DevRel lessons from the hospitality industry

Brendan Eliason: I am here today to share lessons about community building and storytelling that I have learned in a career running wineries, restaurants, and bars. Hopefully these lessons will be helpful in framing how you think about aspects of your developer relations programme. My name is Brendan Eliason. If this picture of me looks like it was taken a long time ago, it's because it was, I've worked at a manager or higher level in the food and beverage industry for over 20 years now. For five of those years, I was the director of education for the largest consumer wine organisation in the United States with over 40,000 members and facilitating over 300 events per year. In 2018, I took the opportunity to go back to school to study computer science. While in school, I developed a special love of developer relations, which has many parallels to the immediate work that I have done in the past.

My predecessors behind the bar may not have invented community building, but we've certainly been practising it longer than almost anyone else.

There's a reason why we are collectively known as the hospitality industry and not just the food industry or the beverage industry. Whenever I would train new bartenders or servers, one of the first things I would tell them is that people do not come to us for food or for a glass of wine. People know how to cook, and you can easily buy the same bottle of wine at the local store for a lot less money. Also, almost all bars carry the same inventory and have the same equipment. So why have customers come to you and not gone somewhere else? The answer is that people are coming to you for an experience and not just for sustenance. Likewise, when people come to you as a developer advocate, they're doing so not because they have no other options. They're coming to you hoping for an experience that is different and better than the one they can get from anybody else.

So how do you create that experience?

One of the necessary elements of this lies in one of the most prevailing stereotypes of a good bartender, and it notably has nothing to do with making drinks. Bartenders, throughout time have always been known as great listeners. You cannot create a positive experience for someone until you know what it is they want. No bartender is successful making the same drink for every customer. Likewise, developer relations is about looking at friction points, hearing the community's concerns, feedback and needs, and owning that experience through docs, tutorials, meetups, and support. For all of this, you have to start with what do they want to learn, not what you want to teach them, and the only way to do that is to learn to listen with empathy. Now that you've listened to your customer and you know where they want to go, how do you translate that into the experience of getting there?

Tell a story.

Every dining bar experience contains a narrative, good or bad. In the hospitality industry, the historical record for these narratives is Yelp. It is not by accident that the format of these reviews is almost always framed as a story. It was Valentine's Day. We met Drake. We arrived at 10. We stayed till two.

Great night, I got stabbed here would consider coming back. The bridge between what your customer's asking for and the experience you want to provide them boils down to telling a story. It's connecting the dots to form a bigger picture. The power in storytelling is that you decide what dots get connected and in what dots, the final picture they're going to form. When these dots are people, you are creating a community. When these dots are experiences, you're creating the narrative that you want your users or customers to experience and walk away with. If you control the narrative, you control the experience. So what is the narrative you want to tell?

One of the basic disconnects of developer relations is that in general, most people work for companies that are selling tools, but most developers are not interested in buying tools. Instead, they're interested in buying solutions and the exact solutions that each person needs is going to be different. Your product may have lots of bells and whistles, but what do you do if your customer doesn't want any bells and is only looking for a very particular type of whistle? I may have a hundred bottles of the world's finest whiskey on my shelf, but if you just want a gin martini, how do I make sure that you not only get a great drink, but you walk away feeling like you have got a great experience? My father once had an expensive business dinner with a client and his wife. The client ordered the biggest, heaviest, most expensive bottle of cabernet on the list.

His wife, after one sip politely asked for some sugar. It is that this point, the sommelier had a choice of the narrative that they wanted to tell.

What was their story going to be? On one hand, one simply does not order sugar. With an 84 heights Martha's Vineyard, the narrative could easily have been, we are not that type of restaurant. Instead, without batting an eye, the psalm immediately came with an ornate dish of sugar and a fancy silver spoon. That is how you use listening and empathy to provide great customer service, and that is how you guarantee that 30 years later, the story you've constructed is being retold in formats that you never even imagined. Perhaps even as a presentation at a developer relations conference, whatever that is. Another notable part of the experience provided here is the cost. Nothing about this experience cost any more than a spoonful of sugar.

It is was the same restaurant, same overhead, same food, same staff. Providing exceptional experiences rarely cost more than providing mediocre ones. It just requires you to act deliberately and to be conscious of the choices you are making now that you're ready to implement the ideas of listening and storytelling, there are two other shared skills that I have noticed that are vital to long-term success. Whether you are behind a bar or behind a keyboard, the first of these is what I call the reverse mullet party. In the front business, in the back running bars and DevRel programmes is hard, but nobody wants to see the work. They're here for the experience, not for the slog of creating the experience. Bartenders have to balance between getting the drinks out on time and chatting with customers at the bar. Dev advocates and community managers are always under deadline to produce talks, blog posts, docs, and product support, while also being the helpful and friendly social centre of the product or company.

Producing workable content is the work. Making it look effortless is the fun and the art. This art also relates to the next necessary element. It is a little thing I like to call mastery of craft. All of the intentionality in the world will do you no good if you don't know what you're doing. With that said, mastery for me is more of a drive for continued learning than it is a specific achievable destination. In the bar and restaurant biz, we have a concept for this mastery missing plus literally translated it means in its place, but the underlying philosophy is a zen-like level of preparedness and balance that can only be attained through years of dedicated practise.

For me, this is what Misla looks like at a bar, but I think it could look very different for many other bartenders.

I think the very idea of mastery in general is sort of a Rorschach test for the things that we find valuable in your work and ideally the things that drive you to be great at the things you do. Think about the idea of mastery in DevRel. What does that look like to you? Finally, there's one remaining skillset that you learn in restaurants and bars that is vital to future success in developer relations and the tech industry. Lots of server experience. With that, thank you very much for your time. I hope this is helpful in highlighting some commonalities and hospitality between our communities. If you have any questions or just want to know how to make a perfect Negroni, please reach out to me on Twitter, GitHub, or LinkedIn.

Thank you for your time.