When I first started at VMware, I noticed that there was my User Experience team (about 25 people at that time, working mostly on vSphere and related applications), and that there were several individual interaction designers sprinkled throughout the company.  I proposed that we all get together, and eventually, a two-day internal UX conference was born.  I chaired it the first year and the second year.

Then I had to let it go.  I explicitly said this to my conference committee, as well as my management, as I was working on it for the second year.  This conference couldn’t just be my thing.  If it was to have any legs, it had to become a VMware thing.  So, vUE 2014 planning kicked off, and I am not part of its conference committee.  I provide whatever assistance they ask me for, but I’m explicitly not part of the conference committee.

I did a lot to try to set up the future iterations of the conference for success.  The first year, I did pretty much everything, with assistance from a small conference committee.  The second year, I made some changes to the conference committee: I broke up the work into Conference Chair and Technical Chair (following the model used by many academic and industry conferences), and I made sure to choose my successor so that she could learn as much as possible from me.  I was also aware that I was setting precedents, so I was very careful about what I chose to do (or not do).

Letting go is hard.  I have a big investment in this conference.  But it can’t be mine.  It has to become something that VMware’s UX community owns.  From the outside, they seem to be doing a fine job.  It’s a bit odd to see the announcements coming out about the theme and how to submit papers and not be the one who sent them.  I’m sure it will be even more strange to attend the conference as an attendee and not as its conference chair.

I’m so glad to see it continuing forward without my involvement.  This tells me, more than anything, that it was truly something that VMware needed and continues to need.  It tells me that it’s something that the VMware UX community values.  It tells me that UX at VMware is vibrant and growing.  It tells me that it was the right thing to do.  I know some of the evolution that it has already undergone with new leadership (some that I anticipated and tried to make sure things were set up so that it could evolve in that direction, some that I never anticipated), and I’m sure that I’ll see more evolution when the event itself arrives.