Activating the DevRel Flywheel to Create Lasting Results

Jen: Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. How was lunch? Okay. So I know that this is an hour and it's after lunch.

I get it. I'm gonna if I see you nodding off, like, don't be embarrassed. I'll just get everybody up and, you know, make you do a little dance or something. I have JLo music ready. No.

I'm just kidding. I do not. But hi, everyone. Jennifer Lopez. Can't believe I said that.

I usually never say Jennifer. I know. Anyway so we have an hour together, my friends. Are we all ready? Okay.

So before I get started though, it is a workshop. So I am gonna make you do things and talk to people. Now, if you really don't wanna talk to somebody else, like, I get it. You can, you know, sit by yourself and do your own thing. That's totally fine.

I'm not gonna shame you. But I would highly recommend you, maybe if you need to move around or sit by somebody that you feel comfortable talking to, or if, again, you don't wanna talk to anybody, that's fine also. But, alright. We're gonna go ahead and get started. And, yay.

Engaging Developers Through Effective Flywheels

Alright. So the flywheel. Everyone here today is coming from all different backgrounds. Right? I've talked to people who are Who do developer marketing.

Who are developers themselves, or technical, you're, you know, pretty much from every part of the organization. But the one thing that we all care about I'm just gonna say it, it's developers. Like, I'm really bad at keeping a secret. I also like to give my gifts away right away. Like, Christmas is no fun with me because I'm like, oh my god, you know what I got you?

Anyway. So it's developers. The thing is developers have influence. If you're in an organization, you know, you have a a product that developers use, APIs, whatever the case. Right?

Developers can influence across the board, which is why we have people from kind of all over the organization. Right? Who anybody who's in here from marketing? You're in the marketing team. Alright.

What about product? Support or success? Maybe. Any sales? See, we got you all covered.

Who did I miss? Who's not on here? Oh, you're I got you. You're that one in the middle. Right?

So, yeah. We're all on different teams. Right? Developer relations is not like marketing operations. Right?

It's very specific. Marketing operations sits in marketing. They do operations. Very easy. But in developer relations, you're all over the place.

You're in a lot of different places. We also have a lot of different goals. Right? Driving awareness, raise of hands, technical training, content. Everybody's just like me, I do it all.

Are you are you the one DevRel person that literally does everything? Oh, we got a bunch of you. Okay. Well, some of this will be really easy because you won't have to go talk to your team and work these out because it's, you know, just you. Anyway, we're gonna talk about flywheels.

Does everyone do you understand the concept of the flywheel and the method? No. Okay. Great. Then this slide is for you.

So this is a method. It's used in a lot of organizations. It's often for, you know, marketing, sales, and it's great for developer relations. Specifically, the idea of the flywheel is when the flywheel's not in motion, right, it takes a lot of effort to get it rolling. But once you get it rolling, it's like, woo hoo, it's going.

And then you can start the next thing. Right? And you, it sometimes will slow down and stop when you find friction. There's issues. Maybe onboarding.

Maybe a process that sucks for your team that takes ten hours a week. Lots of different things that you might run into. Right? But the idea of the flywheel is to get is growth, and and to keep things in motion. I just wanted to show you a few other flywheels.

For example, Amazon has its own flywheel, of course. And one of the things here is like, they lower the cost, they lower the prices, they get more people buying, they're gonna get more vendors selling, they're able to do all these things. Right? And they're constantly making it easier and easier and easier, and all this stuff is just like working in motion. And it's working for itself because it's in this constant motion.

And then we have HubSpot, which is one of the first places I specifically saw this, was on HubSpot. If you Google the HubSpot flywheel, there's actually tons of great content out there. They focus specifically on customer service. Like, they put customer first, that is at the top, and that's how they keep their flywheel running. This is a content marketing one, very similar, again, to maybe what DevRel is doing, depending on your team.

