪ “Learn tech”▪ “Important to stay up to date on technology”▪ “Professional growth”▪ “Love the classes, took 5 in a day”▪ “To know the state of art”

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Why do we come to CMG? To present!

▪ “In development, merely need to say you are talking, submit abstract and be accepted, rare to refuse”

▪ “Wrote a research paper presenting results”▪ “Present findings of research”

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Continue to offer a variety of content

▪ “Many types of sessions”▪ “So many tracks, variety”▪ “Different topics”▪ “Like the variety of topics. Couldn't go to a separate conf for each topic”▪ “Wide variety of topics”▪ “Not only performance!”▪ “Focus on performance and capacity planning, not other topics”▪ “Don't do side topics! E.g., talk development process - too broad. Security

angle - don't care. Go to security conference for that! Core of capacity.”

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Conference Delivery: what was awesome

▪ “Well-organized”▪ “Hotel, staff nice, personable here”▪ “Who is your competition? Share? CMG does better for community-

building; there, on own for lunch and dinner”

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Conference and Content Delivery: what to improve ▪ “Classroom-style tables for longer sessions”▪ “Two rooms on 2nd floor tough to get to”▪ “Have track names – e.g., mainframe, windows”▪ “Offer sessions more than once (schedule conflicts)”▪ “Improve website. Hard to navigate session using laptop”▪ “Printout of schedule”▪ “Cannot build personal schedule on website”▪ “Way to ask questions, say on the blog”▪ “Want a way to get insight into problems during the year,

e.g. why am I seeing 0ms response time? ▪ “Simulcast talks”▪ “Put talks on YouTube”▪ “Provide download site for updated papers”▪ “Don't wait 2 years to open up access to papers”▪ “Nov. conference but subscription begins only in Dec.”▪ “Authorization to publish form is onerous”▪ “More exciting place, like Vegas”▪ “More parties!”

Better use of space

Improve (conference) website

Open up access!

More entertainment

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What content worked well?

▪ “Security & perf convergence”▪ “Containers, Docker”▪ “Perf testing”▪ “Security”▪ “Java 8”▪ “Intel talk was good!”▪ “Like theory, like Bruce McNutt”▪ “Liked Chris Greco's talk”▪ “Invited speaker sessions good”

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What content do we want more of? Rich case studies, best practices, tools!

▪ “Have straightforward case studies, want more in-depth”▪ “Things I can apply”▪ “Experience that can cross platforms”▪ “Documented process that works in production environment”▪ “See what other companies are doing”▪ “Insights how others have solved problems”▪ “More use cases, presentations on how to fix problem”▪ “More case studies, how are people solving problems?”▪ “How did other people solve problems?”▪ “What people are doing, how they implement solutions”▪ “Standardize on tools”

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What content could we use more/less of?

▪ “Less on queueing theory”▪ “More emerging tech”▪ “More on Hadoop”▪ “More on Big Data Analytics”▪ “More on monitoring and alerts”▪ “More on real-time scenarios”▪ “More info on how to generate data for scalability/capacity testing”▪ “More on tools – which ones to use? E.g. <mainframe tool X> easy but not

accurate”▪ “Sessions for newcomers, like at IBM mainframe conference”▪ “More technical papers”▪ “More on Best Practices. Need to have a system within monitoring”

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More vendors!

▪ “More vendors to learn from”▪ “Want more learning about tools from vendors”▪ “Limited presenters - only 1 APM solution”

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Improve outreach!

▪ “Learned about CMG accidentally”▪ “CMG - didn't know it existed!”▪ “Advertise - people like me not aware about CMG”▪ “Advertise more online”▪ “Focus on which people you want to be attending. More people can get

value from CMG”▪ “Look for sponsorship for CMG - can talk to a lot of companies!”▪ “Collaboration with IEEE publications”▪ “Learned about this at Performance Engineering Summit”▪ “Want this learning to hit executives”

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Value

▪ “If you want a conference on Capacity, this is it! (CMG)”▪ “CMG is still important!”▪ “I can only go to 1 conference a year”▪ “When I was not in development, needed to and couldn’t prove value of

attending”▪ “stpcon has 2 days of workshops, easier to prove value!”

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Thank you!

References: Interview data: raw quotes and tags

Would love to hear your thoughts on this!@anoushnajarianAnoush.Najarian@mathworks.comlinkedin.com/in/anoushnajarian