KubeCon: It's back!

Last week’s KubeCon EU, in Valencia, was much, much busier than last year’s KubeCon NA in LA. I know many people were waiting to see if in person events had bounced back yet before deciding to attend/sponsor conferences this fall — if that’s you, it certainly seems that in-person events are back to their former glory.

In-person events are a really good way to test your positioning (there are other benefit too, of course). But having people walking up and asking what your product does, seeing how they react to your response and then having the same interaction again and again provides immediate feedback about what’s working and what’s not. They are also often a wake-up call that your positioning needs work — people have short attention spans, and if you keep getting blank stares, people asking irrelevant questions or comparing you to the wrong competitors, that’s a sign you need to work on your positioning.

Ideally, of course, you’ll have your positioning pretty dialed in before going to an in-person event, and use the event to refine it. Because while events like KubeCon are great for refining language, they won’t help with the larger positioning questions of ‘what market are we fundamentally in'?’ Worse, having undifferentiated, confusing positioning when you go to an event can lead you to have less conversations in general, and/or attract the wrong kind of booth visitor who would never be interested in your project or product. If you’re attracting the wrong kind of visitor, you can end up with warped feedback, and adjust in a way that doesn’t make sense for your actual ideal user/customer.

“Security” is bad positioning

Poor positioning is also a pain point for conference attendees (and anyone who’s roaming the sponsor showcase). More than one person mentioned this to me at KubeCon — that too often, if was impossible to tell what a company did from looking at the booth. As a category, security-related projects and products are perhaps the worst offenders. There were many, many “cloud native security” and “Kubernetes security” companies in Valencia. Chances are, they all solve distinct parts of the security puzzle and are not even competing with each other, but the vague positioning makes it sound like they are competitors (and that they each solve the entire K8s security story, which I find unlikely). This means that an attendee struggling to solve a very specific security-related issue wouldn’t know which company to chat with, or even that there might be a solution for their problem. The attendee misses a chance to solve the problem, the sponsor misses a potential open source user or paid customer.

One of the relatively vague security-related booths at KubeCon.

Anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts, on conferences in general or KubeCon or positioning or all of the above. My favorite part of the conference was running into people I know but hadn’t set up a meeting with ahead of time, and in most cases didn’t even realize would be there. Also, every time I go to a conference I’m reminded how important in-person events are and the limits of being all-remote, all the time. With that said, I’ll be at Open Source Summit in Austin and would love to connect — and to the extent possible, would love to set up something ahead of time.