Practice : Tech Talks & Showcases

Purpose and Strategic Importance

Tech Talks & Showcases are regular sessions where teams share technical learnings, innovations, or completed work with peers across the organisation. These forums strengthen engineering culture, foster knowledge transfer, and celebrate achievements - encouraging cross-pollination of ideas and raising visibility of valuable work.

They provide a platform to demo solutions, explain decisions, explore experiments, and surface challenges - driving alignment, inspiration, and continuous improvement across teams.

Description of the Practice

  • Held on a recurring cadence (e.g. biweekly or monthly), either within domains or across the whole organisation.
  • Talks range from in-depth technical deep-dives to high-level showcases of new features, designs, or tools.
  • Open to all levels of experience and roles - not just senior engineers or architects.
  • Formats include live presentations, demos, recorded walkthroughs, or panel discussions.
  • Often paired with Q&A, shared docs, and follow-up discussions on collaboration platforms.

How to Practise It (Playbook)

1. Getting Started

  • Launch a lightweight calendar invite or shared space and invite volunteers to present.
  • Encourage a variety of topics - experiments, tools, standards, incidents, designs.
  • Provide a simple talk template to support structure (e.g. “problem → approach → outcome”).
  • Record sessions and store them in a searchable knowledge base.

2. Scaling and Maturing

  • Curate a backlog of upcoming topics and speakers.
  • Include product, design, data, and platform talks - not just engineering.
  • Host themed series (e.g. “Resilience Month” or “Frontend Fridays”) to spotlight focus areas.
  • Recognise speakers and participants with kudos, rewards, or newsletter shoutouts.
  • Use feedback surveys to improve content and accessibility.

3. Team Behaviours to Encourage

  • Share learnings early - not just polished solutions.
  • Ask thoughtful questions and amplify voices from all corners of the team.
  • Encourage participation from less represented roles or locations.
  • Use talks as a safe space to discuss failures and “lessons learned” stories.

4. Watch Out For…

  • Same presenters dominating - vary voices and experience levels.
  • Talks feeling performative without real learning or openness.
  • Lack of follow-up or visible outcomes from shared ideas.
  • Busy calendars crowding out participation - keep it lightweight.

5. Signals of Success

  • Teams learn from each other and adopt shared patterns and tools.
  • Talks lead to new collaborations, contributions, and reuse.
  • Engineers are inspired and energised by what others are building.
  • Teams feel more connected across domains, offices, and functions.
  • Showcasing becomes a valued habit - not just an event.