Making developers the superheroes of the enterprise

Liz Moy: Hey everybody, my name is Liz and I am a developer evangelist at Twilio. And today I wanted to share a story with you of how we were able to reach a new community of developers with a new programme that we started. And I shouldn't really say it's a new community of developers. There are developers that have been around probably longer than many of us, but they're extremely valuable, and I've had such a pleasure and it's been such a joy to serve them. So hopefully you'll learn a little bit about our story and what we did, and maybe take some ideas for yourself for how you might reach a community of developers that you may not be engaging with at the moment. So I am talking about making enterprise developers the superheroes of their companies. And part of why I got into this is because I myself was an enterprise developer.

I was a software engineer at Disney for three years before I transitioned into working in DevRel, and I loved the work that I was doing, but there were also a lot of challenges, which I'll share a little bit more about.

Later on. At the end of my time at Disney, I decided to do a batch at the Recur Centre, which is a self-directed programming retreat in New York City. Right now they're operating all online, but they do have this lovely space in New York. And it was during my time at RC that I really started to grasp the importance of community and the power that comes with really being in a community of developers, just the ability to grow so rapidly to learn so much and to just really lean on each other. So while I was there, I kind of realised I think that maybe working in the developer community developer relations space might be a good fit for me.

And I had heard great things about Twilio. I'd gone to Signal actually that same year, and I really liked the product and I really liked the way that they worked with developers. So I kind of had my eye on them.

And then I found out about a programme that they were launching to serve enterprise developers, which just seemed like a really a good fit for me since I was coming from the enterprise space. So when I joined the team, it was Greg who was leading the charge, and then Tilda, who was also sort of spending some of their time on the team. And now we've grown, so there are now four of us. Greg isn't on the team anymore, but all of the photos that you see in this presentation we're all taken by him. So he's an amazing photographer. Definitely find him on Instagram and check out his work if you'd like.

But one of the reasons why this team started is because Twilio has this great history of really serving developers and thinking of developers and having a CEO that was himself, and it still is a developer, and you all may be familiar with this billboard that used to be off of the 1 0 1 that says, ask your developer, but I like to share this because I really feel like this is the whole foundation for our team. Our whole team was basically created to say, we should be asking developers at enterprise companies how to solve business challenges.

And you may know this already, but this was turned into a book. And this quote from the book I think also really embodies why we wanted to strike out on this new venture to specifically find ways to engage with developers at enterprise companies because we believe that they do hold a lot of problem solving power, and that if we were able to give them time and resources and people that have intimate Twilio knowledge that they could build something really amazing that would impact the bottom line of their business.

The team kind of started because for a lot of conversations that were happening, sales was talking to our team, and sales was sharing that they had companies that did want to build something themselves, but they may not really know where to start exactly, or they may not know exactly how to get the developers altogether to figure out whether Twilio was going to be the right solution for them. And so one of the ideas that the team came up with was, well, we should do a hackathon. And for a lot of you, you may have actually heard of Twilio for the first time at Hackathon that you participated in. It's something that we've been involved in since really the beginning of the company. So it made a lot of sense that we could sort of take this tactic that had proved to be really useful and go into the companies that we were wanting to serve the developers at.

So this took a lot of cross-functional collaboration and teamwork with sales and the account executives and the solutions engineers on the sales side were instrumental in making this a reality.

There were some who really came to the team and had accounts that were excited to build with Twilio. From there, we were able to go ahead and set up some onsite hackathons with those customers. We would go to a customer company and spend two days with some of the developers there. We would come up with some business challenges ahead of time, but also allow them to decide on a challenge that they might want to work on themselves. And then really we were helping drive them to getting a working prototype. We had solutions engineers on hand as well as other people from the developer evangelism team, just to help them get started, help them debug, show them different features about Twilio that they may not be aware of yet.

And then the end of the day involved a demo ceremony where we would have the teams show off what they built. And it's amazing because the teams always had something that worked.

They always had something that people could text or call into or a contact centre set up. And then in order to really elevate them and make them the superheroes, we had the management and some of the teams from the executive side or the leaders from the executive side come in and serve as judges. And so this just provided a little bit of fun for everybody and also allowed them to get visibility so that people in management could actually see what they were able to accomplish.

So it was a lot of fun. There were a lot of amazing things that happened, but as I mentioned, there are different challenges that come from working in the enterprise. And one of the biggest ones is just that enterprises are so big that change takes time and it takes a lot of effort. And I love this photo that was taken at one of the hackathons that we went to because it just demonstrates that it's really hard to change things. So here's a few other things that proved to be a bit challenging.

One is that sometimes developers can't even access your tools or your SDK or your product. Sometimes network restrictions prevent that from being possible. And we actually have run into that before where we'll go into work with a customer and their network has blocked Twilio, and we have to figure out how to get around that to allow the developers just to log into the console.

We also encourage the use of tools like Postman and N Rock, and some developers aren't allowed to download software that isn't pre-approved by the company. So the way that we've kind of found forward with this is we have an IT checklist that we share with the company, and we ask the developers to go through that before we do an event. And we'll also offer to hop on a call with them and go through it with them. And this is another area where the solutions engineers are just amazing. They're complete rock stars in my opinion, because I will never forget sitting on a call for probably two and a half hours before a customer hackathon, while the solutions engineer sat with one of the developers and their IT team and figured out how to get the network configured so that we could access Twilio and we could access another cloud server that they needed.

