Let's wing it: a study in dev rel strategy

Baruch Sadogursky: Hi. So

That's more or less me with all things strategy. I'm the last person to speak about devs strategy to you and the only, yeah, so my name is Baruch J Bar on Twitter and I'm developer relation practitioner at Jfr. Jfr. Do a lot of cool stuff including t-shirts with frogs, stickers with frogs and software. And as I mentioned, I'm the last person to speak about strategy with you and the only reason I ended up here talking about strategy is because that was the last available topic, not covered by anything else. So this is how it went. I'm just forced Matthew to accept my talk and then like three seconds after, well I have no idea.

So what I did is asking other people who is much smarter than me.

I can pretend I know stuff, but I really don't. But I do have connections. So I asked smart people and there are tonnes of smart people in this business. Those are on my speed dial. So this is why I ended up with them. But actually having Phil for example, his input would probably make this presentation something completely different. I asked Arun and James and Ted and team probably recognise some faces and names Haddy and Simon spoke with all of them and basically there is another guy, yeah, Ted Patrick of course this one is very interesting.

Look at the title and their input is what this presentation is about. There is very little of my wisdom in it. This guy Victor Gamo from Hazelcast, he's an undercover technology evangelist. He has some stupid title like solution architect or something, but actually he is one of us.

Baruch Sadogursky: Yeah, I'm sorry I couldn't change it yet.

Baruch Sadogursky: So Chris is working on changing it. He's one of us. He did all the interviews with me at, didn't come, but thanks to Victor.

And before we dive into strategy, one of the things that we discovered is that the terms are completely ambiguous and Phil touched into the little bit was the difference between advocacy and evangelism. And there are tonnes of other confusion. So for example, this one we heard that DevRel includes technology evangelism and community advocates, management and training in documentation. And DevRel is working with existing deaths, but evangelism is getting the word out and there are tonnes of ambiguity there and not going there. So just for the sake of setting the stage, everything is fluid. And now let's get to business. So show of hands, who thinks they know what dev strategy is? One, feel a little bit.

Okay, well you know what? For a DevRel professional conference, 10 hands is an embarrassment.

Good job. But yeah, I kind of knew that. So that was kind of staged. So usually we do a strategy, we start with the why. Great book by the way, if you didn't read, please do. And the why for strategy in our business is actually pretty clear.

We have number of good reasons why we do what we do. And two directions for our strategy. Kind of an outbound technology awareness, technology education and technology recruitment. And here you should go, what recruitment, what it has to do with anything. We'll get to it. The other direction is the technology feedback and that what Phil refers to the product, the product part. And it looks like 50 50. Fair enough.

So I keep carrying the technology and what kind of technology are we talking about? Any kind of technology. It can be a product that we sell to developers that's true for us.

Jfr, that's an actual box with no, it's just an empty box. And Hazelcast is of course another example and a lot of others that sell to developers. It's also true for the APIs world. Next NMO is a great example, but others wither for example that this technology, the API related or a whole platform like Salesforce or others which are platforms for developers. So basically anything including interestingly enough software that has no outside interfaces at all.

And that has to do with the recruitment that I'm going to talk about. Think about something that like a service or a website that has no API whatsoever, but still we are interesting in it. We're going to talk about it. So technology awareness, why we do that. We want to spread the word out. We want brand awareness, kind of a generic lead for marketing. That's also important. Public relations that the brand awareness stuff.

I think the best description of derail is being kind of a technology PR on the education part. It's also quite obvious. Make the developers love your technology and by the way, that's impossible, but let's pretend we can try and do that. Breeding community advocates, that's very important. Once people fell in love with your software and we pretend that that can happen, they will advocate for it. Ease the load and the support. This is very important for the education part. The more people use your software, the less support tickets your company gets.

That's a good thing. And I get to the recruitment part and I love it because it's completely different from anything. Most of us concept as DevRel. Now here is a job description in LinkedIn. It has like you have to know that and you need to have skills, you need to have experience.

You should be a good team player that's important and et cetera, et cetera. What do we say? Is it a good position to take?

Who thinks it's a good position to take? Who thinks it's a bad position to take? We have no idea because what we miss is that which company is it? Airbnb has been named the best software company to work for by the Glassdoor or whatever. So now suddenly this looks like a very good position to be in. But what about that for example, same set of skills. Well no, it's not so much. Now this Alexa guy that I showed you who is the foreign minister of a social network in Russia, really horrible one.

The worst people are there. People, they hate the name and they go like, oh no, I'm not going to work there. But their technology is absolutely amazing.

