Jürgen Geuter

It is important to find your niche of course. But maybe your niche isn't one of the niches other people are already in? Sure you can choose to be another expert in a field but if you want to differentiate yourself, break the structure a bit. Come at a topic from a different angle. Use your experience and your interests outside of a specific niche to reshape your experience applying to said niche. Standing out begins by not just following everyone else into the same little boxes.

There's a saying that "The best books about the Internet are not about the Internet" and that is often true: Read books outside of your domain, try to get other perspectives than how you think anyways. Even if the book itself doesn't directly lead you down an interesting path your brain will form surprising connections between that book's content and your current problem/question. And that's potentially something non-obvious and interesting.

It's a bit annoying maybe but video conferencing is a bit of a lowest common denominator thing. Use what most people are familiar with. If you are a presenter you might think of yourself to be the star who can demand a certain software with a certain set of features but if you want to reach people and not have them distracted by a tool they don't know choose what they know. If it's MS Teams or Zoom or Google Meet or whatever doesn't matter. Don't built your online presentation around your favorite toy, build it around what your audience knows to reduce friction and mental load so they listen to you and not fiddle around with new buttons. People underestimate how much attention gets lost by bringing people in a new environment.

Some people see "Interactive Prototyping" as further refining wireframes/paper prototypes but I disagree. Interactive prototypes shouldn't continue the often visual designs/concepts from earlier stages but reframe the problem as a network of events and actions. Don't draw buttons to click but make the actual interaction and its results/following states obvious: What is the using person's state and expectation at that point? What types of agency and choice do you want to provide and which do you want to avoid. The insights you gather here form kind of a "looking at my graphical sketches from a different angle" lens that really opens up rethinking your first drafts.

Being a mentor is a lot of work. It's very rewarding especially in the long term but I do think that some people might not really enjoy it as much. If you are in a management position but don't really click with mentoring, find a colleague or partner to do that for you: Mentoring is a "soft" thing whose impacts are hard to quantify but not doing it will hurt you in the long run (stunted development of your team members for example). Realize that mentoring isn't optional but that you _can_ get another person to help you out with it when you can't do it.

The best way to learn about presenting is watching people present, even on topics you might not be into: Try to understand why a certain presenter does certain things, why they work for them and figure out if that could for you. Because - depending on what your style, your stage persona is - specific things work for specific people/styles. If you need a very rigid, controlled environment and outline, don't go all in for audience interaction during your talk. Know who _you_ are and look at tech and tricks with that framing: Does this benefit _my style_? Many people copy famous speakers without being that kind of person and it often shows.