Speaking at my first SUG-CON 2022.

November this year I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at SUG-CON Melbourne. It’s been a long time coming and felt more than a little overdue - having worked on Sitecore for about 7 years already. With more than a few builds under my belt client side, and with smaller Sitecore Partners, and now one of the largest at Deloitte Digital - I still felt like an imposter. All these Sitecorians with incredible technical prowess can be a bit intimidating.

Meeting a lot  people including Tamas Varga, and Greg Baxter face to face for the first time was a blast, and the Sitecore user group really is as friendly and open as people say. If you haven’t heard of it the Sitecore community has a user group conference that gets the Sitecore community together and enable a heap of knowledge sharing, and the chance to get re-invigorated with the latest tools, products and ideas. This years Melbourne event was held at the stunning Intercontinental hotel in Melbourne, and the sessions were spread across two rooms - one for the techies, and a second for all of us strategy and marketing folk, perfect! I went to as many sessions as humanly possibly, mixing it up across the two genres and getting a lot of insights from each.

When it came to give my talk I had the usual jitters, until some one stopped me on the way to the stage and said “just be nervous enough to tell your story and no more - you’ll crush it!” I thought that was a pretty good way to think about public speaking and it genuinely helped me frame my thoughts.

By the way my session was call Accelerated Personalisation - where I looked at the seemingly huge divide between the digital services we use everyday as consumers - and how different our digital experience is as Citizens using government services. I’ll be putting together a post on this talk and some of the interesting feedback I’ve gathered since.

I can fully recommend Sugcon - wherever you are in your Sitecore journey, anywhere in the world. The community is awesome, full of knowledge and it’s one of the best ways to get involved, build your network and new friends. See you next year.

So cool to speak for the first time at Sugcon, it won’t be the last.