All Bling, No Basics: How to prioritize impact in DX

Dominic: Hey everyone, I see some friendlies in the audience. My name's Dominic. I'm here to talk to you about prioritising impact in DX or rather how not to prioritise. And I wanted to start off with the question that we all hear every year. Is DX dead? I went to this conference last year. Same conversations, same everything. And when I think about it, who actually cares about the people in this room? Literally who, because businesses, they care about impact, they care about the impact of your role and the impact defines mortality. So this talk isn't about conference strategy, it's not about launch weeks, community management, social media strategy, et cetera. These things are great. They're on the way to impact in some cases, but they aren't impact itself. This talk is about prioritisation. How to choose what to work on at the right time. So what the hell do I know about prioritisation, right?

Who's this guy? My name's Dominic. I'm the co-founder of Chromatic. The company behind Storybook. Storybook is downloaded, or rather, our tools are downloaded 39 million times a month. They're used by over half the Fortune 50. In the past I helped launch Apollo GraphQL, it's a category leader now valued at 1.5 billion. I did things like created the logo, which you see here, created the first commercial product. And then before that I was at Meteor First Full stack JavaScript framework pioneered a bunch of things like hot module reloading, stuff that's really common on the front end. So all that to say, I have a lot of mistakes under my belts and have a scar tissue to prove it.

Before we begin, I just want to acknowledge one thing. You can't just buy impact, especially in dx. A lot of people think, golly, more headcount, more billboards, more awareness, more boots, more sponsorship. That's going to give me the recognition in my business and the kind of accolades for my business that we deserve. But that's not really true. So lemme tell you a story at Meteor. How many people here have heard of media technology? It was one of the first, again, full stack JavaScript frameworks back in 2011 is when we came out, which is like an eternity ago. We raised $21 million, 50,000 followers, 44,000 getup stars, early era of certainly the stage of the internet.

Not only that, we had brand name investors like cool, the alumni went on to build beat, went on to build view, went on to build a polygraph, QL went on to build a storybook. So the DNA was there, which is kind of incredible to see that team, the alumni. But we didn't make it. We ended up getting sold to a private equity firm. And a lot of that was because we made a bunch of big decisions, but they weren't really the right ones. And what's more in DevRel DX advocacy land, we kind of juice a funnel that ended up being pretty leaky. And so we were overspending on a part of the funnel that couldn't sustain the business. And we were also pretending like it wasn't our responsibility to go and fix that funnel. We left it to the engineers, left it to designers, developers, whoever else, anyone but us, right?

So who's this talk for and not for? This talk isn't for people like seed stage startups. I did meet the seed stage startup pounder, so it's like take this with a grain of salt. This isn't talk for people who think that you build it and they'll come or who are in it with the vibes. This is not necessarily stuff that I personally care about. I respect it, but not something that I'm going to go over in this talk. This talk is for DX teams chasing business impact. It's founders with product and market fit that are looking for distribution and trying to figure out their distribution strategy. It's for resource constrained teams trying to make sense of what to choose that is going to maximise their tight budgets and ever shrinking budgets. In some cases, D'S teams get prioritisation wrong all the time, and in fact, people get prioritisation wrong all the time.

And I've seen the smartest people make this mistake and it makes me made wonder why we're all rational people in this room. Why do we get it wrong so often? Well, one of the reasons is we have misaligned incentives. We DX works in between teams and oftentimes it gets pulled in different directions, but getting pulled in different directions means that you can work on a million things and only move them one millimetre instead of working on one thing and moving it a million millimetres or a mile or whatever. So you end up getting pulled in a bunch of different directions. The other thing is, look, you mistake visibility and for impact internally, you probably all hear, we need to be seen, we need to increase awareness, we need to do X, y, Z to get in front of more people. But the thing is, not all eyeballs are the same, right?

For instance, I'm speaking at Deb Recon, y'all are my customers. Is this impact for me? I'm only here to share my knowledge. So to be fully transparent with you, I'm not trying to sell you anything and getting it wrong has consequences. You've probably seen this graph before as DX people is a pretty popular blog post. It's set. There are programmes get cut, budgets get cut, people get laid off when the impact of their work can't be seen or felt by the organisation. And if you kind of look in the mirror at the companies that you work at, all it takes is understanding what you spend money on. Do you understand where your impact or your perceived impact lies? Because your resources actually tell the truth. So lemme give you an example. If you spend more money or a disproportionate amount of money on high profile things like going to conferences, I'm aware of the irony I social media and meetups and you spend less money on docs onboarding and gathering feedback, well, you're optimising for visibility and clout and vibes versus say something like developer success.

