Failure Mode: Lessons from the Real World

## Failure Mode: Lessons from the Real World

We spend a lot of time in tech talking about what worked. Failure Mode is about things that didn’t.

Join RVA Data Enthusiasts for a speaker night dedicated to the projects that flopped, the decisions we’d take back, the assumptions that turned out to be completely wrong, and the moments when things went sideways in spectacular fashion.

Three experienced data and tech practitioners will each take 10–15 minutes to share a real failure from their career. What happened, why it happened, and what they learned from it.

### Speakers

Tyler Edelman — Senior Manager, Capital One
Matt Leary — Product Manager, Posit
Spencer Kirn, PhD — Manager of Data Science, CarMax

### Moderator

Lauren Downey — Principal Data Scientist, Blackbaud

No pitches. No polished case studies. No slides full of wins disguised as “lessons learned.”

Just practitioners being honest with each other about what happened, what they’d do differently today, and what the rest of us can learn from it.

This isn’t a room for judging mistakes. It’s a room for recognizing ourselves in someone else’s story. Most of us have a project that didn’t go according to plan, a decision we wish we could revisit, or a moment that taught us more than any successful project ever did.

Those are usually the stories we remember. And they’re often the ones we learn the most from.

Whether you work in data, analytics, engineering, AI, software, product, or the broader tech community, come hear the stories that normally get left out of the conference talk.