I am now a veteran podcaster, with three1 shows under my belt, and a fourth launching today!

Staying sane during lockdown

Roll For Enterprise was my first, started as a Covid lockdown project with a couple of friends to keep ourselves sane when we could no longer leave our home offices. Our idea was to replicate the sort of conversations that make up the “hallway track” of in-person events.

These informal conversations with friends, acquaintances, and strangers are often the most valuable parts of these events, and are undoubtedly a big part of what keeps the industry ticking over. They were also the first casualties of virtual events, which tend to be “broadcast”, with one or more speakers presenting material to a passive audience in a fairly formal and structured fashion. Sometimes there is a sidebar for chat, but I personally struggle to follow two streams like that, and it is just not the same experience at all.

We published over a hundred weekly episodes, tapering off once we were able to leave our homes again and the scheduling got more complicated, but we achieved our goal. The original crew of Zack, Mike, and me was joined by Lilac, initially as a guest and then as a co-host in her own right, and that configuration remained more or less stable to the end. The benefit of having a redundant array of podcast hosts meant that if one of us was not available for a particular recording, the others could carry that week, and we only missed a couple of episodes over the whole run — which we filled in with “textual podcasts” instead:

Podcasting at work

The second show, The Inside Line, was never released to the public. It was an internal sales enablement podcast, born from the intuition that formal training sessions and long documents are good and necessary, but can sometimes be overkill. What I did to complement those resources was to record short ten-minute mini-episodes that focused on one new product feature, and offered the key pieces of information that a busy account executive might require:

  • what the feature was
  • who it was for
  • why they should care
  • where to find out more

As an internal podcast, listener numbers were never huge, but informal reviews were very positive. Sales colleagues liked to listen while driving, or walking the dog, or working out, and felt that they got the essential concepts, and knew where to turn if they or their customer needed more.

Occult architecture

The infamous "hacker" logo

The third show, The Enterprise Alchemists, started out from — well, if I’m honest, shooting the breeze in various bars while on the road with my erstwhile colleague in Enterprise Architecture, Guy. We realised that there was a gap in the market for a podcast that was specifically about enterprise architecture, rather than product development or software engineering or any other of a number of related disciplines — so we decided to start recording some of our chats, and later, to invite guests to join in.

We published three seasons of the show, and they seemed to resonate; we haven’t published an episode in over six months for a variety of reasons, and we still get a couple of dozen “long tail” downloads every week with zero publicity. Longevity is helped by the fact that the conversations were about the big strategic picture rather than being too focused on the news of the day. Listener numbers were never huge in the absolute, but it’s a niche topic, and many people I have met at trade shows or otherwise run into have had nice things to say about our little show, which is always gratifying.

Transmutation

And that brings us up to today, with the launch of the new Enterprise Alchemists show!2

The inaugural episode of the new Enterprise Alchemists podcast

Yes, I have done the infamous “pivot to video”, and episodes will also show up on YouTube — but have no fear, the show will continue to appear wherever good podcasts are downloaded! There is simply now a video option for people who like that sort of thing. Otherwise, the format remains the same: half-hour(ish) conversations about a particular topic in enterprise IT. No marketing pitches, just experienced professionals exploring the subject.

I also have a new co-host, Jeremiah Stone, the CTO at SnapLogic. Jeremiah is a very deep thinker, with a wealth of experience in a variety of different domains. He also has an uncanny ability to see right to the heart of a topic and then structure his thoughts in complete paragraphs, and I am very happy to be able to bring the benefit of his thinking to a wider audience. Jeremiah actually joined Guy and me as a guest on the previous incarnation of the show back in November of 2024 to talk about the rise of agent-based AI, so there is continuity among the Alchemists.

Please do listen in to the new incarnation of The Enterprise Alchemists, and do let me know what you think!

  1. I am not counting the Coffee Talk video series here, because I am a purist, and only count something as a podcast if it has an RSS feed. Even The Inside Line had that; I just gated the episodes behind enterprise Single-Sign-On so that only employees could download them. ↩

  2. Don’t be confused: for operational reasons, we took over the feed of the previous Evolving the Enterprise show, so the new Enterprise Alchemists episodes appear as Season 5 in the feed, but they pick up from Season 3 of the old EA show. ↩