Grace Lau
When crafting your game plan for a conference like Google Next, just going through the agenda and choosing which sessions you want to attend can be a little overwhelming. How do you decide what’s most relevant to you from a lineup of 400+ keynotes, presentations, and panels? That’s why we’ve done the hard work and curated the top sessions you won’t want to miss.
When it comes to content, there’s something at Next ‘19 for everyone. Take your pick of panel discussions, interactive roundtables, bootcamp-style workshops, certification sessions, and more, covering a range of business, marketing, and technical topics.
To make this post a little more skimmable, we broke it all down into must-attend sessions for:
- Business leaders
- Product leaders
- Revenue leaders
- G Suite users
3 must-attend sessions for business leaders:
While Next ‘19 is definitely a tech conference, you’ll find a number of sessions to improve your business skills and strategy.
- Improving Internal Communications With G Suite and LumApps
Lucy Luo (Domain Lead, IS&T Corporate & IS Domains Veolia) and the LumApps team (Michael, Frank, Renaud, and Rob)—who are also proud Copper customers—will show you how LumApps functions as a social intranet that helps businesses promote their corporate culture and share targeted, personalized information with employees.
- Data Gravity Is Lighter Than You Think
Data data data. Everyone loves (and maybe secretly hates) data. There's more of it than ever before, which means there's more of it to organize and sort than ever. Ashwinder Ahluwalia and Benedict Chong (Product Managers at Google Cloud) will show you how to use machine learning and data analytics to extract useful insights from your data. (Don't worry, there will be demos.)
- Making Vendor Partnerships Work for You
In this panel, Courtney Hampson (Program Manager at Google Cloud) will chat with Ian Crew (University of California, Berkeley), Nick Young (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Andrew Keating (Box), and Zach Yeskel (Google) and share their experiences and tips for the most effective ways to build long-lasting partnerships with vendors.
Sign up for our Happy Hour event at Google Next to meet the team and have a cocktail on us!
3 must-attend sessions for product leaders:
Are you responsible for all things product at your organization? Be sure to check out these sessions to learn how to incorporate the latest technological advances in developing your roadmap.
- Transforming Customer Experience: WooliesX Digital Journey
Join this session with Google Cloud's Parna Bhattacharya and Australian supermarket chain's Head of Engineering and Head of Platforms, David Bolton and Joshua Rogers. Get a first-hand look at how traditional businesses (like supermarkets) can use technology to completely overhaul the customer experience.
- Undoing Human Bias at Scale With Kubeflow
Michelle Casbon (Senior Developer Programs Engineer at Google Cloud) and John Bohannon (Director of Science at PrimerLearn) will lead this session about how machine learning can be used to counteract our human biases—instead of reinforcing them. Data science at its best.
- Integrate Firebase into Your Existing Infrastructure
Today, app development is a whole new game. In this breakout session with Hiranya Jayathilaka (Senior Software Engineer at Google Cloud) and Lauren Long (Software Engineer at Google Cloud), you’ll learn an easier way to develop feature-rich apps and new serverless components in different programming languages to make those apps even more dynamic.
3 must-attend sessions for revenue leaders:
Are you part of the team that makes it rain? Here are the sessions that will help you stay at the top of your game.
- Cost Control and Financial Governance Best Practices
See how the best companies around the world are managing the unpredictable costs of working in the cloud. Folks from Credit Karma, Deloitte, Etsy, The Broad Institute, and Vendasta will share some best practices for achieving more predictable costs and how you can find efficiencies in the cloud.
- Establishing Financial Governance Controls on GCP
How do you plan for cloud spend? Find out as Aurelie Fonteny and Phillip Coletti (Product Managers at Google Cloud) demo how to set up both proactive and reactive financial governance controls. From quotas to permissions to budgets, your cloud usage and costs will be capped and under control after you implement your learnings from this breakout session.
- Better Insight: Measuring the Cost of an Application on GCP
You've already heard of Target. Now, learn about how Target tracks the cost of all of their apps. There are hundreds—across multiple business units, and using various combinations of Google products. Rachel Shinn (Senior Scrum Master at Target) and Ron Cuirle (Senior Engineering Manager at Target) will show you how to use tools like Data Studio (we love Data Studio), Stackdriver Logging, and BigQuery to generate better insights into your apps' costs and make smarter decisions.
3 must-attend sessions for G Suite users:
G Suite is a commonly used tool, but are you making the most of it? Transform yourself into a power user in these sessions.
- Empowering Global Nonprofits to Drive Impact with G Suite
Fiona Soderberg (Program Manager at Google Cloud) and Kyle Freeman (Tech Lead/Manager at Google Cloud) will lead this breakout session, sharing how nonprofit organizations around the world are using G Suite's apps to work together, communicate better, increase donations, and engage with communities.
- Google Docs: Taking Collaboration Beyond Real Time
Have any burning questions about how to use Google Docs effectively across different teams? Here’s your chance to have them answered. (Or you could just check out this post.) Abigail Sweeney (User Experience Researcher at Google Cloud), Birkan Icacan (Product Manager at Google Cloud), and Sean Wen (Designer at Google Cloud) will teach you how to collaborate with multiple teammates more efficiently with tips beyond just "real-time co-editing."
- How Your Child Uses Google in Class
This is a neat one. See what the kids are doing these days in this panel with Jonathan (Director, Product Management at Google for Education) and Google Product Managers Brittany, Wendi, and Andi. Learn about the tools that are being used in schools across the country—and get some tips for how to support your child's learning.
Now that you’ve gotten an overview of some of the sessions we’re most excited about, let us know what you think! Is there a session you can’t wait to attend? Something we left out that you think should be included?
