Convince Your Boss – Bringing Your Team

“Dear [Insert Manager’s Name],

I’m writing to request approval to send a team of [insert number] to PASS Summit West 2026 in Seattle, November 9-11, rather than just one of us.

I’ll make the case for why this is a better investment as a group trip than a single-seat one. Right now, the depth we need across [insert your platforms/tools, e.g., cloud migration, AI integration, performance tuning] lives in a handful of people. If only one of us attends, one person absorbs three days of the highest-density training we’ll get all year, then has to compress it back down into a slide deck for everyone else. A lot gets lost in that translation, and the rest of the team never gets direct access to the speakers, the Q&A, or the hallway conversations where the real detail usually comes out.

Sending a team fixes that. With [insert number] of us there, we can split up and cover far more ground than any one person could alone:

[Name/role] covers Sessions on [topic, e.g., cloud data platform strategy and AI integration]
[Name/role] covers Sessions on [topic, e.g., performance tuning and database administration]
[Name/role] covers Sessions on [topic, e.g., development and DevOps practices]
Everyone attends the Keynotes together, so we’re aligned on the big-picture takeaways

Each Deep Dive Session, 60-Min Session, and Pre-Conference workshop we split across the team is content that comes back to everyone else through a proper debrief, not a summary written from memory. We’d also get [insert number] separate slots at the Community Expert Clinic instead of one, meaning we could get expert eyes on several of our toughest open problems in parallel, not just the single highest-priority one.

The cost of not doing this is that our knowledge of where the industry’s heading stays concentrated in one or two people, and everyone else keeps working from whatever they can pass along secondhand. That’s a slower, leakier way to keep a whole team current.

91% of 2025 PASS Summit West attendees rated the event 4 or 5 stars, and 99% said they gained actionable insights they applied immediately after the event. Multiply that across a team, and we come back with a shared, current picture instead of one person’s notes.

Approximate costs:
Airfare: [insert $ here]
Transportation: [insert $ here]
Hotel (2 nights at ~$250): $500 [adjust as needed]
Dinner (3 days at $50): $150 [adjust as needed]
Conference Ticket: $1990 – $2325

We’ll come back with a joint debrief covering what each of us learned, organized by topic, plus a shortlist of what we think we should act on first.

Thanks for considering this.

[Your Name]”