This is really focused on creating good content and getting it out there, and it it being sort of a constant flow of pushing things out, and it automatically bringing things in. My sad images. So how many of you were here last year, and went to Matt Ravel's talk about the flywheel? Okay. We have a few of you.

So I would highly recommend, there is a URL up there. Also, if you Google DevRel flywheel, this is gonna come up. It's a great report that Matt Ravel with Hoopy put together. I really like how he specifically talks about how DevRel, you know, what it, how how the flywheel is useful for DevRel. It's because it's not just about maintaining.

Right? It's about building momentum, keeping it going, and continually adding upon it. So this is, in his report, this is what the DevRel flywheel looks like. We are gonna make our own, because it doesn't necessarily look the same for everybody. Because as we've determined, we're all in different parts of the organization.

We have different goals. We have different things. So, unfortunately, for DevRel, it's not like, here's your flywheel. Have at it. So we're gonna work on that.

Oh, and another thing that I will talk about, and if you've ever worked with me before, there's at least one of you back there. Developers trust developers. Right? So, getting developers to actually talk about your product, your API, whatever the case is, is key. Because they don't care what your marketing person says.

They might care what your CEO says, but maybe not. That they're gonna care about what other developers are talking about. So, typical marketing funnel. How many of you have used this or something similar to this, sort of, you know, when you're talking about When you're in your teams and you're sort of working through your metrics and whatnot. Right?

This is typical. And the thing that it's missing is this aspect. The developers trust developers. That's what is going to bring it around and keep people coming in without having to start from scratch. So, this, when you're thinking that the this method Sorry, this is Okay.

So when you're looking at this, you're like, great. We're gonna bring people in. We're gonna get them to try it. We're gonna get them going, and then we're just gonna retain them. Like, what?

Like, that doesn't That's not how it works. Right? They don't just stick around forever. You gotta do stuff to keep them. And that's that's what this is looking at.

But adding this little extra step. Right? So whatever it is you're doing in the adoption phase, finding the way to bring those developers out there to advocate for your product, your company, your API, your whatever the case is. So this is one that I've used at a previous company, where this is what I literally presented, slightly modified because it had company specific things in it. But this is what I used at a previous company and would present and explain any time I had the, what is developer relations, and what do you do, and where is this?

This is what I used in every metric, every initiative, everything was mapped to this. So we are gonna build our own model, or maybe we're just gonna talk about it. But I I do have time throughout to stop and have you take a look. It may just be you getting into that template if you're able to, or I can talk about it. We can bring it up on the screen if needed.

We'll see. Is there there are some seats up front. I won't pick on you. Okay. So these are these are the ways that I have built my flywheel models in the past, and I have done it several times at different companies based on the needs of that particular company.

So one. Oh, I skipped one. First, you have to have goals. Right? You have to know what your goals are.

No sense in creating really anything unless you know what what your goals are. Two stages. These are the the items that go around. Right? The the acquisition, adoption, advocacy.

Those can be different for for everyone. The inputs and outputs. These are the things that you're the initiatives that you're working on, the metrics, the KPIs that are coming out of it. Looking for friction points. Understanding what, like, what's slowing you down?

Is it you? Are you the problem? Is it your team? Right? Is it something is that you you can't get anything through marketing?

Right? Like, you send them a thing and you're like, can you please send this out in an email? And they're like, you are number 752 on my list of priorities. Anyone ever had that? The last item is to create an action plan.

Right? So you get your goals set, you figure out what's going to go into the flywheel. Because really what you wanna get out of this is, right, you wanna have something that you can do. Right? A flywheel is great and pretty and you can present it and say, look it, this is what we do.

But if you're not actually doing the things and have a plan to do those things, what does it all mean? Nothing. Alright. Okay. So this is a template that I've used in the past.

Hopefully, you can access it. If not, you can come back to it later. So in this template, there are a number of things. Essentially, each one of the the steps, there's a spreadsheet, or there's a sheet. There's both the activity sheet and an example sheet, so you can use that and see, like, what the heck was she talking about?

