This will be as the title says a personal recap on AU2022, not meant to analyse or talk about product and tech in Autodesk but more about the experience in general, and well basically my experience. Just to acknowledge that I do work for Autodesk...just to be clear here.
This AU was my second AU in person. In 2019, after 4 months in Autodesk I went to AU Vegas. That was very different at the time: I only knew one person in Autodesk that was going…I would call it my loner AU.
This one presented itself very different: I was going to meet my entire Tandem team in person for first time ever, I knew many Autodeskers from a previous internal conference and other products I have worked for, I knew many customers this time around and had a very nice organize calendar (credit to the Tandem team who are awesome).
I did my trip from London with my friend Ian (whom happens to work for Autodesk too) and wearing an AUTODESK hoodie. The reason for the hoodie was the following: in my first loner AU I saw a guy on the plane with an Autodesk t-shirt, and I approached him, let’s say he was not very welcoming or very talkative. So this year I decided to take my hoodie and be pretty much the opposite and talk with anyone that asked me about Autodesk. It worked, I met Oliver Green from KOPE on the boarding queue (sorry Oliver about forgetting we were actually neighbours for a while…), colleagues on the plane, customers on the layover airport...etc.
This AU I loved to talk with customers and old BIM friends, but I would lie if I didn’t say that for me the highlight was to meet my own team in person. I am a remote worker; I have been for the last 3 years, and most of my team is based in North America with a few exceptions - engineers based in UK and Germany. I joined Tandem 4 months or so ago but some of the team members were part of my first team at Autodesk, finally I got to spend time with them. Whoever has worked with me knows that I invest a lot of my energy in building the right relationship with my colleagues so we can deliver the best projects/products, I did this in construction, and I do this in software. One of my mentors, a director at Lendlease, always says: it is all about the team. I cannot agree more. You can deliver projects and products without investing in team relationships and with even dysfunctional teams, but that is so much more painful and not fun. I was very happy to feel in person how I feel remotely: that my team is awesome.
Then for the second highlight: the attendees, the innovators and what I used to call myself while industry: Tech geeks or BIM geeks, in the best possible meaning of the word. To see people excited about what we are building is great and to hear more about what they like and don’t is incredibly value-able for product managers. I was planning to only be a couple of hours this week on the Tandem Expo booth, but I ended up spending an average of 3/4 hours a day because every time I went there was meaningful conversations, whether this was a very basic digitalization one or a much more complex IoT connectivity one.
The rest of the time were customer briefings or team meetings, mainly til dinner time. I was able to pull off energy for all this, considering that I was sleeping 5/6 hours a day and completely having an opposite lifestyle as my regular days in London, but I am not sure how. I found the best coffee place in town, Revelator, and that gigantic flat-white helped a lot. I know Autodesk gets a lot of heat many times, I get it, I was a customer for 10 years. But I think sometimes people forget that there are actual people building some of the products that sometimes are hated or sometimes are loved, and most of us behind we want to move things forward. So for me many of the conversations with people give me a boost to go back and keep on going. Sadly I couldn’t talk or attend everything I wanted…definitely missed around 50% of people that I wanted to talk with, but maybe next time?
I stayed longer to check out the not so downtown area, as in my experience, the personality of a city is more in other neighbourhood, and seems that New Orleans changes a lot. On Friday I went for a walk in the Lower Garden District and Touro and that was a very different place. I felt very safe, and it gave me more of the vibe of a calm and nice neighbourhood with many cafes, restaurants and locals shops. I started grabbing a cold brew at Mojo Coffee House, then continued down Magazine Street and ended up buying very cute stationery in Lions Heart Print. I went back to that area for dinner in Gris-Gris and some after dinner chats at Hotel St. Vincent courtyard, very cosy. Last day I spent in the New Orleans City Park, playing city golf and checking the contemporary art gardens, lots to do there.
Also, for the next one I think we need many alternatives to the usual drinks-dinner-night out. So following the conversations in twitter regarding alternatives ways of network and have fun I suggest some things that I tend to do in London:
Rock climbing night.
Morning city walks.
Morning runs (this already exist in the wonderful 5k).
Maybe a board-game evening.
P.S.: yes, I love Seinfeld and gifs.
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