My first Lucidchart Connect event was certainly one to remember. The Windy City proved to live up to its nickname but also lived up to its reputation as “My Kind of Town.”

It was my first task to greet people as they arrived at the event, and I was immediately struck by how friendly everyone was. It definitely helped me get in the zone and made the event more fun and energetic.

Opening keynote

Our CMO, Nathan Rawlins, kicked things off by thanking everyone for attending. There was an air of extra graciousness in his voice as he reminded the audience that we call the event Lucidchart Connect because it helps us connect with our most important asset: them, our users. He highlighted how important that relationship was with a story of a user from Austin, who called him personally about 30 minutes before they were supposed to deliver an org chart to their boss asking for help and who Nathan was delighted to assist.

Most importantly, Nathan addressed the most important issues Lucidchart aims to solve: the need to capitalize on innate human creativity to combat the rise of automation in the workplace.

Lucidchart’s primary goal is to help individuals solve complex problems, think more critically about their projects, and be more creative in their solutions. We accomplish this goal by offering our users more clarity through our visual communication platform. This makes sense as human beings are, by and large, visual beings. We interpret the world around us with our eyes before anything else, yet we don’t work that way. But we need to. That’s why Lucidchart is here.

Nathan concluded his opening remarks by emphasizing that, if we can help our users receive more clarity of thought and communication in the workplace, then we’ll have succeeded in our goal to make working visually easy and essential for everyone.

Customer spotlight

Then our guest presenter, Sheila McRae, stepped onto the stage. She started with a description of what her company, Haggerty Insurance, is trying to achieve. Haggerty Insurance specializes in insurance for collectible cars. After showing a gripping video about what driving means to those who love it most, she highlighted that their mission is to “save driving,” lamenting that increased automation allows cars to, in some cases, drive themselves. But the fun and the art of driving—feeling the nuance of the road in the car and struggling in every turn and shift of the gears—is being lost. Haggerty Insurance aims to stop that from happening.

The company accomplishes this goal in part through a new service they offer called DriveShare (imagine Airbnb but for collectible cars). Imagine if you could rent out your favorite classic car for a weekend getaway, to impress a boss, or to live it up in a night out on the town. This is the life Haggerty hopes to help others enjoy.

Sheila fits into that picture as a business analyst. She was challenged with building and maintaining a business process diagram library. For an insurance company like Haggerty, up-to-date processes are key to success. They need the business process diagrams to be easy to update, maintain, search, and use by those who need it.

In this past, Haggerty found their use of Visio® and Sharepoint® to be cumbersome, cluttered, and unintuitive. These programs reaped dismal results. Eventually, they discovered Atlassian Confluence and used it to create more intuitive working spaces for teams. Shortly after the company realized that employees had adopted this tool, they discovered Lucidchart and found that it had a shorter learning curve, it was simple to maintain, and it was infinitely easier to collaborate. Because of Lucidchart’s integration with Confluence, employees at Haggerty Insurance were able to easily insert their diagrams and know they were up to date.

Achieving of thought and communication around their business processes was a huge priority for Haggerty—and they were able to finally achieve that clarity by collaborating visually in Lucidchart.

Closing remarks

As Sheila finished her presentation, Nathan returned to talk a little bit more about where we are going as a company. At Lucidchart, we’re strengthening our core to make sure anyone can use Lucidchart anywhere, seamlessly integrated, on any device or platform.

Nathan also introduced the visual reasoning engine, which will help users automate their work— because no one likes building diagrams, but we all need them to get that clarity we crave. Finally, we’re adding more updates to security to help prepare us to scale. We want your documents to remain safe and secure, a solution built for the entire enterprise. By capitalizing on this core, we can then construct all sorts of solutions for sales, HR, IT, engineering, and beyond.

Certification course

The closing event—and the most fun, of course—was our Lucidchart Essentials Certification Course, which I was there to teach. I immediately found the audience to be energetic and engaged. (It also feels good when everyone laughs at your jokes.)

We tell our users that our passion is to make working in Lucidchart a delight. And therefore, in all of my trainings, I give a satisfaction guarantee: I will teach attendees at least five new things about Lucidchart that will help make working in Lucidchart a delight, and I won’t leave until I do.

In this course, we teach users how to work more efficiently and make it easier for them to work visually. We show them how to capitalize on custom shapes and templates to set up a better workspace and conserve time, so they spend more time building the documents they need instead of setting everything up to get ready for it.

We help users build dynamic diagrams with links and hotspots while eliminating those little frustrations that slow users down. We teach them best practices for collaboration, and finally, we show users how to publish their documents for anyone to use, even if they don’t use Lucidchart!

Not a single person had failed to learn five new things. Many claimed to have learned more! I still stuck around for an hour or so, because everyone deserves time with a product expert if they need it.

I loved my experience teaching these Chicagoans! Lucidchart Connect helped me to better connect with our users. And it helped our users better connect to a way of working visually, which will help them find the clarity they need to think more critically, collaborate more effectively, and unleash their creativity.

And just as we felt the chilly gusts blow as we arrived in Chicago, as we left, our newly certified Lucidchart users reaffirmed to me that they could feel the winds of change blowing too.