tldr;
You’re one of fifteen, twenty thousand people at Rising, not the person on stage. Stop trying to drink the firehose. You’ll drown and learn nothing.
The only artifact that justifies the trip is the one-page memo your boss actually reads. Reverse-engineer the entire week backward from that page.
Pick fewer sessions. Work the floor on purpose. Capture as you go. And for your own sake, pace yourself.
Somebody in your leadership chain approved the registration. Flights, hotel on the Strip, the badge. Four, maybe five thousand dollars, and a vague mandate that sounded like “go see what’s out there and bring back something useful.”
You are not keynoting. You’re not on a panel. You’re attendee number 8,742, and nobody rearranged the agenda around your calendar.
Good. That’s the job I actually know how to do. Here’s how you work Rising when the spotlight is pointed at somebody else.
Start with the memo. Work backward.
The mistake is treating the conference as the thing to consume. It isn’t. The thing you produce is the point, and that thing is one page.
Not a trip report. Not forty screenshots of slides you’ll never reopen. One page that says: here’s what I saw, here’s what it means for us, here’s what we should do about it in the next two quarters.
Write the headers of that page before you get on the plane. “What’s actually shipping.” “What we should pilot.” “What we should ignore for now.” And my favorite, “What did I learn that can provide immediate value.” (Try to find one). Every session you pick, every booth you stop at, is you filling in those four sections. If it doesn’t feed the page, it’s tourism.
Pick fewer sessions than you think.
The catalog is designed to make you feel like missing anything is a failure. It isn’t. Half of what’s announced from the main stage will be in the release notes by November, written more clearly and with none of the theatrics.
Skip one and use it to collect your thoughts. Instead, pick a session where a real customer stands up and says “here’s how this broke in our tenant and what we did about it.” Those don’t make it into the release notes. That’s the stuff you can’t get anywhere else.
Rule of thumb: 3-5 sessions a day, chosen well, beats eight sessions chosen out of FOMO. You are not there to fill a schedule. You’re there to fill a page.
The vendor floor is not your friend. Work it anyway.
Every booth is a funnel and you are the thing being funneled. That’s fine. You can still get value out of it if you walk up with a question instead of a lanyard-shaped hole in your soul.
Ask something specific. “Show me how your thing handles [the exact problem you’re fighting in your tenant].” Watch what they do when the happy-path demo runs out of road. That reaction tells you more than the booth graphics ever will.
And when they ask to scan your badge, decide before you’re standing there whether this is a real evaluation or a swag transaction. Both are allowed. Just know which one you’re in.
Capture in the moment, or you’ll lose it.
You think you’ll remember the good line from the breakout. You won’t. By Wednesday it all blurs into a beige hum of “AI-powered”, “agentic”, and free tote bags.
Whatever your system is (notebook, phone, voice memo in the hallway), the rule is the same: capture before the next session starts, not at the end of the day. The half-life of a conference insight is about ninety minutes. After that you’ve got a slide photo and a vibe.
Pace yourself. This is the one everybody blows.
Rising is four days. Some of us crazies come early and make it longer. You cannot do all of it on Monday. The people sprinting the vendor floor at 8am with three tote bags and a cold brew are the same people face-down in their hotel room by Tuesday afternoon, having peaked too early and absorbed nothing.
Skip a session block. Eat a real meal. Take your team to lunch and bond. Have the hallway conversation instead of racing to the next room. The thing you’ll actually remember in December is rarely the session you rushed to. It’s the twenty minutes you spent talking to someone who does your exact job at a company three times your size.
The page, one more time.
Four things. Not thirty. Your boss does not want the firehose either. They want to know what you saw, what it means, and what you’d do. Deliver that on one page while everyone else is still sorting through their camera roll, and you’re not attendee 8,742 anymore.
You’re the person who came back with a plan.
— Mike
Director HR Tech | Skips one Keynote on Purpose
P.S. This summer in Myrtle Beach, Justin found a store called Sugar Life and bought four pounds of candy in one shot. (I’m not innocent here. 1.3 pounds of gumballs. We all have our vice.) Twenty-four hours later: stomachache, mild regret, a working understanding of consequences. I keep telling Rising newbies the same thing, and I’ll tell you: it’s a marathon, not a sprint. Justin forgot that in Myrtle Beach. Don’t forget it in Vegas.
The Department of First Things First. For the people who do the work.
Just a note - my gumballs lasted the week plus a week at home, despite frequent pilfering by 12 year old hands. Justin's candy... didn't.