Learn the seven ideas that helped create a top-rated analytics workshop at AWS re:Invent

It was October 2018, and the annual AWS re:Invent conference was right around the corner. This time, I thought to myself, was going to be different. My plan was to participate in a supporting role, rather than as a speaker. I had been a speaker at both re:Invent 2017 and 2016. While the speaking experience is both thrilling and rewarding, I wanted to enjoy re:Invent from a different perspective. Attending in a supporting role would have been great for meeting customers, networking with colleagues, and enjoying the conference -- all while contributing something valuable. So, I signed up to support the delivery of several workshops. That was my plan.

One morning, less than two months away from re:Invent, I woke up to an email from the organizers of a workshop I had signed up for supporting. As my eyes quickly ran through the email, I sat straight up in my chair. The team who were supposed to lead that workshop were all too busy meeting a critical deadline. They were able to give this workshop only very little, if any, attention. Someone else had to develop and lead this workshop, or it would be cancelled.

Cancelling the workshop was a possibility, but it was highly undesirable. For one, the workshop entry had already been published on the conference's website. Customers had seen it, and many had already signed up to attend. The topic was clearly interesting to many. Cancelling it meant forfeiting a golden opportunity to help and educate customers.

A combination of factors led the original workshop owners to ask me to lead this workshop. But, agreeing to do so was a risky proposition. The timeline was extremely tight. The chance of failing to create a workshop worthy of re:Invent was high. If I had passed on the opportunity to lead it, everyone would have understood. On the other hand, if I accepted and somehow made this workshop a success, this could easily become a great story to tell (and document).

After some careful consideration, I took up the challenge and assembled a team. We had about six weeks to get from nothing but an idea to a high quality workshop that is worthy of our customers' time and attention. Not only did that happen, but also our workshop ended up ranking as the top analytics workshop at re:Invent 2018 by customer satisfaction. In this article, I distill what worked for us into seven ideas and share them with you. Although this was in a pre COVID-19 world, these ideas are applicable whether it's for a virtual workshop or a physical one.

1. Follow a story format

Your audience must come out feeling good about themselves. This fundamental goal permeated every decision we made while building and delivering our workshop. Having our workshop follow a story format made this overarching goal easier to accomplish.  In its most basic form, a good story has a hero, who has to overcome certain challenges, in order to reach a much-desired reward. Everybody loves to be the hero in an exciting story. At the very beginning of the workshop, we setup the story with our attendees being the hero data engineers. We aspired to make the workshop feel very close to a real experience a data engineer might have, including the dataset, the problem, and the solution. This immediately grabbed our audiences interest and attention.

2. Don't overwhelm your audience

Your audience must come out of your workshop knowing a little more than they did coming in. The keyword here is little. Some well-intentioned workshop creators pack their workshops densely with educational material to the workshop's detriment. It's easy to overestimate what the audience are capable of absorbing in a 2-3 hours sitting after a long conference day of attending other sessions and workshops. Instead of covering all interesting concepts, what workshop creators can do is to brainstorm a list of all the concepts they want their audience to learn. Then, they could take a closer look at that list, and aim to cut it down by say 40-50%. That's what I did for our workshop. I aimed to cover only the concepts the audience absolutely must learn to be able to solve a common problem. This helped simplify the workshop to the point where it would fit nicely within the allotted time.

3. Segment your audience and meet their needs

It is also helpful to think -- in the absence of data -- of your audience's proficiency of the subject matter as being normally distributed. A relatively small fraction will be beginners. The middle, probably largest, group would have a mixed bag of general knowledge of the subject matter. Let's call that group the intermediates. On the far end of the distribution, you will have a relatively small group of experts.

How do you cater for all of these very different groups with different needs? It is safe to assume that the largest groups are beginners and intermediates. For those two groups, getting lost and frustrated is a very common cause of dissatisfaction. So, to maximize impact and satisfaction, I designed 95% of the workshop content, including the activities and the guide, to cater for those two groups.

But, what about the experts? If the workshop was simple enough that they finished it on time, this in itself, would be a strong validation of their expertise. Such validation is rewarding. More importantly, I included an expert-level task at the end of the workshop activities. Experts would reach this task almost certainly before others did, giving them a good challenge to tinker with. At the same time, this task was labelled as an extra 'bonus' task, in order for groups one and two not to feel bad about themselves if they didn't complete it.