Well, there's, like, dummy data in there. Do we have access? Does anybody have access? Yay. Oh, we have one person.

Everybody can look at his screen. Okay. So the first thing that we're gonna do is define our goals. How many of you already feel like you have a clear definition of your goals and they map to your organizational goals and the company goals? Like, three of you?

It's not that easy, right? But that's where we wanna get to. Because you wanna have It's very easy when you are reporting to the CEO and live in a what did you say? Like, in a side bubble or whatever. Right?

To not get visibility, and you're just out there kinda doing your own thing. But if you can make sure that you are aligned directly to what your boss cares about, and what your boss's boss cares about, depending on levels and all of that, like, that's how you're gonna be able to move forward and get those things done. And it may mean though that some of the stuff that you're doing doesn't actually make sense and map to it. So look at that. So this is this is a a view of one of the the goal sheets that I have used in the past, where there's the company goals, there's the organizational goals, and then the specific DevRel goals in the yellow.

Right? These are for, like, a half year, and everything that we did in that time mapped to one of these. And we literally would cut things that didn't go in there. So here's the template again. This is a view of the filled in version.

You have your company goal, department goal, and then your DevRel goals. Right? Again, you're not gonna build your goals in three minutes. I mean, that'd be awesome. What I wanted to do though at this time is actually take the opportunity, might be that you take the opportunity to actually get your computer out and load it up.

If that doesn't work, that's fine. We could We can just talk about it. We don't have to look at anything. But the idea here is to actually sit down, take a look at the template, and start, and and talk to the other folks about, like, what are your goals? What do you focus on?

Do you know what your goals are? Or are you just like, I just create content, and then somebody else figures that other that crap out. Right? So I'm gonna give y'all three minutes to talk amongst yourselves. And if that doesn't work, then next time oh.

It was like moving around. If that doesn't work, then the next time we're gonna do it a different way. But, how's everybody feeling? Yes? Are we gonna talk to each other?

Again, you don't have to, if you don't wanna talk to anybody. Alright. I'm gonna set a timer. Okay. Go.

MC: You have about twenty seconds. Okay. Alright, everybody.

Jen Sable Lopez: Wrap it up.

back: Hi. I'm back. Can you hear me?

Jen Sable Lopez: Can you hear me? What's up? Oh, clap clap once if you can hear me. Yeah. That was brilliant.

Thank you. I was like, I can't clap. I don't know what you're saying. Okay. How was it?

It looked like you were having some really great discussions. Does anyone wanna give just a quick highlight? No one. Wow. He just threw you under the bus like that.

Are you comfortable? Do you okay.

still guarding up: Happy you don't, and then we go right now. I'm still guarding up. I'm gonna come soon and have her very rare rare if we don't really quite bow and figure out a little.

kinda looking for: Awesome. I mean, that sounds like fun. So you're just gonna, like, test stuff and we're all like, can we work with you? I'm kinda looking for a job. I'm just seeing.

Anyway. Alright. Well, that's great. So good conversations. You've heated up the room so much, I had to take my jacket off because I was like, that conversation's going.

Alright. We're gonna move on because we don't have a ton of time. We're gonna set the stages, and the stages are these areas that are highlighted, like growth, attraction, engagement, adoption, advocacy, referral. The next thing we wanna do is just make sure that we have those set right. Right?

But I think, just to make sure, because I know we started a little late, and we gotta stop a little earlier, I'm actually gonna combine two and three. I know. Crazy. Here's another quick link. Hold on.

Here we go. To the template, but I'm gonna keep going. So, because this is kind of the fun part. Right? Actually putting the things that you do and and how you're measuring them.

You gotta list all the activities that you're doing. What I love to do, and again, if anybody's worked with me, know, I love to do on a quarterly basis just a quick like, what are the things that you're actually doing? How long do you spend on them? And do you love it? Do you like it?

