I miss the breakout rooms

Nick Burrus · 10/19/21

From a more technical standpoint, I just wanted to share that this entire Engage this year seems like a Sales pitch. We're already Smartsheet customers. We were excited to see more of the new features and the solutions. My apologies if this seems blunt. After my Master's degree, my writing style was forced to change to be more like this.

2020's Engage with the breakout rooms showing these features, and more was perfect. Our company loved it. In the current event the stories and more are cool. However, the amount of stories being shown is quite overwhelming and in a baseline is almost the same thing repeating multiple times. The focus on the new features was almost minimal. Like we saw custom form branding, but, nothing was said about it for example.

Today, my company builds Smartsheet solutions over 20 Fortune 100s, 3 of the largest school districts in California, the Superior Court system, and more. Our customers themselves loved the breakout rooms last year. I'm already fielding questions asking if there's going to be any of these sessions this year. With the breakout sessions in 2020, we felt it was an amicable action to grab different points of view. With this method, Smartsheet targeted everyone from Sales, to Information Technology, to Executives, to clients wanting ideas, and more.

This is very different in spirit then any Engage event I've seen.

[Deleted User] · 10/19/21

Hi @Nick Burrus! Thanks for the feedback. This year's event was based on feedback that folks wanted to hear more from our customers on what they are achieving with Smartsheet and what's possible, as well as to keep the program around the 90 minute mark. We tried to capture that and keep the length of the event in mind.

While we aren't doing breakout rooms this time around, we do have a lot of other opportunities for continued learning. I recommend you visit our Build Your Own Agenda page; we're running six weeks of Roundtables and ENGAGE special edition Webinars so folks can dive deeper into the keynote content.

I will definitely pass your feedback on the breakout rooms to our events team. Thanks again for taking the time to share your feedback.

Nick Burrus · 10/19/21

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/308251#Comment_308251

Thank you! You know what's funny? I don't even have an email about Build Your Own Agenda! I asked around on my team in our Smartsheet chat, none of us heard of it. This wasn't even on the Engage registration/login site! So this is news to me!

thank you. Exactly what I was hoping for!

[Deleted User] · 10/19/21

@Nick Burrus Interesting. There was an email that went out on October 6th that had this information included. It came from "engage2021@smartsheet.com". I appreciate you flagging this and I will look into this with our events team.

Glad you started this thread so I could get you the info you were looking for! :)

cantpickname · 10/19/21

I would second this sentiment. As a heavy-user of smartsheet I also appreciated the break-out sessions last year. I don't need generic sales pitches but would LOVE to actually see what they are talking about.

My needs may be more tactile or technical than others, which I thought was covered well by the various tracks last year.

I also haven't seen the Build Your Own Agenda email but will look into your link provided.

Paul Newcome · 10/19/21

I got the email, and it was also listed (at least for me) on the event registration page.

Stacie Karkhoff · 10/20/21

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/308256#Comment_308256

I agree! I feel that the standard product enhancements this year were minimal compared to previous events. Even if there were some basic, simple updates, they were exciting. Unless I missed something, it seems like the only upgrade on the standard platform was the changes in form branding. There are a ton of other updates to forms that I'd like to have seen, like being able to use more than one condition in logic, formatting options for text, etc.

Also, not every user has an Advance package. I'd love to be able to utilize Smartsheet to its full capabilities, but it's also hard to sell my company on upgraded features when I don't quite understand how they full work. For me, the quick 30-second pitch videos and the one-page sell sheets don't do it. It would have been nice to have breakouts with actual demos and Q&A available. Hopefully, the roundtables and other sessions over the next few weeks will assist with that missing piece. I just hope it's not too late to submit my business case for 2022 budget requests!

[Deleted User] · 10/27/21

@cantpickname and @Stacie Karkhoff Thanks so much for sharing your feedback about the breakout rooms. We definitely tried to address the needs for product deep dives and customer walk throughs via some of the webinars and roundtables listed on the Build Your Own Agenda page. Hopefully a couple of these sessions have the content you are looking for.

I will pass this feedback along to our events team so that we can ensure that we are offering this content for upcoming events.

Nick Burrus · 11/02/21

Thank you @Stephanie Boulanger !

I miss the breakout rooms

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