Problem solved, everyone happy!

4. Make progress very visible

In many workshops, the creators would start with some sort of a slide that shows what the audience should expect. They may call it agenda, objectives, list of activities, or what have you. When delivering the workshop, the presenters would then instruct the audience on the next activity to do, and then the next one, and so on. The initial agenda would be the only clear depiction of the overall workshop plan. In doing so, the creators rely on the audience to somehow infer progress from the current activity they’re doing. This simply doesn’t work. Your audience end up getting lost, especially the beginners group.

Instead, workshop creators should strive to make progress very visible to the audience most of the time. What could be a fun way to help our audience visualize the workshop's story and their progress through it? A game map, of course. The game map we used was complete with a ninja hero avatar, multiple levels, a final boss, and a reward. Every time the audience progressed from one level to the next, the hero avatar moved on the game map, making progress very visible. Judging by the reactions we got from our audience, I would say that they found it entertaining.

5. Mix instruction and practice

Every 'level' we had on our game map had both theory and practice parts. We explained the concepts the audience were about to apply. Then, we gave them enough time to complete the practical part. We kept the instructional part to around 10-12 minutes at most. We used a lot of visuals and steered away from text-heavy slides. We also followed a repeating pattern. We would start by explaining certain concepts, talking through one or two "What is ...?" slides.  We would then move on to show such concepts in action. Finally, we let our audience apply what they had just learned in the hands-on activity. One of the greatest benefits of this approach is keeping the audience engaged with the presenters throughout the workshop.

In contrast, I attended workshops in the past where the presenters started by going through a lot of background material. Then, they pointed the audience to a workshop guide to follow individually. The majority of the workshop's time was spent on helping the audience go through that guide, answering questions as they come up.

I am not a huge fan of this approach, for two main reasons. First, a sizable number of the attendees, especially the beginners and intermediates, can get easily get sidetracked when just following written instructions in the guide. This easily leads to frustration, disengagement, and attrition. Folks would simply bail out on the workshop and leave. In addition, those attendees who decide to hang in there will have to rely heavily on the presenters and their support team. This puts unnecessary strain on workshop staff for most of the workshop's duration. Second, from an attendee point of view, simply being handed a guide to follow is not engaging or entertaining in any way. In fact, it is downright boring. Everyone would follow that workshop guide individually, and the audience would miss out on having an exciting experience as a group. Again, this leads to disengagement and attrition. These two reasons alone are enough to steer away from that approach.

6. Create a prescriptive workshop guide

For the workshop's hands-on activities, the audience were guided by a meticulously written and tested workshop guide. I wrote the guide by going through the steps I would do to solve the workshop's different challenges and documenting each step along the way. It was a straightforward yet tedious and time-consuming work. The notable challenge with building a reliable workshop guide was overcoming one's own curse of knowledge. It's easy to fall into that cognitive bias and write a guide that a beginner or an intermediate practitioner finds confusing or missing important steps. To avoid that trap, I enlisted volunteers to test the workshop guide. We made sure our volunteers had a beginner to intermediate knowledge of the subject matter. That testing activity led to a lot of fine-tuning of the guide and how the steps were written.

7. Give them something on the way out

Everyone loves to leave an event with something valuable. Aside from the intangible heightened sense of achievement, we offered our audience stickers. Stickers are very cool. But, we would still be a bit light in the tangibles department. We wanted to offer a little extra something. That something was the workshop itself. Its guide, code, and even video tutorials for its activities -- all packaged together and ready to use later. Those who were unable to complete the workshop for any reason still had a chance to learn and practice.

But wait, there is more.

There were certainly more factors that contributed to the success of the workshop than the ideas I listed here. For instance, our team put an enormous effort into automating the boring parts behind the scenes, so that our audience could focus exclusively on the valuable learning activities. Finally, the most important factor, was that the team that created the workshop were all dedicated, detail-oriented, and smart professionals. They all committed to making this workshop a success, and without them it would have never happened.

Cover photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash.