A CEO Pivots From Events to Digital Publishing During the Pandemic

Ruth Yarnit, CEO, LeadDev

I’ve worked with LeadDev for several years as the host of Bookmarked which interviews authors and as a workshop facilitator. This gave me a front-row seat to watch the company handle the sudden shift in the market after the world shut down in March 2020. I’m thrilled LeadDev CEO Ruth Yarnit was willing to share her story with me. We talked about Ruth’s unexpected path to CEO, how she thinks about the balance between being internal and external facing, and her advice for other leaders facing a sudden market shift. 

It's great to see you today. We've worked together with LeadDev on various projects for quite a while now. I was hoping you’d be up to come talk about your experience because LeadDev has had an interesting ride the last few years. You were one of the businesses really affected by the pandemic.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of many affected, but yes, definitely for us it had a big impact.

Yep. Can you give a quick introduction to yourself?

Yes. I'm Ruth. I'm the CEO and one of two co-founders of LeadDev. I am London-based in the UK. I'm a mum of two and run LeadDev. Pre-pandemic we were an events company and we produced conferences and meetups for senior engineering leaders across the world in the US and Europe.

We've come out of the pandemic as digital publishers. We still organize events, but we've broadened. I founded LeadDev in 2013 with my friend Dave Fletcher, and that's what I've been doing ever since and I really love it. I find it a very creative and inclusive space to work. Tech is not my background, but it's a place where I like working. I feel like I've found a community of like-minded, may I say, kind of liberal creative people, so it's my space now.

I feel the same. Tech is my world. I found an industry and a space that just suits me. You're coming up on your 10-year anniversary of the company this year then?

Yes. The company has evolved quite a lot and the name has changed over those 10 years, but yes, effectively the same company, same people with a bit of an evolution and adding people as we've gone along.

What made you and Dave, your co-founder, start LeadDev? How did you get started?

As with all these things, there was a couple of different reasons that came together at the same time. I mean, the first thing is that Dave and I are really good friends and we were friends first. I went to primary school with Dave's wife, Corinna, and so we were extremely good friends.

One night we were in the pub (because we're British) and Dave used to run a software development agency and he employed a lot of developers and they had been running a couple of grassroots community conferences on things that his developers were interested in.

They had a very small database conference and a small front-end conference. They were running them partly for fun and to promote the agency in the local area. They were also running them because Dave's developers wanted to go to those conferences and they didn't exist in Oxford where he was based. So they'd been running these two conferences for a year and saw lots of opportunity in them. People were coming to them and they were paying for tickets and companies were interested in sponsoring them. They did a really beautiful job with them. They were very focused on the experience and they were designed beautifully but frankly not terribly profitable and also Dave needed his developers to get back to doing development work.

My background is in event operations. So we got together and said, "Maybe there's a spinoff company here." His company was called White October. We were like, "Maybe there's a White October Events here." So we decided then to start a company and have somebody solely focused on the events who was a professional and knew what to do with them.

At the time I was working in an organization with quite a toxic culture. It was a small organization, and there was a really strange relationship between the senior team and the Board and the employees. I was an employee and I just kind of thought, "I've never run a business before, but I can do a better job than this. I want to create a work environment that doesn't feel like this." That was a big driver for me. Lots of things came together. 

As the business evolved, around 2015 we started running LeadDev as a conference. That came about as a direct answer to a need that was happening in Dave's business. It was a fairly small agency, but they were scaling so he needed to recruit what in the UK we call lead developers. He was looking to employ some people or promote some people into roles that were leading a small team of developers and he'd never had them in his business before.

He started thinking about the role and what those people would need to be able to do and the skills they'd need. And thinking, actually this is a very different job to the role of an individual contributor. There are a lot of skills that we haven't trained them in and you can't intuit it. Somebody has to teach you how to get the best out of people and make those kinds of decisions about, for example, how to hire and manage people and how to think about team performance and team happiness.

He started looking around and thinking, "Oh, there aren't any courses. There aren't any conferences." Certainly weren't in the UK in 2015. And so we thought, "Oh, well maybe this is our next conference. If Dave's having this problem, maybe other people are as well." So we did what we always do when we're starting conferences or any products now, which is go and talk to people. So we drafted a fake agenda of a conference that we thought would be useful, which was a balance of a lot of team-focused softer skills, but then also still some tech and tools and process elements, which is what's always made up LeadDev.

We spoke to some team leads and some CTOs and various people we know and just said, "If we put this conference on, would that be useful? Would you pay to come? Would you send your team? Would you want to come?" Everybody said, "Well yeah, yeah, actually that would be good. All of these things are problems that we have, but I don't know if we would spend our budget on that. We want to go to tech conferences. If we can only afford to go to one conference a year we want it to be something technical because that's what will bring on our skills. But actually, those things you are talking about, how you communicate, how you manage people. Those are the things we find the hardest."

We decided to give it a go. We launched it in London in 2015 and it sold really well. It was a small conference, but people came along and the feeling was just amazing. There was this real sense of, "Oh my God, this unanswered need. All these things we find so difficult being discussed. I thought I was the only person who found it this hard but everybody finds this hard and I've found this community of people who not only admit that this is a problem that lots of people share but also actually that we all care about humans in the same way."

I know it sounds kind of cheesy, but it's very much a group of people who are focused on human beings and the human experience and making sure that people like their work and get satisfaction out of it.

So it felt a bit revelatory really, that first LeadDev. It was really wonderful. So we ran it the next year. We were still running other conferences alongside that, we were still running a front-end conference and a database conference, and a testing conference. Then we decided to launch in the US as well. By 2019 we had decided that we would just focus on LeadDev. That was the thing that we all felt the most passionately about.

There was this growing community. We felt there were loads of opportunities. We really wanted to be doing meetups and we wanted to be producing content throughout the year for people, but we didn't have the resources. So in 2019, we said, "Okay, we'll just be LeadDev. " and we stopped running any other conferences or anything non-LeadDev related and that was us in 2019.

One thing I noticed is that you said you got some feedback that we don't know if we'll spend our personal development budgets on a non-technical conference, but you all decided to go forward anyway. What made you say, "Well we're going to try it anyway"?

I think because we really could see that the need was there and it would solve a genuine challenge for people. I think maybe we just thought, "Well, we'll kind of educate people that there is a thing there that could solve this problem." We could see from the conversations we were having that the technical problems that developers have are not the things that keep them awake at night because they're so smart and they're good at self-learning and they can go on the internet and they can teach themselves how to do things.

It wasn't the technical things that were making them go, "Oh I'm nervous about work tomorrow," or "I don't know how I'm going to get my next promotion." There were these other non-technical things. So we thought, "Well if we can solve those things then this would be a genuinely useful product and so we should just do it. "

I think it's true. We need a paradigm shift. We need to shift how we think about the things that hold us back from doing our best work or having the kind of organizations we want to have. It’s not necessarily a lack of technical skills, it’s the stuff surrounding it. 

Yeah, absolutely. It would be remiss of me not to mention that one of the first people I went to speak to about the conference was Meri Williams, who was a London CTO. She was one of the people I took this kind of fake conference agenda to and said, "Would you pay for your team to come to this?" She was immediately on board and said, "Yes, this is a good idea."

I later messaged her and said, "Would you host that first conference? You are somebody who I think is a good values fit for what we believe in." So she's been involved from the off in helping us craft the content and what would be the most useful talks to select. She's been very instrumental in the development of LeadDev as well and we still work with her.

Yeah, Meri’s great. I remember talking with her about it in 2016. I thought, "Ooh, I'm going to pay attention to this." 

This is your first time as CEO. Was that something you planned or ever thought you’d ever do? 

Absolutely not. I mean, my parents are both public servants. 

I didn't grow up knowing anyone in business. I don't know any CEOs. It just wasn't in my vocabulary of things you can do when you grow up. It just didn't occur to me that that was a thing you could do.

It speaks to my personal great naivety, but I think if you'd asked me 12 years ago what a CEO was, it was a white middle-aged man in an office with a secretary who leaves at three o'clock on a Friday to go and play golf and is just interested in the bottom line. I don't think I even knew what the bottom line was!

If anything, I would've been potentially even a little bit embarrassed about focusing on business over people because I feel like people are why you do things and how you have a meaningful impact. I've been on a huge journey of understanding how you can run businesses that have a positive impact on people. I suppose that was one of the reasons I mentioned it at the beginning, why I thought, "Maybe I could set up a business because I've seen some people doing it badly. I can think of things I'd change from the off." So yeah, no, it wasn’t expected. 

It sounds like a small ambition, but I'm all about customer service. So I enjoy creating experiences that make people leave feeling like “that has changed something small for me”, or “I felt personally taken care of”, or “I had a fun day today”. It can be small, but I'm all about customer experience.

So that's why I went into organizing events. I suppose that's a bit of what I thought I could bring as the head of an events company. And let's also be honest here. When I set up LeadDev, it was just two of us. It was me and another girl who had come from my previous organization. She did all the marketing and the web stuff and I did all the events and business stuff, so we started very small.

