Julia Anderson and Giovanni DiFeterici from unmatchedstyle.com made a trip down to Atlanta to check out the LessConf 3010 conference and talked to a couple of attendees while they were there.

In the above video Julia interviews John Ashenden @ashenden from Grooveshark and then Kevin Milden @kmilden from newleaders.com and author of Lessons for Leaders.

The Conference

This year LessConf was a small, informal affair, where people could listen to some great speakers and get to know their peers. Folks came from all over. We met people from Canada, California, Florida, and Ireland. It was a lot like summer camp except less sunshine and more Macbook Pros.

There were quite a few memorable moments from the conference. The venue was great with a friendly atmosphere. The friday after-party alone was worth the trip, but as with any event, a couple of things stuck out the most.

When you get down to it, there’s one main reason why we went to LessConf:

Speakers

Sure, we wanted to network, we went to get away from the digital cave where we spend most of our days. But, honestly? We went to meet a couple of our heroes and listen to them talk about what they do so well. We won’t discuss all of the speakers in this post, just give a couple of the more interesting ideas tossed around at LessConf.

Cameron Moll (@cameronmoll) gave, by far, the most concise, directed presentation. He spoke, as always, about what makes a great design. He talked about a number of his personal design principles, which was great, but most impressive was his ability to comprehensively articulate visual hierarchy and the creative process. Employing everything from diving boards in the shower to capture his mind’s meanderings to blurring his designs to better see the visual flow and hierarchy of his designs without the noise of legible text, Moll seems to have an intelligent and novel way to keep the mind agile and able. He is without a doubt a great designer but we could learn a lot just by thinking about how he thinks about design.

Dan Martell (@danmartell) of FlowTown spoke at length about his obsession with marketing and his consumer research driven work flow, a fascinating mix of endless trial and error and hard data. Possibly his most experimental ( curious? ) workflow decision is to allow all employees equal and unhindered authority to “push product”, as he put it; that is to say, he allows anyone in his employ to author changes to their product and go live with those changes without human oversight. FlowTown relies on a fail-safe built into their software to check for major traffic changes and roll back to a more stable version of their product. Not one to equivocate, when pressed by Steve Bristol to defend this somewhat reckless approach to project management, Martell responded that he believes the culture this method creates is more important than the occasional hiccup in their product (I’m paraphrasing ).

Chris Wanstrath (@defunkt) from GitHub told us to not get stuck on the big ideas, to get things done and learn from the experience all that we can. He said that our first ideas are going to suck anyway so learn to adapt and like it. Its a fair assertion. We can’t know how our products will perform before they are tested so just go with it; find what works. He basically said to roll with the punches. Can’t argue with that.

LessConf was a good show, maybe a little haphazard in execution ( delayed schedules, a missed lunch ) but fun as hell. Can’t wait till next year.