Speaking
Since 2014, I’ve been an international conference speaker, covering topics like good management practices, building internal outreach, evangelism and learning initiatives and becoming a better speaker. I also provide coaching and internal training on these topics.
Get in touch at melinda@seckington.com to find out more or to book me for your next event.
Here are a few videos of the talks I've done in the past. For a full list of talk topics, scroll past the videos.
Level Up: Frameworks for Developing Developers
As video games have become more and more complex, game designers put way more time into creating environments where players are engaged and willing to put the time and effort into learning and mastering these skills.
As leads, we can learn a lot from how games are designed to make the internal developer experiences better, since it’s a similar type of environment we want to create: an environment where people can learn and master skills. We should make it easier for developers to understand what options are available to them, allow them to make time for learning and provide structures and processes for them to develop the skills that they want and need for future roles.
This talk will look at how you can help level up your developers by using competencies and career development frameworks, what types of processes you can introduce to support personal development and how developers should be using opportunities like these to get a better understanding of what skills they should focus on.
Employee Evangelism: How To Succeed at Hiring without Really Trying
Hiring good people can be hard. Keeping good people can be hard. It’s made easier though if you can set your company apart as a place that people want to work at. But how do you make the community aware that that’s the case?
Developer evangelists typically evangelise products to developers, but what if the thing you’re trying to sell is the team itself? How can you get your entire team sharing with the community what you’ve built and how you work? This talk examines why you should evangelise your team and gives concrete examples of how to encourage your team to do so.
[Slides]
The Art of Story Design
Once upon a time… A couple of years ago… Did you hear that thing about… Let me tell you a tale… We live in a culture that lives and breathes stories, and we use and rely on them every day. Stories are part of the fabric of our lives.
As developers, we need to understand how our stories have an effect on others, how we can best tell stories to our audiences and how we can share stories about what we do.
This talk will explore the mechanics of storytelling and demonstrate the ways we can tell better stories. It will showcase several techniques and storytelling structures to help you craft more impactful talks, blog posts and conversations.
Talk Portfolio
Art of Comms Design: how to be more deliberate in your communication and design & apply comms plans
Art of Talk Design: how to apply design thinking to creating better talks
Art of Story Design: how to understand storytelling techniques & structures to tell better stories
Art of Slide Design: how to apply design principles to creating more effective slides
Level Up: looking at game design principles to create better internal learning opportunities, from onboarding to career development.
What to Consider Before Building a Career Development Framework: an approach to designing a career progression framework that works for your team.
Reflect & Refactor: how to do personal retrospectives to figure out what your values, motivations and next job should be (Reflect), and how to create habits to constantly learn new things and change what we do (Refactor).
Employee Evangelism: how to get your team sharing more about what they do with the wider community
How to do Goalsetting Workshops: an approach to brainstorming bigger questions before hands-on goal setting
How & Why to Run Internal Hackathons: how to setup internal hackathons to allow your team to get to know each other, collaborate and brainstorm ideas
I’ve also got a couple of new talk ideas I’d love to create and give, but would need a bit more time to prep for these:
- Improving Your Onboarding
- Optimising Your Hiring
- How to Offload Your Brain: improving internal processes by using checklists and tooling
- Building Resilience
- Managing Your Emotions