I love that you’ve taken the idea of creating an experience for people at an event and translating that into leading a company. 

Yeah, absolutely.

Can you give us some context for what the business looked like in March 2020 as the world was shutting down?

In March 2020, we were a team of 12 or 13. We were working out of a small office in Brixton, which is in South London, where I lived at the time. We worked there every day, 9 to 5, a very kind of normal setup. We were preparing for our big New York conference in that March, which would've happened in April 2020.

The tickets were on sale and we'd sold sponsorship for it. So we had technology vendors who were getting ready to go and set up their stores and talk to our audience about their tools and products. We’d sold 600-odd tickets for this conference that was going to happen in Manhattan in April. My business partner, Dave Fletcher, had been saying since about Christmas, "I’m seeing this coronavirus thing in China. It's bad, it could have an impact on us as well for the business. What are we doing to plan for this?"

Me and our event manager at the time, Megan, were putting all these different contingency plans in place and going, "What might happen if for some reason we couldn't travel there, how would we run a conference from the UK?" Or, "What if none of our speakers could get there? What would we do? How would we..." So we were thinking through contingency planning, but do you know what? I didn't really believe it was going to have an impact.

That was in January. By February/March it was becoming increasingly obvious that it would have an impact. Then very quickly we were meeting on a weekly basis to assess the risk to our audience of running it and trying to work out what might happen. Reading the World Health Organization website and just trying to figure out the right course of action. We weren't quite yet seeing other conferences shutting down.

I think the first bellwether was that Twitter or one of the other really big tech firms decided to stop people from traveling to events and conferences. I think that's what happened first. We were like, "Okay, well they are much bigger than us. They are well-tapped into what's going on. Writing's on the wall."

At some point in March 2020, we decided we can't run this conference anymore. It’s not going to be safe to do this. We had lots of communication with speakers who were planning to come, workshop tutors and attendees who were excited, and the sponsors who were planning to attend. It's quite a big operation shutting down a conference that you're planning to run.

So we shut down the conference. It was a nerve-wracking time because we didn't know how long the Coronavirus would last. We didn't know what the impact on our team would be. We shut down our office at that point and sent everybody to work from home instantly. We'd never worked remotely before. And at that point in time, I know everybody else kind of processed Coronavirus differently, but I was very frightened at that time. I felt like, "I'm going to lose people I love to this. This sounds absolutely terrifying."

It was a very, very weird time for so many people, wasn't it? I’ve been personally lucky and I haven't suffered any personal losses of people over Coronavirus. I feel very blessed but we were also suddenly a team of 12 people working from home, who had never done it before and no conferences on the horizon, which at that point was the only thing that we did.

That was your only revenue stream, correct?

Yeah, all of it.

How did you begin to reason about it? I mean this is a pretty devastating event for someone like you all, meaning from revenue, I mean because companies need revenue to pay people. I mean that's how it works.

Absolutely. We had money in the bank – people had already bought their tickets and they paid for their sponsorship. We were in a fortunate position that we could pay salaries for a bit. So we were thinking, "Okay, well we've got this money but it isn't our money until we have delivered something valuable to the people who've given it to us. What would be valuable?"

Everybody's now working from home, and nobody can attend conferences, but the problems that they had that meant they wanted to attend this conference haven't gone anywhere. If anything, they've been exacerbated by this immediate pivot to remote. Everybody's at home and frightened. No one can go anywhere. All of the kinds of situations that were hard before the pandemic are even harder now because you're all at home with kids and dogs and caring responsibilities and whatever else people are dealing with.

I suppose I was scared, but I also felt confident that we had a clever team and I thought, "You know what? We're going to think of a different way to solve these challenges for people. It might not be conferences, but it'll be something different.” So we went back to basics and how we've always started new products, which is just talking to people and kind of saying, "What keeps you awake at night? What are your biggest challenges? If we gave you a hundred thousand pounds tomorrow, what would you spend it on? How would you spend money to solve your problems? If we could make one thing come true for you, what would it be?" Just lots of questions that tried to get to the root of what the biggest issues for people are.

And at the time we were seeing lots of events, and companies making a very quick flip to just virtual versions of the conferences they used to run. And Rob Smith, who you previously interviewed, was very involved in and very outspoken in his belief that just wasn't valuable to people. Attending a fully virtual version of a conference and virtual sponsor booths is not a very valuable way to spend your time if you are at home and feeling kind of isolated and it doesn't give you any of the experiential aspects of attending a conference.

