I once worked on a project where the goal was to improve the reliability of MS Teams. The skip level manager was not happy when we said we cannot estimate what the revenue gain would be because it can't be measured.
This risks getting into the Fisherian/Bayesian stats wars again, but it would be possible to project a revenue gain, even in advance of making the change. You'd do this in terms of improved customer retention, lower cost of future customer acquisition, increased price a Teams license could sustain based on a rep for higher reliability, etc.
Obviously it's not a change that you'd be able to pin a specific human decision-maker (who was marginal on Teams) down as to this change being the difference between a sale or not, but nor is the change in revenue going to be a random number uniformly distributed in (-∞,∞).
If the change was revenue-neutral, the skip level would probably have been justified in seeing if the teams working that project could have found something to do customers actually care about instead.
How do you estimate the improved customer retention and improved future customer acquisition of something as nebulous as, "this does very little on its own but is a tiny part of making Microsoft software feel more robust in general"?
There's probably various methods, but if you don't already have quantitative estimates, you'll probably end up polling SMEs you'd trust for this on how much increase in retention and decrease in acquisition costs you'd expect for a notational more robust Microsoft. Average those out.
Even 5 people is enough to significantly narrow the uncertainty (at least, as compared to the prior hypothesis that the true change in odds is somewhere from -1 to 1).
And like a good spam filter, you don't need to be perfect, you just need to be able to turn your initiatives into a forecast of future changes if implemented, and then measure what actually does change for those initiatives you do implement. Even simple linear regression models can be useful in tracking results compared to forecasts.
Most people would probably expect that the improvement is close enough to zero to be nearly indistinguishable from it. And this is why most enterprises don't invest much in reliability work like this, because it doesn't actually seem to move the needle for customer purchasing.
As user I still find it less painful to use than either AWS or GCP, where I had worse experiences in platform complexity (AWS), or talking to bots for support (GCP).
To imagine a big audience as just 1 person sounds cool, but when I imagine the talks I need to give to a bigger audience, I find it very daunting. I can only hope that I overcome it soon.
I am late 50s and I still find talks overwhelming.
What has worked though is
1. Recordings. Go into zoom, and give a talk with recording on. Listen to yourself, just once per recording but more if you can tolerate your voice :) It shows you your common failure points in black and white so that you can work on them.
2. Presenter notes. During my final talk, I have succeeded when speaking without notes, but to get there I need notes. I write my script as presenter notes (in Mac Keynote). Because of ADHD or whatever, as I am speaking, new ideas pop up. Every single time. In early rehearsals, I pause immediately, update the notes first and then go back and rehearse. After a dozen iterations, sometimes 30 iterations, the edits disappear, you learn to live with what you finalized already. Also once you narrate it 30 times, you have all kinds of memory maps sorted out in your brain, so even if you derail, you mind does have the information. I have seen some people have presenter notes in bullet forms, does not work for me. In the beginning I need my speech written out.
3. Rehearsals. The 30 rehearsals I mentioned. Figure out what you need. 5 or 50? You will know when you are ready. Once you have your magic number, stick to it. Maybe 25 becomes 20, but do not short change yourself by saying ... no I can wing it.
4. The morning of. I have tried 2 approaches. One is just open the deck and speak through the notes in your head. No recording. No zoom. No notes. Your mind should have it. OR not even deck. Just close your eyes, I am usually on a recliner (do not nod off) and run the narration in your head. Mistakes ... happen
5. Seating. Most of our presentations are in conference room settings but with remote viewers. Sometimes they are purely on video. Figure out the setup and rehearse 1-2 rounds in live mode. If you will be in a conference room, find one similar and rehearse once in that setting. If you will be seated and speaking to local + remote audience, try to visualize that as you present. It never feels the same with live audience, but it does give you some muscle memory.
6. Timing and Clickability. Transitions sometimes take more (or less clicks) than you envisioned. Practice them. If you are given 3 minutes, or 30, time yourself so that you know how far are you. Sometimes you need to be pitch perfect, but sometimes you can tolerate 10%. If I am at 10% variance, I stop fine tuning. As people ask questions, small variations can be tackled.
If someone else is sharing the screen and you are just speaking, rehearse that with them, because "next slide" handoff gets tiring very soon. To help them, add a line [ Click ] in the notes so that they know the click is coming when you get to a specific speech.
