The approach

How a keynote gets made.

Every keynote is unique, but over the years I've developed a formula for making them. These six steps take an idea from the first deep dive into the technology to the moment it lives on beyond the stage.

01

Dive deep for the idea

Every keynote starts with discovery and exploration. I spend weeks with the speaker and their teams, getting hands-on with what they have built; as a software developer, I use the technology myself. There are usually several products and ideas in play, so the real work is finding the bigger picture that connects them: one crystallised nugget worth an hour on stage.

Weeks of whiteboards and engineering deep dives, each distilled into a single idea that became a keynote: The World Is Asynchronous, The Frugal Architect and The Renaissance Developer.
02

Build the world

Building a keynote is a bit like building a world. It has to make sense and it has to be cohesive. Do it well and you can completely immerse the audience and open them up to an emotional connection. I consider every sense through which the audience will experience the show: the scenic design, how we use audio, the pacing and the emotional impact of the content. In my mind I'm always thinking about sight, sound, style and story.

On bigger productions I often start with a cold open film. Its one job is to put the audience inside the keynote's world before the first word is spoken.
03

Collaborate closely

Every project is different. Sometimes I only get a few hours with an executive; sometimes we are lucky enough to have week-long retreats. Over the years I've learned to build trust quickly, because trust is what gets you to the real stories. Most of the executives I work with are already excellent communicators and storytellers, so I'm not so much writing their keynote as helping them find their unique angle and their own way of telling it.

A few hours or a week-long retreat: the process fits the speaker, not the other way round.
04

Show, don't tell

Audiences of builders trust what they can see working. If you make a claim on stage, you have to be able to back it up; that is how you earn a room's trust. So every demo, customer guest and piece of evidence is chosen to prove the idea.

Guests from Nubank and Thorn made "frugal architecture" real in ways no slide could.
05

Simulate everything

I once wrote a keynote about training robots in simulated environments, and it changed the way I work: now I simulate as much of the live show as I can. Writing for the page is different from writing for the spoken word, which is why you will often find me standing up and reading a script aloud. Slideolicious, an app I built, takes that further: it recreates the stage in 3D and plays the whole keynote through with realistic speaker voices, so we can rehearse ahead of the rehearsal.

A 3D stage and a full run-through, weeks before anyone steps into the arena.
06

Extend the moment

The keynote is the peak, not the whole story. Films, documentary series and follow-on content carry the idea beyond the room. That's how one hour becomes a year of influence.

The Frugal Architect became a website, a podcast and an in-person workshop, and the CTO Fellowship documentary series took a keynote called AI for Good far beyond the stage.

Sound like what your team needs?

If your executive has a moment coming that has to land, this is the discipline I bring to it.

Send me a note

Northampton, England
On stages all over the world