So what is the thing that LeadDev can do for people? It's something around the community, it's something around bringing you together with other people to share conversations and experiences and either solve challenges together or feel like you're kind of less alone in that challenge. We did run one free virtual conference very quickly after we closed down New York.

We called LeadDev Live at that time. 

We focused mainly on the remote challenge in software engineering and lots of live panels and discussions and talks on managing teams remotely. And there's so much good practice out there from teams that had been already remote and designed for remote for years. So we kind of focused on that and then we started building a new product, which we called LeadDev Together. And again, Rob was just absolutely instrumental in this. It was designed to be a product that would be for groups to learn together.

So that's how LeadDev Together came to fruition. Talks and some content but kind of built around how you learn. We spoke to learning experience designers. We asked, “What's the cognitive process you go through to take on information and do something with it?” We built these group experiences based on structured questions and group discussions.

What we wanted was something that you could do something tangible with at the end. You would consume this content, but then what are the outputs for people? What can you see changing at the end of it? So we didn't want to be putting out passive conference content that didn't lead anywhere. That’s how we decided to solve the needs of our audience who couldn't come to our conferences.

For our sponsors, we were thinking about how they could connect with people digitally. One of our ambitions since 2015 had been to produce content for people outside of the conferences. 

Conferences are just points in the year. Outside of the conferences, there's no real way to connect with other people. Your problems don't go away just because you're not at a conference, you can only go to one a year. That's how far your budget stretches. You've got loads of needs for communication issues, people development, metrics, and all kinds of things throughout the rest of the year. 

So we quickly spun up a website, LeadDev.com and we started moving over all the old videos from the conferences onto there and started commissioning articles from our community who would've been speaking for us to write for us instead and paying them because that's important. We always pay the people who give us their time, but the content was free for our community.

I don't want to use the word serendipity about a global pandemic. That wouldn't be right, but it was something that we had always wanted to do, and would we ever have done it if we hadn't had our hand forced? I'm not sure that we would.

So LeadDev.com. Free content for our community to serve them during the year. A new group product which would serve that need to meet with other people and learn together. And then also more, I suppose, commercial packages that we could put together for our sponsors to help them get in front of the same audience that they wanted to get in front of before they were doing it at sponsor booths, and this time they were doing it via webinars or article series, that kind of thing. So that's what we did.

You seem pretty calm and collected. Was there a moment of panic or, do you know what I mean? Your whole revenue stream was just obliterated.

I mean yeah, I sat in a cafe around the corner from our office with my colleague Jo and cried. It's like, "We're sending everybody home tomorrow probably, and is everyone going to be all right? And are my mum and dad going to die? When will we be able to run another conference?"

But I suppose also as well, we have to remember back to March, April 2020, we thought it might be a three-month thing. So we were like, "Yeah, we can weather this financially for three months." It was a bit longer before we realized, "Oh no, we're not going to run our June conference either." 

 I'm very cool about it now but It was a monumentally stressful period of my life. I was living in a flat, I had two very small children, and they couldn't go to nursery. My partner works full time so we were splitting the days. I was working 6:00 AM till midday and he was looking after the kids and then we'd have lunch together and then we'd swap and the other one would do the afternoon. And then we were both working every night after the kids went to sleep until really, really late. And this is a totally universal experience for people with caring responsibility during that period. But personally for me, very stressful and I was very tired.

Yeah. I say that because I think that you've handled it so well. I think that's hard to carry the weight of responsibility to people who bought tickets, sponsors, and employees. 

The responsibility was huge. We were deciding to not run the conference, we were thinking obsessively about safety. You're balancing, "We need to run this conference because this is how we make money and pay people," versus "We don't want people to get ill at something that we're putting on.” So you're juggling these decisions.

But also, I wasn't on my own because at a point in this, Dave, my business partner who hadn't been working in the business, who'd just been running his own agency, shut down his agency and came on board full-time. We were a duo and we had a leadership team – Julie, who's our finance director, and Jo who was our MD at the time and now is our people and operations director.

So we were in it together very much, very kind of supportive, making decisions together. We were also getting good advice from more experienced people than us on our board going, "You're going to get through this, it's going to be okay." Yeah, it was a big weight, but also it wasn't carried alone I suppose. I guess it rarely is, isn't it? It's rarely truly on one person's shoulders.

It really isn't, but sometimes it seems like the weight of the CEO role can feel like it’s on their shoulders. It’s wonderful that you had others so the weight felt less heavy. 