These aren't the bad things. We go to conferences, we have to do this stuff. But it's really about the proportion of the budget that you spend. So lemme give you an example. Here's me in 20 16, 9 years ago, right? Looked a lot younger then and maybe cooler too, I don't know. But at media we used to throw these monthly SF meetups, they were packed, the energy was palpable and that was really fantastic. It really fed your ego and when you talk, you got a room filled with people that really believed in the product. But at the same time, these were pretty expensive. And as I kind of alluded to earlier, we had a problem in the product further down. So even as we threw all of these meetups, we couldn't keep the people that were adopting our tooling. And thus, if you looking at it with 10 years in retrospect, that was probably a waste of money. We could have been spending our efforts on a completely different thing and that was not dx. That could have led to a better result for the business and hand us our collected features. So I wanted to introduce a prioritisation framework around bling and basics.

And I'll tell you a little bit about this in a bit. So I grew up in LA in the nineties, bling was everywhere. Gold chains, fast cars, white, Nike Cortez is like crisp white, Nike Cortez. I love this stuff. This is me as an LA person and I live here as a New Yorker now, but I have a special place in my heart for my home. But if you know anything about la, things aren't quite what they seem when you scratch the surface. So it's the same thing in dx. You have a bling and basics continuum. So on one hand you have bling. This is the high visibility, short term, expensive, high maintenance, trying to keep up with trends, trying to keep up with the latest, coolest, whatever to attract your audience. And then you have basics, which are the quiet compounding, lower cost, hello, sustainable investments right? Now let's go flip this continuum on its side and look at it as a hierarchy of needs instead. So it blings on the top, basics on the bottom. And just like a hierarchy of needs, you want to prioritise the things that sustain the foundation before you prioritise the things that are at the top.

And if you don't prioritise the basics, well the entire thing collapses. Your foundation collapses. So that's all rational, right? I've said everything that you already know, but we still do B blink. We still are so tempted by the flashy, the gold chains of dx. And why the hell is that? Why do we keep on making the same mistake? Why do I keep on making the same mistake? Well, bling is emotional, so it hits a different part of your brain. The novelty and status of it all these are dopamines. So we want to keep on getting that dopamine hit. Bling makes you look famous and that fame is addictive. Who doesn't want to be recognised by a group of their peers? Bling makes you look successful. Here's a bunch of billboards in SF that you can drive down the, I think it's a 1 0 1 from the airport to SF and back.

And you'll see developer tools, companies just littering every billboard. And the thing with this is it's survivorship bias. Y'all, the people that get these billboards either are printing enough money such that they get to spend that few money on these billboards, or they have raised so much money that they get to spur venture capital money on these billboards. This ain't bad. I would love to be here one day and be in that position. But for most people at this conference, we are not in that same boat. And so this talk is really for the rest of us. And the thing is, because of the recognition and ego, you end up making irrational decisions and prioritising rational things. So here are a couple of things that I've either heard or been a part of or seen myself firsthand. So your company wants to build immediate company, right? Your DX team wants to get out there, be super thought leaders, influential, let's build a media company. And then you realise, well media companies are always cost centres. They lose money. I think the only media company that makes money is New York Times.

The other thing you hear inside of teams all the times, let's be influencers, let's hire influencers. And then you realise, oh, not everyone on your team has the skills to be an influencer because influencing is a separate job and it's often a full-time job. And the most successful influencers have gone solo because that better aligns with their community and their vision and frankly how they make money. The other thing you hear is let's start a community. And there are a lot of companies here that maintain communities that have started a really long time ago. And there are companies here that are thinking, golly, maybe we should start a community of our own because wouldn't it be nice for us to bring together a bunch of potential customers and customers and get them to talk to each other? And then you realise communities take a really long time to bootstrap. They take money, they take resources, they take commitment. And how long does your budget, how long far in the future can you see your budget?

