TL;DR: A brutally honest and counter-intuitive guide for turning visibility, timing, and narrative into promotions, buy-in, and real impact.

I didn't want to name-drop, but all the highest voted ideas last year all named-dropped - so please forgive me. :)

Before I started at Adobe, I had never worked for a company I didn't start myself, and my friends found the idea of me joining a behemoth enterprise company so ridiculous that they created a pool for how long I'd last before I'd quit - with the most optimistic of the bunch betting 6 months.

4 years, 5 bosses, 5 promos and 10 org changes later, I realized that while most people cared about building great product, what is much more important is being at the right place and time, saying the right things, to the right people.

That strategy may or may not include waiting outside the head-office bathroom, casually working on my laptop, and 'accidentally' bumping into an SVP to pitch an idea.

Things I'd like to talk about:

• Why the only KPI that matters is lowering stress
• How naming an idea is more important than having the idea
• You care about data. Everyone else just cares about slogans about data.
• How 80% of my work was unimpactful, and how I just stopped doing them
• Do the right thing - but only when everyone else cares about doing the right thing (but also secretly do the right thing)
• Build social capital - then SPEND IT

Yes. This is mostly a indulgent therapy session where I get to recount all the ways I realized that my good product ideas were not going to be good enough on their own to get buy-in. I just hope that you have as much fun listening to it as I will have unloading and that some of these lessons will be valuable to you in your career and the wonderful things you want to build.

The session will be participatory and I hope you bring your unfiltered stories with you.

It's going to be fun.