Yeah. I wonder if there's also something about being part of a relatively small team. I said there were12 of us and I don't know what the other people in the team felt like, but I felt a lot of support from them and they didn't treat it like just a job. They were as obsessed with what we were doing. We shared the weight of needing to produce something valuable for our customers. So it did feel like a kind of shared endeavor, which is just greatly to their credit because they didn't have to do that. It wasn't their business.

I have deep love and respect for your organization and the people in it and that is my experience with them. I mean it is just top-notch, incredible people. 

What's one of the biggest things you've learned as a leader in the last two years about leadership?

You can't be too close to your customers, your community, and your audience. You can't know them too well. You can't have too many conversations. The big revelation for me has been from coming from an event ops background, starting an events company, and obsessing over how you run interesting inclusive conferences, I've realized that actually we are medium agnostic s. It doesn't actually matter the medium that we're serving people in. It's just the problems that we're solving for people.

The real revelation for me is I might not know how to do it. I might not know how to launch a digital publishing company or how to commission articles, but there will be somebody who does. So you can employ great people to do a thing you don't know how to do. The thing you need to know inside out is what are the solutions you're providing or what are the challenges that you're solving. It doesn't really matter how you're solving them. 

I think you just have to keep asking the questions over and over because the problems for people develop and change. I think it continues to be a bit of push and pull in a small business – how much time you spend being internally facing as a CEO versus being externally facing, just talking to people, and finding out what their issues are.

I want to go back to the balance between how much time you spend internally versus externally. Was that something you found difficult or was that pretty easy to figure out? 

Not at all because when you shift the focus externally, then I have found that then things start kind of falling over a bit internally and you think, we haven't served this person right in the team, or we haven't put enough focus on this. or we've just pivoted to remote but we've not spent enough time thinking about how meetings are going to work in this new culture or how we're recording and sharing information when we never see each other. Then you spend a lot of time with your head in the business thinking, "I want to solve all these things and make it better and smoother and more efficient, and I want people to love coming to work and I want their work-life balance to be great." Then of course you're like, "Oh no, the products, the audience." So no, I'm still seeking balance there.

I can see there might be swings and maybe there need to be swings. I think sometimes people think balance means equilibrium but I think it’s often more like a teeter-totter or pendulum swing. 

That feels more like how it is for me. I still feel like a new CEO as well in lots of ways. I'm still learning how you lead a company and we're growing a lot. There are 29 of us now. So, that's what happened over two years. I'm sure it sounds very small fry to lots of people, but for us, doubling a business is really significant. All the processes that used to work for 12 people don't work for 29 people. You have to change everything. But you can't change everything, so then some things don't work very well anymore. So yeah, lots to learn.

Going from 12 to 29 in two years, but also while shifting your business model in the middle of an event must have had a huge impact on your business. That's an incredible amount of transition for the company and for you as a leader to go through.

It's a lot of change. It's a lot of change and sometimes there have been points where the team has kind of said, "What are we? What do we even call our company? And then you're like, "Oh my goodness. We failed to even communicate to our team what our new business is!"

It happens. You're still doing conferences even though you think of yourself as a digital publisher?

Yes, absolutely. They're really core to what we do. They're a really core way that we connect with our community and they're really fun and they're really fun to run and the team gets a real buzz out of doing them. We love it. We brought the conferences back in April 2022. So yeah, our conferences are back. We're about to run our Berlin conference and our first inaugural San Francisco conference as well. So, that's exciting. It's a busy, busy autumn, but really fun.

What was the process like to shift the way you thought about the business? Was it sort of slow and gradual, or was it something where you realized we need to shift the way we're thinking about our business?

I think it was a big shift because it had to be. We just had to do something quite quickly. But I suppose we probably took a good three months thinking about it, talking to people and analyzing what they were telling us, and thinking about different ways we could then meet those needs. But I think probably in the grander scheme of things, it was probably quite a quick and dramatic wholesale shift, I would say. It was always our intention to come back to running conferences the second that we could. We had no idea it would be two and a half years. I think we thought about it for a year tops. So yeah, yeah, pretty dramatic.

What advice would you give other leaders who find themselves in a situation with pretty dramatic changes in the market or something they have to change pretty dramatically?

Be very, very close to your market. Understand what people need, and talk to people. Get your whole team to talk to people. And also, hopefully, you have invested the time and effort, and energy in having a team that has enough emotional buy-in or loyalty to your business that then you can rely on them in a pinch. 

I needed a clever, smart, loyal, emotionally supportive, great team who was going to work their absolute socks off to make something new happen. You can't ask people to do that without some investment in them first. So part of my advice would be to make sure that in good times you've already been doing that.

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