Most conferences serve a single industry or knowledge specialty. There, everyone has a common language and starting point, and it makes sense to allow speakers time to go really deep and describe some specific new learning. But when the content and audience are wide-ranging, a speaker’s goal isn’t to exhaustively cover a niche topic. Instead, it’s to make her work accessible to others. To show why it’s interesting. To show why it matters. That can usually be done in less than 20 minutes.
