Realize Live 2023

As I stepped up to the registration desk at Realize Live 2023, I started filling out information on the tablet to get my ID badge. “Have you found yourself yet?” I was a little stunned. How did she know my life-long quest without ever meeting me? Plus I’d just arrived, how could I have completed my metaphysical search so quickly? Is that how you greet a stranger in corporate America these days, I mean, I’ve been out of circulation for a little while. “That is, after all, the only reason I came.” Came my reflexive quip. I was of course trying to be dryly sarcastic, but deep down, that off-hand question did knock me off my feet a little bit.

It’s a hard pill to swallow that the days of big CAD conferences centered on the end user are over. The shows are now consolidated engineering, analysis, document and big data management and product development software shows. I’m only 10 years behind in realizing this, or maybe I’m just finally accepting it. Not sure what was wrong with the old way of doing things, it worked great for me, although I’m sure it was wildly expensive. I’ll bet it’s still expensive, but now they reach a group of people closer to the money.

What I’m slow walking myself to here is that there is a lot to learn at a broader level if you aren’t trying to use a conference like Realize Live to figure out how to make a pattern follow a path. Strategy over tactics, right? More chiefs, fewer Indians. Maybe if you’re trying to decide the metaphysical meaning of product development, maybe that’s what you’ll find here.

The general session (for the second day – missed the first day due to screwed up flights) was predictable in a lot of ways, but I have to say, I may have found something in all of that banal inane babble. One of the presentations was on sustainability. I’m going to come to my main point circuitously, because I took a roundabout way of getting there myself, and it’s not the kind of thing you can just say in a sentence.

My wife is a sustainability director, so I’ve got a certain perspective on this stuff. There is a lot of throw-away talk when it comes to topics that are really simple ideas that for some reason must be communicated in the most difficult, tortured language possible. Why say it in less than 100 words when 10 will do? Right? Truly, very little of what is said about sustainability actually matters. It’s a very common sense topic, but corporate America is here to save you from simplicity. Like most things, I suppose.

Before the sustainability talk, the first thing that really made me take notice was Easton LaChappelle of Unlimited Tomorrow. He said something profoundly basic. Users First. Not stockholders first. Not management first. Not even customers first or process, profit or bottom line first. Users first. The little slogan brings home why we do anything at all. If you’re trying to help end users as an intermediate step on the way to making a lot of money, you’re in it for the wrong reason, and should just go home. If you just want to create a large organization for you to stand in front of, again, quit, and think it over and try again. Users first. The people who use your solution should be the ones who matter to you. That is how you measure success – if your users are successful. It turns business and work into something with a technical purpose that I can relate to again instead of a steaming pile of metaphorical garbage.

And further, the sustainability drum beat often gets lost in ulterior motives. Too often, you hear this political, even pedantically moralistic foot stomping as the motivation for “saving the planet”. Everybody says it, so it must bet the best way, right?

Sustainability is just what you would do if you hadn’t become comfortable with the outlandish excess of the industrial revolution. There’s this old saying don’t shit where you eat. Right? It’s just common sense. Sustainability means we have to go back to older values when people used to be able to live together with one another and the world around us. But it has been industry as a tool of lust for power that has got us to this place where we can’t keep doing things this way. And one of those things is to put the user first. Which is maybe metaphorical for maybe we should all learn to be people again. The only thing that we can do long term are the things that treat people the way you’d want to be treated yourself. Too simplistic isn’t it? No, That’s the way it should be. That’s the only mindset we can have that will not devolve into what we have today, and you can take that on any level you care to apply it.

This all came from a CAD conference in Vegas? Vegas just knocked it loose, it’s been there for a while. Users first. I’ve heard that from more than one person this week. I hope it’s a slogan that gains momentum.