A few months ago, Shaun Lowthorpe put out a call on LinkedIn for people willing to share real‑life experiences of using business analysis at work. Although I haven’t done what you’d call traditional business analysis for years, I work in a Product led organisation, and I love getting up in front of a room and talking. So I volunteered, and Shaun kindly accepted.
I wanted to show how we use tools like Amplitude to test and measure the impact of user interface enhancements. After chatting with colleagues, I put together a short ten minute presentation about some of the A/B experiments we’d run to improve the guest booking details experience. I’d never presented this kind of material on my own before, so it was a little daunting. I was keen to make sure I had the details right, especially in case I was hit with any tricky questions.
Presenting can be unpredictable. Sometimes my energy doesn’t quite match the mood of the room, even after I’ve got them all to grin and wave for a photo. But the group from City College were already chatting when I walked into the room. They introduced themselves enthusiastically, shared where they worked, and I even discovered that I’d been at school with one of their employers - Norwich really is a small place.
The presentation went down really well, I got laughs in most of the right places and some excellent questions at the end. It was all over in about half an hour, and I’m hoping to get the chance to come back to City College and speak again.
Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...
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