Or do you hate it? And you would be surprised to know that very How often people hate a thing, and it's just because, like, that tool sucks. Or, you know, it can be It's rarely that the thing that they're doing sucks. It's that there's some outside thing, you know, that's making it horrible. But having taking an inventory so that you have a solid list.

Right? The next is to prioritize. Because there may be things, again, that you're like, you know what? Actually, these aren't gonna fit. No.

They don't fit into this. They don't map to our goals. We don't have any goals, so we can do what the heck ever. Right? So going through that, I am a big fan of Mero.

Mero? Mero? I don't know how you pronounce it. Mero? Is somebody from here?

Anyway, I'm a sticky note gal, and when you have a, like, global distributed team, you have to find another way to do it, and so I will do literally everything. Coming up with the stop, start, discuss, or stop, start, continue, We use the discuss here as everything that we're like, we don't know. Should we stop this? Do we care about this? Is this good?

Is this bad? Let's talk about it. And then the next thing in prioritization is this impact versus effort. To me, it's key to understand what is the impact of the thing that you're doing versus how much time and energy you have to put into it. Right?

If you're, if you, if it's gonna take you six weeks of, you know, writing this content and doing this thing, whatever the making this video, putting in all this production and editing and all of this stuff, but the impact is actually going to be low, you should probably not do that video. Right? These are the things you wanna think about at this stage. Okay. Back to the template.

So, we're gonna do, yeah, we're gonna do five minutes. And I understand some of you may wanna continue your discussion that you were having before us, that's perfectly fine. But, what I wanna go through is, again, if you are able to bring up the template, start thinking about the tasks. Maybe it's even you can sit there and like list out the stuff that you do in the day. In the template, there actually is a place for you to do that where you can add all of your your tasks.

And and and this can be this isn't like these are the initiatives I work on. Like, wanna know what you do every day. What do you spend your time on? Because what you also might find is someone on your team is doing a thing that you didn't even know that they were doing because they used to work in sales. And so their former colleague went and asked them if they could access this thing that only you know how to do, and all of a sudden you're working on some project.

Right? Does anybody have that? Right? It happens that you just get pulled into different things, and all of a sudden your team and you're like, why are three of you working on that thing? Like, this doesn't make sense.

K. So I'm gonna give you five minutes, and the idea here is goals, the labels, and then inputs. Now if you can use the spreadsheet, that is awesome. Make a copy of it and do what you will with it, or keep having your discussions before. But I'm gonna give you five minutes this time.

Ready? Go.

MC: You have about two minutes. Two minutes. Okay. We have about thirty seconds. Okay.

Our five minutes are up. Hello, everyone. If you can hear me, clap twice.

like: Oh, I'm like, that works so well. I'm so excited about that. Great. This is awesome. Okay.

We don't have this back up yet. That's totally fine. How were those discussions? Who Was anybody able to get in and actually look at the template at all? No?

No. I know the internet also isn't great. Anyone wanna give a quick, like, what you guys talked about, or what you're still talking about? Anyone anyone wanna throw somebody else under the bus to make them talk? No?

No. Seriously, did anyone I I would love to hear yeah.

Speaker 3: So it's Parsley, Mez, or Big Warburg.

Jen Sable Lopez: Uh-huh.

Speaker 3: He tries on app, but we're. Hate to pull up. I do a monthly con started to January that your her theory at bloody. Oh,

Jen Sable Lopez: that's awesome. Yeah.

Speaker 3: Or stop now. I like to remove

a big fan: I'm a big fan of cutting stuff that you don't actually need to do. Could everybody hear that okay? Like what he talked about? Yeah. Oh, that was a the lights on me, I was like, or is he pointing?

Identifying and Addressing Friction Points

I don't know what's happening back there. Okay. Right. So, the next step though is to find those friction points. Right?

