For re:Invent 2022, AWS’s Enterprise Strategy team was on the hook for a wide range of keynotes. To help write and design them, they turned to Willis Collaborative. Here’s what we did:
Drafting keynote content: While a number of keynotes drew from existing materials, several of them needed to be built from scratch. In these cases, Willis Collaborative worked directly with the Enterprise Strategists to determine the flow of the presentations, helped to draft content where needed, suggested ways to better transition between chapters and tie things together, and helped point out and eliminate content gaps. This work was largely done in parallel to design work in the interest of time.
Designing keynote graphics: In just over a month, Willis Collaborative designed ~400 slides of new keynote content, and ported ~200 slides of existing content into re:Invent 2022 templates across seven keynotes. Design work combined AWS’s preferred line art style and creative imagery, and required a large number of complex diagrams and multi-slide animations designed to convey concepts.
The work demanded a strong understanding of the subject matter, an ability to visualize complex concepts in new and interesting ways, juggling multiple presentations each with different stakeholders and at various points of completion, and a very tight timeline. In the end, both the Enterprise Strategists that presented the keynotes and the AWS customers that viewed them highly rated the final results, so much so that the Enterprise Strategy team is looking to dramatically scale content creation in partnership with Willis Collaborative for 2023.