7. Screen setup. Over time, I am learning to speak from my mind (or heart). But the notes are there. I work on Mac Keynote, so there is a presentation mode where I can see what is on screen now, and what will be on screen next as soon as I click. The notes are there but they are only a last resort. If you are familiar with what is on screen, and what is coming next, you do not need to look at the conference room screen, OR any other window. These are usually enough to tell what you need. I make them the maximum size possible - do note that I have 2 screens side by side (current and next) so their sizes are still small on a laptop window, but having the biggest size I can get allows me to interpret fine variations - sometimes the next click makes only a small change, so having them visible helps.
8. Notifications off. Do not look at notifications. Ignore them. It is hard, but do it. 2 presentations back, one notification disrupted me so bad, I choked. I read the notification, it was at the beginning of session and someone just saying "sorry for joining late" and by the time I read it, my mind had disconnected. I started reading from the notes and never recovered from there. Maybe part of it was that I was not prepared - I did not have the 30 rehearsals. We did the work in 3 days, and 3 days was not enough for me to iterate on the slides, rehearse, have notes ... so when the chokepoint happened, my brain could not take it. But notifications is what triggered the disruption (of a bad kind).
This is incredible advice across the board. Would you consider writing this somewhere and submitting it as a post? I think this is valuable and worth repeating.
Great advice. One point I’d add is to just let yourself be nervous. Once I accept that my voice will wobble and my hands will shake then nervousness starts to feel a little more like excitement.
Rehearsal works great for fighting nervousness. Just the mere thought of speaking in front of 30+ people makes my heart slightly faster, but once I have a presentation down to the minute and can go through it 100% without looking at my notes, the nervousness dies down a lot and confidence starts taking over instead.
Of course, it reverses back the second you take a step into the stage, but it gets a whole lot worse when you don't remember what to say, and once you've spoken for 4-5 minutes the confidence seemingly remembers to come back by itself too.
I've been talking to so many grandmas these days, and it's mostly them approaching me. It's usually something sweet and makes my day, but sometimes, it's heartbreaking to hear the troubles they've been dealing with alone because there's no family to rely on.
I think talking to the elderly is a great way to learn how society has shaped people's lives over many decades.
There's a video on YT that basically proposes the idea that Ewan McGregor's & Charlie Boorman's "Long Way Round" series has been the last "true" travel documentary made for TV. I thought that was a bit silly initially, but after watching it(the YT video) I can't shake the feeling that I agree with the premise.
Basically - in "Long Way Round" Ewan and Charlie take two motorcycles and they ride them from the UK east, going through Russia and finishing in the States. But even though they have support crew of two cars following them with extra equipment, it doesn't change the fact that back when it was filmed, they didn't have internet connected phones with them. The maps of Syberia were innacurate, they didn't speak any Russian, they were driving through really difficult terrain and you could "feel" that they were far from civilization - contact with family was infrequent,they relied on kindness of strangers a lot because there was no other way to continue. There was a lot of communicating with hand signs and pointing.
Compare that to their later "Long way up" where they rode up through South America - at that point they both had mobile phones with maps and instant translators - they were never lost, and even in the middle of absolute nowhere they would walk up to a local and just use their phone to translate. They had video calls with their families practically every night. Even though they were in some places no less remote than Syberian roads, it didn't feel remote in the same way.
And yes, I know there are YT travellers who try to artificially follow the same kind of philosophy - no translators, no maps, just going in raw so to speak. But the world has changed. Even if they don't use phones, the locals do even in the middle of the amazonian jungle. And it is amazing how connected humanity is, but there is certainly an era that has ended for all of us.
I really recommend this video, whether you have seen Charlie's and Ewan's adventures or not:
Long Way Round felt a lot more "natural" than the follow-on movies. They were all good, but Long Way Round was by far the best. IMO, followed by Long Way Home, which had no real pretense about being remote or "adventurous" - just two buddies doing what is likely their last moto tour together.
I disagree here. A good researcher has to be a good communicator. I am not saying that it is necessarily the case that you don't understand the topic if you cannot explain it well enough to someone new, but it is essential to communicate to have a good exchange of ideas with others, and consequently, become a better researcher. This is one of the skills you learn in a PhD program.