So, again, if you use the spreadsheet and you have everyone on your team go through that list, the first place to look is you look inside. Look at what you're doing. Find those things where you're like, why exactly are you spending eight hours a week on this contest that literally two people have signed up for? Right? That doesn't make any sense.

That's a great place to like that's friction, because you could be putting your efforts somewhere else that's actually gonna keep things moving forward. I'm also a a fan using this the love like hate, so not just the team tasks, but also taking all the tasks that everybody on your team has put together. And again, I love using Miro as a great way to do it, and then people, like, tag themselves. Do they love it? Do they hate it?

Or do they just like it? It's really funny because you'll find that certain people, they either love something or they hate it. And then other people are like, I'm fine. It's all likes. Like, it's all good.

But this was like one of the ways that we found at Contentful. Nobody liked It was all developer advocates. Nobody liked doing any of the community related things like managing the forums, and running events, and things like that, like the operational side of it. Like, all the developer advocates were like, hate. They were like they were like, is there something worse than hate?

And and we realized, we're like, I was the only one on the team that had a love in that, and we're like, I think we need to hire a community manager to manage all of these things, because we know we want to do We know we need to do these. This is part of our goals. And so that was I was able to take that to my boss and hire a community person with that information. So that's a great place to start. The other thing is, and and again, I mentioned this a little finding those those areas that people hate is very often like it's an operational nightmare or something.

Right? You have to manually update a thing. You have to go pull the data because it's not set up to automatically do it? Whatever the case. So there may be ways to find those friction points there.

The other the next is to look at data. Right? Look at, do people get caught in onboarding at a certain place? Do they are they not, you know, signing up for your thing that you're like, oh, we're gonna do this every other week. We're gonna have a virtual meetup every other week, and everybody's gonna come, like nobody's gonna come.

Right? So you find those things. And I'm just gonna keep talking. And so finding those friction points are key, because what you wanna do is remove the friction in order to keep that flywheel rolling. Right?

K. We actually only have five minutes. So this is what we're gonna do. So there's also So finding the friction points, and then putting together your action plan. So that is essentially, it might be first, you know what, we need to tackle these five things that we've That we think are points of friction that we can get out of the way so we can actually start working on stuff.

Right? So this is a quick view again. This is in the template for you to use, but it has this sort of this impact versus difficulty or effort, however you wanna use it, and based on what you put here, it will help you prioritize, right? So, things that have a six are like, oh, these have high impact plus are easy to do. Let's get those done and just out of the way.

Right? And then you can work through your list in this way. So we're gonna do a three minute. Again, so talking about friction points, or how you're going to prioritize your action plan. Alright?

Ready? Three minutes, go. You're all like, and now I'm tired.

MC: Thirty seconds. Okay. Time is up. If you can hear me, say, I can hear you.

Jen Sable Lopez: That doesn't work as well. Okay. If you can hear me, clap. Wow. That's so much better.

That's amazing. Alright. This sounds like some pretty awesome conversations here as well. I think if there's anything that we've learned in this workshop is that you should know what slides are coming next, so that you can talk about them. Right?

Anyway, my biggest takeaway for all of you is I want you to be able to download this spreadsheet that can help you to build your own flywheel, that will show you the goals, that will get you started with, like, making sure you're prioritizing the right initiatives, and you're working on the right things, reducing the friction, and creating your action plan, and tell your boss, you're like, look it, this is what we're doing, and this is how we're gonna we're gonna measure it, and they're gonna be like, you're the best, and we're always gonna keep our DevRel team, because we love DevRel. Right? That's what we want our bosses to say. So you make sure, at least if you get it on your phone, and then you can send it to yourself and look at it later, whatever you wanna do. Please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn if there's questions, whatever.

I'm gonna be around, obviously, the rest of today and tomorrow, and I would love to help you get that figured out. So thank you so much. Thanks for participating, and that was a lot of fun.