Samsung Developers Conference
We Came. We Coded. We Conquered.
Samsung Developer Conference is a flagship global event, showcasing the vision for the future to a vibrant audience of builders, coders, and engineers.
Samsung Developer Conference is a two-day event held annually in the Bay Area, attracting over 6,000 attendees from around the world to discover the latest technologies from Samsung, featuring a number of workshops and sessions designed to help developers in the Samsung ecosystem
Those visiting SDC are treated to first looks at some of the latest and greatest products of Samsung’s innovation. Spanning categories like mobile devices, UX design and more, the devices and experiences showcased at the conference hold the power to transform the way people live, work and connect.
If you build it... they will come.
The Samsung NEXT team had been participating at SDC for the past 4 years. When I joined the company, the challenge on our side was to increase our presence at the event as the innovation arm for Samsung, showcase portfolio companies from our Ventures team and position our product line as thought-leaders in the AI and deep tech space.
To be able to achieve all of this, we needed to build a booth that could house our different portfolio companies- and also our product teams- making sure that they were not seen as one line of business and each company would have their own unique personality and technology featured.
I worked with Samsung’s HQ team to position our group as the innovators that connect with startups and a deep tech audience through our two software products: Whisk (food AI platform) and Dis.co (edge computing). Feedback from previous years indicated a need for deeper, more technical content, so I worked with our Product Evangelism team to build highly technical sessions and host a CodeLab station. All of our sessions were standing room only and we added a kiosk at the Samsung NEXT booth to allow attendees to learn more or continue the conversation after the session. At their booth, we made sure to build informational signs around their product, how they fit into NEXT and how they interact with the portfolio of products from Samsung.
Show ‘em what you’re working with.
I worked with our platform team that manages portfolio relationships to bring six portfolio startups to SDC and provide them with a kiosk and devices to showcase their technology. In addition, they were each provided with a suite of signage, showcasing information about their company. We also enabled them to conduct demos, allowing them to connect with a large audience of software developers and potential clients.
I also made sure to build a sign at the entrance to the portfolio area explaining Samsung NEXT’s Ventures mission and vertical investment thesis, so people could become familiarized with our technology focuses.
To position NEXT as the forefront of product innovation, I worked with our SVP of Product, Travis Bogard and his team to build an open theater fireside-chat session around developing new software products. In parallel, I also worked with the HQ team to make sure the themes that our team was developing made sense with the overall direction from SDC and we made sure to tie how Samsung NEXT is influencing Samsung from the inside out.
Travis has extensive experience bringing new products to life and gave insights into how he and his team are developing new software at NEXT through really technical and disrupting startups and the impact that these products will have in how we connect with smart technology in our daily life.
The results.
Participating at SDC increased our product’s teams and portfolio companies visibility with target organizations and developers that can convert into users or clients. SDC is a great platform for our teams to reach a much bigger audience that looks for ways to engage with their technology and the fact that we are deeply technical, helping them come closer to us and engage with our products.
The surveys conducted by the HQ team after SDC showed high ratings for our technical sessions and feedback from attendees pointed out how interesting and different the information and technology that our teams brought was. They requested that in future events we continue to focus on these types of deep technical sessions and provide more spaces like CodeLab to allow developers to have a closer look at our technologies and teams.
As a result of this positive feedback, Samsung NEXT was asked to increase their presence after our first year and our technical and open theater sessions received double the space allocation in the 2019 edition and secured additional speaking opportunities.
