Product Summit 2025

A 4-phase comms plan and a workshop template anyone could run

Internal events fail quietly. Nobody says the summit was bad (well, we all know that one person who'll say it); people don't sign up, don't prep, and end up at a session they didn't choose. Both of the things I built were aimed at preventing those failures.

The first was the comms plan: 4 phases across Slack and email, each message carrying exactly one ask and a date it went out. Never a digest of four things.

The second system was a planning template for the elective workshops, built on an "I do, we do, you do" teaching structure and a milestone countdown running from 8 weeks out to the week of. It meant a facilitator wasn't designing a session from a blank page—they were filling in a shape that had already been pressure-tested, and hitting checkpoints early enough that we could catch a session in trouble.

Work backwards from the moment someone has to do something

I started from the actions, not the calendar. Registration, elective selection, tool setup, session prep, post-event feedback—each one is a moment where an individual has to stop and do a task beyond their typical workday. Then I worked backwards from those moments to figure out how much warning each one needed, what the person had to know first, and which channel they'd be in.

That's what produced 4 phases rather than a stream of announcements. Pre-summit builds the reason to care, so the countdown can just make the requests. The countdown handles the transactional asks while attention is high. During-event comms only carry logistics and changes. Post-event goes out while memory is fresh enough for the survey to be worth reading.

On the elective track, I co-produced sessions with facilitators from across the org—same influence-without-authority situation as the rest of my program work. First we gathered a list of candidate topics from the team weeks in advance. Then we narrowed it by business goals and had the team vote on which ones interested them most. After that I asked around to find who was an expert in those topics.

From there, the template did most of the persuading. It's much easier to get a busy staff designer to run a workshop when the ask is "fill in this structure by these dates" instead of "design a workshop."

An internal event is a logistics problem pretending to be a content problem

Nobody misses your summit on purpose. They miss the message that told them to sign up.

Everyone plans the agenda. Far fewer people plan the 6 weeks of small asks that determine whether the agenda meets an audience who's ready for it. I treated the comms plan as the actual product and the event as its output—which is why the numbers I care about are the completion rates, not attendance.

The other reason for the template was durability. A summit is annual, which means whatever you learn this year is worthless unless it's written down in a form the next person can pick up. The workshop template and comms plan were both built to be handed off, not just used.

Everyone did the thing, on time

The sessions themselves landed too: the elective workshops scored 4.01 out of 5 on a roughly 80% survey response rate, and the Design for Delight session scored 4.2.

What my team kept

The workshop template outlasted the summit. The next person to run an elective starts from a structure that's already been pressure-tested instead of a blank page, and hits checkpoints early enough that a session in trouble can be caught.

The comms plan template went further. My ops team adopted it as their model for the strategy plans that followed. Anyone can build something useful for a single event; a template your own team reaches for again, when you're not in the room and nobody is asking them to, is real evidence that the thinking underneath it held up.