Removing Queues
The last year has seen a significant change in how TechVoices operates. Starting from the idea of limited effort available, the mentee - mentor intake saw a major redesign through experimenting with a process that removes queues.
Instead of maintaining queues of mentees and prioritizing it, we have started mentoring from the first online introductory session. We've come to learn that for some people, the 30-minute conversation gives them enough structure to proceed with their speaking aspirations. For others, we've scheduled the next session to end the previous, and with a low but continuous investment of time, we have progressed through tens of mentees creating their first talks.
We've come to understand there are many choices of how we can invest our time in taking TechVoices forward:
- Mentoring new speakers with the available capacity
- Maintaining our web pages - the tech requires attention even when contents don't change
- Recruiting mentors to grow capacity, and managing a mentor community
- Recruiting mentees by promoting the program actively and managing the queue of aspiring speakers
- Promoting new speakers to conferences and creating priority routes for new speaker selection
We have prioritized the value in co-creating new speakers. For the last year, TechVoices has been in a mode of continuous stream of creating value with very little information sharing or promotion. Our mentees get accepted to conferences through regular call for proposals. Their abstracts speak for themselves.
As per the experiment, not having queueus of people waiting to be paired enables us to focus on the output - successful speakers at conferences. We're happy to work with you on your speaking aspirations, within the limits of volunteer availability.
Small streams, continuously, move large masses of water. This is how we now work with the mentees - we're in a long term game not scaling up in the moment but moving a large mass of great speakers to availability over longer period of time.