So I've gone over a lot of examples of what to watch out for, but not necessarily bad. And I'm passing zero judgement here, but what should you actually do? How should you actually proceed if you want business impact? So the way I think about business impact is that business impact is something that can be felt company wide in many cases it's because it can be felt company wide. It's not constrained to the output of your team. It is the multiplicative output of your team times product, your team, times marketing, your team times success. And lemme give you a couple examples. Well, you have a product with just words. That's business impact because it's revenue. You have thorough docs. That's business impact because it leads to feature adoption. You can actually measure that. And it's not kind of flimsy measurements that you often hear. It's literally real measurements that your business cares about. Same thing with workflow, leading to usage, onboarding, leading to aha moments that you typically track in your onboarding funnel. So here's a list of things that aren't business impact and they're not bad, they're just not what you would define as business impact. They are they things on the way to delivering that impact. So things like relationships, content created weekly, crps like newsletter subscribers. They might be something you track internally on your DX team, but it's outside of your team.

It's not going to be that useful for other people in your company. And what's more, if you overvalue the things behind me, it can be a trap because you end up optimising naturally the things that you measure. And any business person will see right through that when there's no uplift in corresponding metrics that the business cares about, leads, revenue, users. Alright, so let's talk about a key kind of factor and delivering impact. I believe it's the prerequisite to having that impact. It really depends on your org structure. So DX can live in between a tonne of teams, it can support many teams. Sales enablement, success enablement, marketing via content solutions, sport products, you name it like dx. Kind of fits in many places. Now that can be a double-edged sword and we could talk about that after. But here's the most common orientation for dx. It's DX supporting product or it's DX supporting marketing. Now you might live within the people in this room, you look at your org chart, you might live under product or you might live under marketing. The mistake that I've made is that DX didn't live under any of them. It was like a silo and that was, shit, I can curse here. That was shit. Because it led to bad alignment with the company goal. We made up our own kind of goals.

The communication overhead was higher just because the natural boundary of teams. And that led to more meetings. Who wants to actually be in more meetings? I certainly don't, the collaboration was kind of knee capped because we can't actually take advantage of the superpowers and other disciplines if we're in a siloed team. So instead, maybe the better pattern here is to really embed DX into either your product or your marketing teams and treat it as a consultative team similar to designers or product managers. And so when you embed, you naturally align that entire team's goals and that team can use DXs superpowers to achieve its kind of main intention. So for a product team that's focusing on user adoption or focusing on user growth or focusing on user, whatever, for a marketing team that's focusing on leads or pipeline, something like that, and DX can be instrumental in delivering those results for that business without having to make up its own metrics.

Alright, another thing to consider is how many DX people do you actually need? If you ask this room full of people, you're going to get a bunch of different results or different answers in my opinion. I think you need one DX person per user facing major products if you have a DX orientation for products. And alternatively, you need one DX person per marketing team. If your DX team is situated under marketing, and I use dx, debre dev advocacy, the kind of similar, same, same but different. And the caveat for marketing is if you find a repeatable lead generation strategy, you're probably going to hire more DX people because that's the unlock that allows you to achieve a business impact. Alright, dx, headcount grows as a ratio of your organisation. I need to talk faster. Holy crap. Okay, so basically as you grow and as your organisation gets more successful, you want to align DX with your broader companies and success.

And you do that by scaling with your company. If you have DX in a separate kind of silo, if you have DX in a separate org structure, it's really easy to over resource or under resource these things. And they both have bad results, the head count and the ratios, they are kind of healthy resource constraints that end up forcing prioritisation. And lemme tell you what I mean by that. If you are an early stage company and you don't have that many DX people, you can't. You afford blinging initiatives, you can't afford a community. You can't afford having a YouTube series to keep on forever because you are going to under resource the basics that you need to literally survive and support your product or marketing teams. So you focus on basics. If you're in mid stage, you might be able to bet on bling, but sparingly, if you're late sage, you probably are printing money and you can afford bling your bets.

