Rosenfeld Media’s 2020 Retrospective
By: Louis Rosenfeld
Tags: Books, User Experience, Conference, UX

A quarterly review

Our 2020 started and ends on high notes, with a deep, dark, dank valley in between:

Q1: Who’s invention’s mom again?

We launched our third conference, Advancing Research, in late March/early April. Five weeks prior, we’d sold it out. Three weeks prior, we scrambled to convert it to a hybrid event — both in-person and virtual. Two weeks prior, we realized that we’d have to go fully remote. Rube Goldberg would have been proud of how we contorted ourselves to virtualize the conference (livestream goes here, Zoom there, Slack there), but what choice did we have?

Really, it was a huge success thanks to our team, our speakers, and our sponsors. And the conference received very positive attendee reviews, giving us the confidence that we were on the right track with our virtualization efforts.

But there was no time to catch our breaths, because…

Q2: Nuclear spring

…we then tumbled off the cliff, careening from Q1’s growth mode to hanging on for dear life. Like everyone else, suddenly we were reinventing everything: our products, our business processes, and our operations, moving our team from mostly in-person to mostly remote. We were also renegotiating everything, from massive deposits on conference venues to the lease on our office space.

It wasn’t all bad though. We manged to scale a huge learning curve for virtualizing our public workshops, which seemed to go quite well. And we had a huge dollop of gratitude for that ancient of ancients, the book: really, it was a banner year for publishing, with six new titles (crammed mostly in Q2), and book revenue helped keep us afloat.

Q3: Making bets

Summer saw retrenching — aligning all aspects of Rosenfeld Media around the new normal of all-remote and, more importantly, accepting the distressful queasiness of business planning against a backdrop of extreme and constant uncertainty. Yes, we accept it — do we have a choice?—but we’re still not used to it, and I doubt we’ll ever be.

It’s also hard to get used to investing in the future when the time horizon appears, at best, only a few weeks out. Investing begins to feel less deliberate and evidence-based, and more dependent on intuition. More like bets, really.

We think we’ve come close to cracking the nut of virtual conference Zoom Fatigue.

Given how important conferences are to our business, we decided to double down on the bet that virtual conferences could offer an experience that was the equal of that of in-person events. We experimented with two innovative solutions for combatting Zoom fatigue — sponsor programming and attendee cohorts — at both Enterprise Experience 2020 and the 2020 DesignOps Summit. These innovations showed even greater potential than anticipated — I can tell you that conference attendees absolutely love participating in cohorts, and sponsors were excited to take to the stages we “built” for them. We also began a long-awaited transition to a WordPress 5-based web environment to support all these innovations. A huge lift, but so far, so good.

Q4: What is “normal”?

As I write this, 2020 is just about in the can. We’ve published six books, virtualized our three conferences and ten workshops, dramatically changed how our team works, and even moved into a new office (which we occasionally get to visit). Over recent weeks, we’ve been able to get back to making the “normal” investments that a publisher typically does, like signing new books and workshop instructors.

But even those investments are different in 2020. In the year of George Floyd, we realized (and, to be fair, had it pointed out to us) that our rosters of authors, workshop instructors, and conference curators all looked a lot like… me. Too much so.

Small publishers like Rosenfeld Media are powered by personal relationships, and that lack of diversity correlates with the makeup of my personal network. So, in Q4, we’ve begun the legwork to change that: having conversations with BIPOC, Latinx, and other industry people to grow and diversify the group of people we know and we work with, one person at a time. This is a must, given how much influence we have over who gets to write UX books and present at UX conferences. And the investment is already starting to pay dividends with the rosters of our curation teams, workshop instructors, and soon, authors.