CONFLUX
The Amazon Design Conference
The Brief
Expand the scale, capabilities, and quality of the 2024 edition of CONFLUX, Amazon’s annual in-house design conference.
The Outcome
A 15% increase in RSVPs, a 4.23 / 5 overall satisfaction score in personal career growth, and a new strategic direction for engaging the Amazon creative community.
The Team
Paul Mendoza, Program Manager & Event Producer
Elysia Syriac, Senior Program Manager, Events & Gatherings
Kass Escalera, Senior Program Manager, Design Education & Diversity
My Roles
Show Writing, Speaker Coaching, Audience Research, Data Management, Event Production, Email Marketing.
Research & Strategy
Amazonians delight in the aspirational and functional stories behind their work.
Amazon’s in-house design conference, CONFLUX, faced a clear challenge in 2024: overcome the plateau in audience growth and overall satisfaction scores in a DIY corporate culture.
After watching past talks, reviewing audience feedback, and speaking to key stakeholders, we zoomed in on two key content insights: the highest-performing moments at CONFLUX offered tools and advice with immediate impact and implementation; and talks from Amazonians that could match or surpass the quality of our invited external speakers always performed best.
Our advantage was our experience with producing high-quality community-driven shows that championed character and performance. We approached this year’s challenge in three ways: increasing the number of contributors and host cities in the planning process; elevating our marketing and communications pipeline to generate interest; and raising the bar for Amazonians’ speaker presentations through a new coaching program.
Prototypes & Outputs
New locations, themes, and activities designed to spread joy and fuel connection.
As CONFLUX’s first dedicated speaker coach, I implemented several of my favorite storytelling tools that I’ve collected over the years: Natalia Ilyin’s houses and caravans, Jung’s four learning styles, and common journalism article models for news reporting. My earliest sessions revealed that speakers most needed space to breathe and reflect to find new ways into their work, so the best conversations broke from checklists and milestones and simply marinated in the ideas.
For the main stage event, I led the production team for CONFLUX’s live broadcast in San Francisco, the first time the event went live outside of HQ1 in Seattle. I implemented all my best assistant director practices from my TV production days to deliver a well-timed show. I also wrote the show script for all three main stages to amplify each host’s unique personality and to interpolate three programming drivers: Amazon’s newly formed design vision; Amazon’s well-established leadership principles; and CONFLUX’s four programming themes (Amplify the Momentum, Bring the Outside In, Engage the Senses, and Balance Evidence & Intuition).
For the return of CONFLUX’s Watch Party program, I delivered a series of facilitation workshops that led to the easy-to-use “summer camp” model for on-site engagement: friendship bracelets, bingo cards, and Polaroid walls. This was also the first year Amazon was able to run a proper in-house email marketing campaign for CONFLUX, so I designed the campaign around different segments and hypotheses each week to figure out which aspects of professional identity Amazonians cared about most.
Insights & Futures
Local proximity is king, and design-adjacent audiences are well within reach.
The combination of talent coaching and on-site directing made the difference for our San Francisco show, which received the highest feedback scores out of all our host cities. We also successfully increased RSVPs by over 10% through our marketing campaigns through emails and Slack, and Watch Party cities with exclusive local community programming performed at levels similar to our highly resourced main stages in Seattle, New York, and San Francisco.
The keys to this year’s growth were the emphasis on local messaging and broadening our audience reach beyond the core design profession. Focusing our messaging on local activations in building-specific channels made the biggest impact on our engagement rates, and the gains we made with our design-adjacent audiences—software engineers, program managers, and account managers—are an indicator of CONFLUX’s future programming potential.
