Delivering DevCon 2025

DevCon is Amazon’s largest internal engineering conference: thousands of engineers from across the company, with nearly every session led by engineers themselves. For the 2025 event, the program covered architecture, storage and AI, with around 11,000 employees expected. Midway through planning, the event’s leadership departed unexpectedly, leaving no clear direction and no time to waste.

The challenge

Step in and own the content strategy and delivery: source, vet and align sessions with the organization’s most important priorities, on a compressed timeline.

What I did

• Got alignment fast. I formed a steering committee to agree on positioning, the core toolchain story and the most pressing learning goals.
• Built the agenda with the experts. I consulted product managers to build and pressure-test the program, then took recommendations to conference leadership for sign-off.
• Programmed for attendees, not presenters. Every session was mapped to the jobs engineers were trying to get done, reflecting what people needed to learn rather than what teams wanted to show.
• Made intake repeatable. A requirements document standardized how sessions were submitted, keeping proposals on brief.
• Built the website myself. With HTML and CSS on the internal wiki platform, using prompting and AI code generation to move fast under deadline.

What changed

DevCon 2025 reached 11,000 employees on time and on brief, despite the mid-cycle leadership change, with a fully vetted program aligned to the company’s learning priorities.

What I took away

When direction disappears, a small steering group and a clear principle (“what do attendees need to get done?”) is enough to keep thousands of people on course.