Vendor PSA: A Field Guide to Field Day

Field Day vendors pay real money to get in front of a room full of independent engineers. These engineers have zero obligation to write a post, produce content, or even discuss anything they see. Some vendors turn that into years of attention, others fade.

I’m not going to name names. (You know who you are, so does Tom.) But I am going to put together the field guide I wish someone had emailed every vendor before they booked their slot.

Most of this is going to read as snark. It’s earned snark. But every point underneath is a real lever you can pull to get more value out of your slot. Read it that way.

Since apparently I can’t keep my opinions to myself, big surprise, this has turned into a bit of a recurring series… See: Vendor PSA: Words and Phrases to Avoid in Presentations from 2013, and the original Public Service Announcement for Engineers from 2011.

Before You Show Up

Read the delegate bios. All of them. They’re public, they’re linked off the event page, and most of us have been doing this for years. Knowing who is in the room changes how you pitch. The canonical cautionary tale here goes back to early NFD: a vendor questioned Ivan Pepelnjak understanding of how MPLS works… Ivan Pepelnjak. The guy who literally wrote the book on MPLS. The room has not forgotten, and it’s been well over a decade. Don’t be that vendor.

Watch the other presentations and tailor your talk. You’re presenting to the same people who just sat through three other vendors before you. The schedule is published. The streams are public. There is no excuse for not knowing what has already been said in the room.

This is bigger than just differentiation. If three vendors ahead of you already walked through “the problem” your category solves, we do not need to hear it a fourth time. We work in this space. We know what the problem is. Cut the setup, skip the industry context, and spend the time on what you do about it. The session right before yours already did half your intro for free. Use it.

Understand the format. NFD is not a keynote. It’s a conversation with practitioners who have probably already deployed your competitors in production. We are not the audience for your sales kickoff. We’re here for the engineering session your SE normally isn’t allowed to give in front of customers.

Deck Hygiene

Font size. There are 15+ people in the room, plus everyone watching the livestream, plus everyone watching the YouTube replay six months later. If the back row can’t read your slides, you may as well not have shown it. Open the file on your laptop, walk to the other side of the office, and try to read it. If you can’t, neither can we.

Kill the NASCAR slide. The wall of customer logos is meaningless. We can’t read half of them, the rest are companies whose presence on your slide tells us nothing about whether the product works, and nobody has ever bought a product because they saw a logo. If you must include logos, pick three that actually deployed your product at scale, name the use case, and move on.

Kill the Gartner Magic Quadrant slide. Everyone is somehow in the upper right. Nobody who actually understands the technology cares what Gartner says. Period. The whole quadrant model is a procurement-checkbox exercise dressed up as analysis… but I digress. If you’re using the MQ as your differentiator, you don’t have a differentiator.

Cut the founder origin story and the funding recap. Two engineers met at a coffee shop in 2019, raised a Series B in 2023, and decided to disrupt the industry. Cool… nobody flew to San Jose to hear that. If it’s on the About page or Crunchbase, it doesn’t need to be in the deck.

Lose the TAM slide. “$47B market by 2028 per Forrester.” Delegates are not your investors. We don’t care how big your addressable market is. We care whether the product works in our environment.

Make your architecture diagrams readable. If the diagram has 40 boxes, 12 arrows, and 6-point text on each box, the only thing we’re going to write is that your architecture is complicated. Pick one diagram per session. Make it big. Make it labeled. Make sure the colors mean something.

No strawman “legacy vs. us” comparison tables. You know the one. The one where the legacy vendor magically has zero features and your product has all of them with green checkmarks. Delegates use the products you call “legacy.” We know what they actually do. The straw man is insulting, and we will absolutely call it out on stream.

Buzzword rationing. AI-powered, cloud-native, zero-trust, single-pane-of-glass, digital transformation. Pick one adjective per sentence, max, and it had better be doing real work. If you can remove the word and the sentence still means the same thing, the word was filler.

Vague roadmaps are worse than no roadmap. “H2 2026: enhanced capabilities” tells us nothing. Either commit to specific features and dates, or explicitly say “we’re not sharing roadmap today.” The middle ground just makes it look like you don’t have one.

Stage Craft

Don’t read the slides to us. We can read. If your slides are dense enough that you need to narrate them out loud, the slides are too dense. The slide is the visual aid. You are the talk.