They do crazy stuff like insane scalability, really interesting stuff. His job is to evangelise the technology that the technical people can get to work with if they get hired. So they solve the problem of a really bad brand name with a technology evangelist that gets the word out of how cool the technology is there despite everything that this technology produces. So that's for the outbound, for the inbound, the feedback of course, again, I hope this is trivial, this is trivial. Report to sales.

That's very easy. People say that our promises are too high. Report to marketing. This is also very easy. People say that we send too much emails, report to product. This is interesting. That's the real deal. We can give different kind of feedback that we collect from what we do from conferences and other activities that we engage with the developers.

So this is how it looks like and that's what Phil spoke about.

50% out outbound, 50% in about, well not so much usually day-to-day job. We're much focused on evangelising than getting the feedback back. And the reason is that's because who is paying our salary is paying the bills. There are two options under which DevRel organisation can exist inside your company, reporting to marketing and reporting to product and of course who you report to makes a great deal on what's your focus in. And what we see is that most of the DevRel organisation do report to marketing. And the question is why. I'll try to get my input on that as well.

Now I think I will, people like ly disagree with me at this point. Good, this is not mine. This is what the smart guys told me for the why. And that's kind of the first question. The second is how well, and the biggest trade-off that we make here is offline, online versus face-to-face.

We have limited budget, we have limited resources. We need to put it very simply decide should we do a webinar or should we go to a conference? We cannot do most of both all the time.

And the comparison is simple. There are of course benefits to both of them. Talking about online, we're talking about much broader reach just because we can reach more people by going online. It's measurable. This is very important. Everything we do online have a digital fingerprints that we can realise and manage no travel. That's a nice thing. And of course it is much cheaper mostly because no travel.

So those are great benefits. But face-to-face have their benefits on the role and they are extremely important. Better engagement. I think you will all agree with me that the engagement that you have at conference is much better than the engagement that you have at the webinar. Although theoretically the audience can respond in both channels. Relat can only build face-to-face. Now I'm the best friend of Phil. He had no idea who am I?

Like yesterday? This is what it does. I've heard you before you did, but stay with me here. And of course feedback is better face-to-face as well. So those is the comparison and you can make your own decisions based on what is more important for you. And again, we ask the guys that we spoke with, what is the ratio? We got numbers from some of them three to one, like 66%. Where's the three to 3% or no, sorry, that's 75, 25, that's 66, 33.

And someone said other numbers and then we got a remarkable answer. You don't get to choose. And we were like, what we're the strategists? Now we decide what we do. And they're like, no you don't. That's the what. And that's because technology evangelists advocates the world specialists are rare species. We are rare species because we both technical and extroverts and we don't consider marketing to be profanity and other nice things that we say about ourselves that makes our special.

But there is something into it. It's hard to hire a dev specialist. It it's hard to hire technology evangelist. And your ratio of online versus offline is frequently dictated by who you have on your team. So let's say you hire Josh Long, how your ratio will look like 99% face-to-face just because this is what he does and he's the best in it. So you go with what you have, right? You are the only Java guy here in the whole audience.

Baruch Sadogursky: I don't know what she's talking about.

Baruch Sadogursky: The solution for this, the solution for this problem is of course diversification of your team. If you have someone that enjoys travel and someone that hates travel here, you build yourself a ratio, right? Another very good benefit of diversifying your team is Stalin. No. Well he meant it in a little bit less nice way that we do. But what I mean by that is what happens if your lead tech evangelist lives? Will he will this person take all of the glory and all of the brand that they build with them? If you build a team of those, it's a little bit easier for the company group with a loss.

Now you know that it will come to that. And that's there of course the part that we all hate to talk about and we really want it to be like the force and we just say it has to be done and here, get yourself a lot of money and go do that. But that's not what's happening. Again, let's start with the why. We want to measure the rail activities as a part of the strategy. Two reasons justify your existence. You need to come to your boss and say, I do that. This is what I did.

Give me money. The other one is improve. I want to know if I did better at this conference than in one in San Francisco. How do I know need to be measured? So those are the two reasons. What do we measure? One of the things that we measure is buying people, purchasing people, or in a more nice way to say it, the cost of developer acquisition. This is the great Adam Fitzgerald speaking at Daryl Cohn San Francisco about the cost of developer acquisition.

And he said that the three things that we need to know is how to calculate this cost and then couple of other things. And basically calculating this cost is easy,

Right? All you need to do is take bunch of numbers and multiply them and then add some factor and you have a result.

Now we actually know what it is, right? It's like some number that it costs to get a developer on your platform to buy your product, et cetera. Now this is, as I mentioned, is relatively easy to calculate. The hard question is, okay, so I spent $220 to go to a meetup. Did I get 100 developers on my platform after this meetup?