But kind of watch out for the efficiency and be very judicious about cutting programmes. Alright, so let's get into the prioritisation framework, when to prioritise basics and when to bet on bling. So kind of like a recap of everything that you've seen here. Alright, step one, take stock of where you are. Be real about the reliability of your product, integrity of your product. If you don't have product market fit yet, you probably don't need to focus on DX said you need to focus on building a product that people want. If your product is rough around the red edges, you're going to be overspending on DX top of funnel and not be able to convert a bottom of a funnel. And that's going to be a waste of your time and effort. If you have a product that just works, you're in the perfect position to kind of scale that distribution via a vehicle like dx.

In compliment with marketing, you have to understand, look in the mirror about what orientation are you in? Are you in the product orientation? Are you in a marketing orientation? Be really clear because that's the team that actually pays the bills. Those are the resources that you're getting. And PR and other beware, it's not really an easy place to be because you don't get the clarity that you need in order to kind of drive the impact because you can't define the impact if you don't know what you're trying to impact. Alright, step two, be honest about your resourcing. Are you an early stage, mid stage, late stage company? And how much budget do you actually have? If you're a mid stage company and you have low budget, well you can only afford basics. You can't afford these blingier programmes. If you're a mid stage company on a hypergrowth scale printing money, then yeah, probably you can afford to run hackathons every week or something like that.

I made that up. But insert whatever blingy thing you want. Step three, nail the basics for your situation. The common basics are going to be docs across the board as far as I can tell. And then if you have a product orientation basics might be guides, templates, code samples. If you have a marketing orientation, it might be mos sales enablement, white papers, blog articles that speak to your job to be done. Step four, you are now in a place where you can bet on bling and bling is great if you are in this position, but remember it requires high production and high maintenance while having a really short shelf life. So what you need to consider is, golly, do I have the logistical tail? Support that bling initiative and ensure that you have the follow through. And lemme tell you what I mean by that.

Alright, three examples. You have an ebook, right? You're like, oh, we need to invest one or two months on this ebook. You're investing a lot of your time in a lot of your company's effort on this ebook. You also need to think about the distribution strategy. How are you going to bring marketing success and sales long to help you with distribution? Because if you write it, there's no guarantee that people are just going to go and read it. You actually need to consider and enlist your counterparts in other teams to help you distribute. Same thing with YouTube. YouTube is a long game and you need to be able to understand before you make the investment in YouTube, what's the payback period? What can I expect from a company perspective on this YouTube initiative? Open source. I'm really familiar with open source, three big open source projects in a row. A lot of teams think if I make an open source library, give it away for free. They're going to come now, there'll be a flood of your potential customers, but the things that people get wrong are, look, open source takes a lot of time and effort. You need to have a maintenance strategy at three months, six months, 12 months, two years for it to survive. And if you don't have that, it's going to die on the bind and your initiative and time is going to be waned.

The other thing to note about bling is look, bling is relative, right? Your team might have very unique superpowers that can make bling attainable. And in which case, it's not really bling, it's something else. So some teams have natural efficiencies in tactics like social media, video conferences, and that's amazing. And if you can make that work and change the equation of the high production, high maintenance and make that low production, low maintenance and are okay with the short shelf life, then that might work for you. So for instance, the speaker that we saw upstairs at cloud for Lizzie, that might work for her because she seems super talented at creating these demos and she can do it on a quick timeline. So everyone has their own superpowers. Prioritisation is all about saying no, you can't really afford all the bling and bad things tend to happen when you say yes to everything. Who here has been a part of one of these failed initiatives?

Who here has been a part of multiple failed initiatives? Yeah. Fuck yeah, I have a coworker here. But say hi to everyone. Varun, you've watched us failed through all of these initiatives together. So bad things happen when you say yes. And I want to connect this back to the impact. When these things go defunct, it means that your impact is not getting delivered. Which means that your programme and your reason for being with DX in that company, someone needs to make the maths work. Someone needs to make the budget work and you don't get it that many chances. In many ways, this is a kind of a cautionary tale of what not to do, but I think DX has impact if you prioritise, because at the end of the day, we sell optimism. Really it we sell stoke, we sell the ability to achieve your dreams, but we need to also connect that to impact in order to sustain what we do. So I'll leave you here with a focus on basics that compound. Place strategic bets on bing, on bling, and be extremely conservative or budget conscious so you don't overspend on things that might not work out for you. If this talk makes you reconsider or consider what you're doing at your company, just come up to me and after. Alright, let's time. Thank you for.