Meet Trailblazer Chris Alvarez, Jeff Rodanski, and Tessa Reuber

Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Alvarez, Jeff Rodanski, and Tessa Reuber.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Chris, Jeff and Tessa. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
The three of us worked together a few years ago at a User Experience Design agency called Slice of Lime. Jeff co-founded the company with Kevin Menzie (who will be a counselor at this year’s event). Chris was a Lead UX Designer and Tessa focused on Employee Experience design.

We’ve always been inspired by nature and the amazing access we have to the mountains around Denver/Boulder. We also share a passion for creating amazing experiences for ourselves, our clients and our team. Working with world-class clients such as Google and Medtronic, we always found creative ways to engage the teams and keep everyone inspired throughout the project. Sometimes this was a group hike or a picnic by Boulder Creek. Other times it was a singing unicorn birthday-gram. We always kept it interesting.

Slice of Lime was acquired by Pivotal software in 2016, but we’d already started laying the groundwork for either hosting our own design conference or starting up a design school. Like all of our projects, we started with research and talked to a number of people in the local community about what they would want to learn, where their professional skills gaps are and how interested they’d be in participating in something that spun out of a UX design agency. The response was great, and we had plenty of signals that this was a good thing to pursue.

After the acquisition, we kept the idea alive and started meeting regularly to figure out what the next steps would look like. We decided it would be best to host the event as a totally bootstrapped side-venture.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Definitely not a smooth road! 🙂

While we all have experience hosting events and creating amazing digital experiences, we hadn’t put together an event at this scale that involves, well… humans. It’s funny how much we rely on ‘user testing’ or ‘user research’ to improve digital experiences, but there’s still a high degree of separation between your work and the ‘experience’ the end user has with your product. When planning our first year of RAD Summit, we went perhaps too far down the rabbit-hole of ensuring every last detail was planned and refined to create the best experience possible. As a team of three though (all of us have full-time jobs too), we had to step back and look at what we created as a whole in order to stay sane. As a designer, it’s easy to obsess over the details.

We also had no idea how things would play out in terms of timing, ticket sales, vendor commitments, shipping times, etc. We stayed in close communication using tools like Trello and Google Docs, but there were many unplanned late nights spent organizing the fine details.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about RAD Summit – what should we know?
I’m not sure if you’ve been to a conference in the product or design industry, but I’d imagine most of them follow the same format: you (or your company) spends money on the ticket, the flights, the hotel, the meals and when you show up, you realize the event is taking place in what is basically a hotel basement (ok, a ‘ballroom’). You see the speaker while they’re on stage for an hour and then never see them again. Everyone in the room has their laptop and phone screens lit up, and while you take notes during the first few sessions, you burn out quickly from sitting in a dim room and look to Twitter or check email during the last few. Then, after flying back home and heading into the office you realize all the talks are now posted online and you can watch them for free.

RAD Summit is a special type of event focused on disrupting the typical conference experience. Attendees all arrive in a central location on the day of the event. We take buses to camp and during the ride up you may realize that you’re sitting next to someone who’s facilitating a workshop the next day. We don’t print company name on badges because that’s not as important as the person wearing the badge and their own story and experience. You have a core group that you stay with (bunk with, adventure race with) and facilitators, leaders, staff and attendees are all mixed. We do this because we want attendees to feel like they are attending not because they lack something, but because they have something to offer.

Everything is included: the ride to camp (and back), all meals and lodging while at camp, all the activities (we have archery, paddle boarding, yoga, ropes courses, canoeing and much more). We’ve also thought about the type of workshops we feature which are focused less on skills and tools (the things you can learn online) and more on the unspoken dynamics and inner stories that make us who we are. It’s very design and product focused of course, but we don’t want you to get back to work and feel like you could learn anything you experienced at RAD Summit by reading a book or watching a video.

Pricing:

• Full-Price Ticket is $1,399

Contact Info:

• Website: radsummit.co
• Email: founders@radsummit.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/radsummitco/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/radsummit/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/radsummit

Image Credit:
Josh Vertucci – Vertucci Visual

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