Demo > deck. Every minute on a screenshot is a minute you could have spent in the actual product. If the product can be demoed live, demo it live. Yes, demos fail sometimes. We’re engineers. We get it. A failed live demo with a real recovery is a hundred times more memorable than a polished video.

Live demos beat recorded videos every time. Recorded demos always look fake, even when they’re real. Live demos prove the product exists in a way no slide can. If your product genuinely cannot be demoed live for a defensible reason then say so explicitly and walk us through the architecture instead.

Kill the 20-minute company intro. Mission, history, leadership team, office locations, analyst rankings. By the time we see a screenshot of the actual product, we’ve lost half the audience to laptops. If you must do company background, give it five minutes max and get to the technology.

Don’t stack four presenters into a single session. Whether your slot is thirty minutes or ninety, every handoff loses momentum. Every new presenter spends the first two minutes establishing themselves. Pick your two strongest people, give them real time, and let them carry the session.

Bring an engineer. At minimum one person in the room who can answer “what happens when …. ?” without saying “great question, I’ll follow up.” Marketing-only presenter lineups telegraph that you don’t trust your own engineers in front of a hostile room. We notice.

Don’t have the CEO present deep tech. All due respect to founders, but if they’re three years removed from the code, it shows the second a delegate asks a real question. So, unless your CEO knows ball, let him open with five minutes of vision, then hand it to the people who actually know how the thing works.

Reading the Room

We are not sales leads. The “do you have this pain in your environment?” discovery questions belong on a sales call with a prospect. We are reviewers. Pitch us the technology, not the value prop you’d run on a CIO.

“Great question, I’ll follow up” is a promise. Then follow up. The follow-up list is where vendor trust gets built or burned. The vendors who circle back within a week with a real answer get remembered. The ones who never reply also get remembered… just differently.

Don’t get defensive when we push. If a delegate pushes hard on a real limitation, the worst possible response is “well actually if you look at it this way…” The right response is “you’re right, that’s a real gap, here’s what we’re doing about it.” We’re going to write either way. Honesty plays much better than spin.

Know who you’re talking to. This circles back to reading the bios, but it goes deeper. If three of us in the room have deployed your direct competitor in production, that should change how you frame the entire conversation. Pretending we don’t have the context we obviously have is the fastest way to lose the room.

After the Lights Go Down

Send the slides. You paid for the slot. The delegates ARE the ROI. If we don’t have the deck, we either skip the post or we get details wrong from memory. Neither of those outcomes helps you. Seriously, send the damn slides.

Not as a watermarked image-only PDF. If we can’t copy a product name, paste a config snippet, or pull a screenshot at decent resolution, the deck is half-useless for blog material. Send the editable version, or at minimum a PDF where the text is selectable.

Engage with what delegates publish. If we write about you, comment on it. Share it. Reach out and say thanks. Better still, engage with the substance. If we raised a concern, flagged a gap, or pushed back on a claim, tell us what you’re doing about it. Even a “you’re right, that’s on the roadmap for Q3” reply lands well. You don’t have to love the post to respond to it constructively. The vendors who treat the post-event coverage as a one-way obligation get one round of coverage. The ones who engage with the community, including the parts they weren’t thrilled about, get repeat coverage for years.

If a delegate writes something critical, don’t whine about it. It happens, rarely. We’re not out to trash anyone, but once in a while the coverage is going to be less than glowing. The worst thing you can do is push back publicly, pressure the delegate to take the post down, or run to the organizers to complain. Look up the Streisand effect. If it’s factually wrong, reach out privately with the correction. If it’s fair criticism, sit with it and fix the product. Quiet and constructive beats loud and defensive every single time.

Don’t cold-pitch us as leads. If your sales team drops the entire delegate list into a marketing automation sequence two days after the event, we will all notice and we will all talk about it.

What You’re Paying For

The vendors who do this well get written about for weeks. They get linked from podcast episodes. They get mentioned at the next event when delegates are catching up. They build durable mindshare with the people who influence what their peers buy.

The vendors who don’t get a quick mention, sometimes a polite one, and then they fade.

You’re not just buying a slot at Tech Field Day. You’re buying outcomes. Everything in this post is just the difference between vendors who understand that and vendors who think they bought an ad.

Now, please… send the slides.

I’m sure I missed a few PSAs in here that other delegates would add. Drop them in the comments and I’ll round up a v2 if there’s enough material.