Context. Teaching events are my top-of-funnel, so they deserve the same design effort as any campaign. For this one, Turing College and Women in Tech UK co-hosted an evening in London: a fireside between me and the Head of Product for AI knowledge platforms at Amazon, live demos, and a gamified “AI or human?” challenge.
What I did. I built the whole event kit: the format, the run sheet, the demo fallbacks, and the event page itself, which my employer shipped on their own domain. The page carried the programme links, so attendance flowed somewhere rather than evaporating. Follow-up was wired before the doors opened.
What happened. The room got an evening where the interesting parts were live rather than described. The retro afterwards was honest: the fireside beat the live LLM demos, because latency between prompts kills a room’s energy, and the next format changed accordingly. That retro loop, event to event, is the actual system.
What I’d reuse. Treat events as products with funnels, not performances. And put the learnings in writing while they still sting.