One person instead of a team: coordinating 80 conference speakers

Context

A conference where I prepared 80 speakers. I was the entire speaker coordination team on my own

Problem

One person acting as the whole coordination team and 80 speakers: from the first meetings and agreeing the line-up, through contracts, to passing on the details, collecting materials and matching topics to the programme pillars. At this scale it is easy to miss something.

What I did

I built myself an assistant in the form of a dashboard that worked as my second pair of eyes. I made it with Claude Code, and it drew on my Google tools: shared documents and lists (Drive, Docs, Sheets) updated by the organiser and by me, my Gmail inbox and the calendar where I scheduled meetings. It caught inconsistencies, tracked the status of emails and reminded me about pending replies, helped me write email content, checked that speakers’ materials were complete (bios, photos) and helped refine talk topics and assign them to the programme pillars.

Result

One person carried the work of a whole coordination team. I kept the programme under control and nothing slipped through, not just thanks to my memory but thanks to AI support. I could run the project with more freedom despite the imbalance: one person handling 80 speakers.

Technologies

• Claude Code
• Google Drive
• Google Docs
• Google Sheets
• Gmail
• Google Calendar (scheduling meetings)

The dashboard worked like a second coordinator: it watched documents, emails and topics, so I could focus on talking to the speakers.