How can I know that? That's the hard question. And of course what people naturally try to do, and that's true for everybody, not only developer relations specialists is searching under the light, measuring what is easy to measure. And in our case of course, for example, one of the reasons most of the time dev reports to marketing is that marketing activities are easier to manage than feedback that we provide to product. I mean, how can we measure feedback that we provide to product marketing activities?

Some of them easier to manage and that's why a lot of organisations go this path. And of course our ratio between online and face-to-face often also dictated by the easier management on the measurement of the online activities, comparing face-to-face. And if we have management that is obsessed with measurement and they have to have numbers, we don't have my choice.

We have to do online most of the time just because this is where we can provide the numbers. Just because measuring online is easy. As I mentioned, we have digital fingerprints on any activity that we do. There are some interesting aspects on it. How for example, we know whether the people decided to buy after a webinar or a blog post that they participated in both, but it's solvable. This we know how to measure online activities. And here is another talk from San Francisco, this is Rob speaking about how to measure online activities. Engaged traffic is one of the good measures.

Managing face-to-face is almost impossible. And well again, I have no idea. I asked the smart people and let's take a use case, a conference stock, something that I hope most of us love to do. And hey, to measure just because, let's see, how can we measure it? One of our gurus said, I wish I knew I kind of need that. And the other said, that's a lot of grey here. And the third said, I never found a good way to write good metrics around conference stocks. And the fourth they, this one I like.

That's a real of the philosopher, then a statistician. And then you come to your SFO and say that and you end up like Phil in his previous company.

Well there are some management that we can jump on. And Rob mentioned audience size as a horrible metric that you can measure. And he is absolutely right. It is horrible. It is easy, but it is bad. And people agree that we might do that, but we cannot rely on it at count that in this.

But it's not enough attendance count, it's only a part of it. Attendance is not a perfect metric. And here I do have an opinion. So I'll tell you what, measuring attendance gives you the ness of the title because this is how people decide if they want to come or not. And if you have, and here you can put the best speaker you know about in the room nearby because if you have them in the room nearby, you won't get any people, right? This is what I like about single track conferences and keynotes. You're all here.

Will it give me how good my talk was?

No, you are here because you have nowhere else to go now, not a very good metric. So what else can we measure? Conference rating. This is good, but not always available and not always the exact what we need. I can give a great talk, a really funny and engaging and what's not that has nothing to do with what I try to achieve. So that can be problematic. How many people took out their phones and took pictures of the slides? This is great.

This is very relevant. Well, not very reliable whether your slides being tweeted, that's kind of the same right as the previous one. So this is what we can measure from a conference stock. Ray Bango, is he here already? No, I don't see him. Anyhow. Amazing guy except of one thing, but otherwise amazing guy is going to be here this afternoon talking about measurement of darl, talking about this topic.

And I guess his talk will be based a lot on his blog post in which he said that measurement first to first activities need to be done through monitoring the social media on the keywords that you care about.

And that's actually true. And taking it back to the conference talk I get on the stage, I sit on my chair and for the instant satisfaction, I start to browse my Twitter because I want to know how great I was. And then a couple of things can happen. For example, it's happening now. The internet was down. So first of all, I'll give myself a slack if I won't see any tweets, but that means this is a problematic stat. Maybe it was the end of the day and all your phones are dry so you won't tweet it. Or maybe I have a great slide deck, which is completely useless because all I have are animated cat gifts or maybe people forgot my handle.

Not going to happen to me. It's on every slide. But other speakers might have this problem. So this is not a very reliable start.

Usually I would say just give it up. You cannot measure online activities. What you can measure in online activities is extremely important for the other reason, for the improvement of yourself and of your team, but not for justifying your existence. You won't have any numbers that your CFO will buy.

And that's kind of the reality. So again, asking the people face-to-face KPIs are hard and unreliable. Solid numbers are easy to fall in love with but are irrelevant like the audience of the conference talk. The only way to conduct DevRel is by having trust and vision. And not only we should have this vision, but the one that gives us money shouldn't have this vision. And just don't waste your time and money to measure the non-measurable like building your influence. I love this slide. I'm going with that to my boss like tomorrow.

And the good thing about it, I didn't say that smarter people did build trust by helping other departments. This is a very good advice when we help the salespeople to make their cold calls a little bit warmer. By hitting up the audience in front, sales will back us up when we come to ask for money without solid numbers. So this is an important thing as well. And that's all for me. Just shameless plug here, the guys, after we spoke with them, got on one chat and decided they want to do more of it. So keep an eye on DevRel rud io. We'll probably do some kind of podcast there and there will be some good KPIs there.

This is solid stuff, right? And I really hope that by now you know what to do next. Thank you very much.