I’ve gone on about this before but have clarified my thoughts further recently. I tried to put this on twitter but the thread didn’t post correctly. So here is Adam’s Keynote Heuristic.

A keynote should be one of the following;

• Controversial – ‘x is dead’, ‘you are all doing x wrong’, etc. which shows how you are correct in saying it (if inflammatorily phrased) and then a call to action to flip it around to make it not so much. Using this approach I might do ‘Your problems can’t be solved with automation’ which would illustrate how most of the problems I got asked to solve with automation are actually people problems (or process, which really are also people) and then hypothesize on how to solve them. Or maybe ‘all the problems in automation have been solved’ (which is my current fun one) where I ridiculously generalize things into patterns we were using a decade ago and how they have been updated for today which leads to a call to action to overhaul the selenium docs.
• Story time – This is literally, ‘I have cool stories to tell.’ Typically this person is not from the domain that the event is for but whose stories can wrap up nicely into actionable things that can be applied to the attendees. ‘So there was this other time where I forgot to unstub the payment gateways…
• Something from left field – I find this one actually the most interesting and this is where someone takes a different field entirely and applies it to the audience of the event. I’ve done this for testing audiences around when I ‘fixed’ the dryer and coached lacrosse. The anecdotes need to be fun. I often try to snag the loot bags from conferences that are sharing facilities to get insights I can steal for this sort of talk.
• State of the Union – As the name implies, these keynotes reflect a bit on the past to set context for the future. Ideally, its a 1/3 past, 2/3 future split.

Too often keynotes are really just track talks with a personality/name-brand. Which doesn’t diminish their content, its just that they are misnamed.