So it is a bigger challenge than you might expect. The other challenge is that typically in big enterprises, decision makers are procurement managers or even the VPs of engineering. So developers that are actually using these tools every day sometimes don't get to decide if that's what should be used, even though they're the ones that will be building with it. So finding a way to help them become a significant crucial part of the decision making process was really important to us. And then I feel like this slide needs no explanation because we all know how hard it is just to juggle everything and find time to build things. So just by taking that initiative to set aside time and get everybody in a room together, it can be really impactful.

This was the last photo that was taken at an in-person hackathon. I love this photo because it was with a customer in Illinois that we went to and there was a giant snowstorm on the way home, and we were all stuck in these terrible delays at the airport.

But right after that is when Covid hit and we couldn't travel anymore, and suddenly I would've given anything to be stuck in an airport for any amounts of time, honestly. So once that happened, I know I was panicking. I think everybody in the whole world was panicking, but I know that for our team, I was very worried because I didn't know if these events would translate virtually because it can be a lot to ask of someone to sit on a Zoom call for six hours for two days. But the developers came through and they wanted to do them, and they were incredibly engaged and we were still able to do virtual events, which was really just amazing to see.

We tried to find ways to make it fun for them and keep it engaging and really still make it a good developer experience. One of the things that we did that I really loved is we had these world-class magicians. They're called Digital Deception, and they're a duo, and they created an entire magic show on Zoom called zo, and they actually used Twilio for a significant part of the show. So they would have people pull out their phones and go into their calculator and calculate a number and then text it in and hold it up to the screen.

And they had just all of these super inventive creative ways of keeping people engaged in the show, and it was basically the best Twilio demo that we could ever ask for because it was so creative. So that was something that was really special and kept people engaged.

The other concern that I had was will people actually be able to finish a build and create a demo? Because if you're like me, you're working from home and it's really distracting and it can be hard to sit down and actually finish something. But again, totally amazed by the developers and just their drive and their initiative. And what you're seeing right now is an example of a web chat that one customer built. They were able to integrate with Salesforce, build this whole web chat experience, and it was just a really, really great day that we spent with them. This was a quote from one of the participants on that day as well, which was something that was also really amazing to see that a lot of developers felt like these hackathons were a way for them to bond with their team in a time when it was really hard to find that sense of team unity and joy.

I also really love this quote because this particular leader that we were working with was incredibly sceptical, very sceptical of the product, very sceptical of the event. And after that, he has become one of our biggest advocates. He sings Twilio's praises, and he's been so happy with what the developers did. And really that's the whole point of this is letting them shine and giving them the tools that they need to do that. So it was very cool to see that transformation happen. This is another quote from another leader that I think it's just been nice to hear that anecdotal evidence from folks that these events are useful, they do have an impact, and if we can kind give the developers a really good experience, hopefully that will set up the sales side to be able to continue that relationship and move the deal forward. So just a couple of numbers.

I know that people were talking about NPS earlier, so I think people know what it is, so I won't go into an in-depth explanation, but basically, would a participant recommend this event in our product to a friend or colleague?

We also started this programme in North America and now we've been able to scale it internationally, and we have also done several hackathons now with some of our partners at Accenture and Deloitte. And it's just been incredible to see the way that developers all over the globe can participate, thanks to the fact that we are doing them virtually, and we have served 150 teams of developers. And one reason we were able to serve that many teams is because we have this amazing partnership with field marketing and we've been able to learn a lot from them about how to run events. Honestly, I don't think that we would've been able to get the programme to where it is if it hadn't been for them and utilising their expertise for running and scaling events.

So that is very much thanks to our field marketing. So I have just a couple of other things to go through here. A couple of things that I think are important to get from the customer. When you're embarking on something like this, you need to have a strong customer champion from their side because there are just so many things that need to be sorted ahead of time.

Having somebody that's excited about the event, excited about the product is really crucial. You also need developers, which is probably seemingly obvious, but I also wanted to mention that we have included other roles at our events. We've invited people from the product side to join or project managers, business analysts since there are other opportunities during the event to help sort of map out and delegate as well as have somebody demo at the end and sort of organise that.

And then also having some solid business challenges is really great. It's also really helpful for the sales side to be able to get more of an inside look into what the customer is actually facing, the problems they actually have. And this is a really good opportunity to just further those conversations while also allowing the developers to choose a business challenge for themselves if they'd like to work on something else. Some things that we needed from inside of Twilio and that you may need to consider asking for from your company if you were to launch a programme. Similarly, as I mentioned, cross-functional collaboration is just it.

It's the most important thing. There is no way that we would've been able to grow this programme without the account executives on the sales side and our partner folks on the sales side as well, the solutions engineers who are just instrumental in, and I think solutions engineers are really the secret weapon of every company because they have so much knowledge about what developers are actually building and what they're actually facing every day.

So utilise all of their knowledge and learn from them if you can. And field marketing for sure. I mean, they came up with so many amazing ideas for how we could do these better and how we could iterate on them. And I've learned so much from them in regards to event management. Strong storytelling, both internally and externally will help grow any programme. I think especially one like this where it's a bit more experimental, being able to tell the story of what we were trying to do within the company helped clarify to people what the goal was and the community of developers that we were hoping to reach.

And then lastly, focusing on serving developers. Because at the end of the day, that's really what we've been here to do. It's to give them a good experience and also to take any feedback that they have about the product and use that as a channel back into the product team to let them know what developers are actually using day to day.

So if you liked this talk and you are interested in the type of work that we're doing, please reach out to me. You can send me an email or find me on Twitter. And just to leave everybody on this note, I would encourage you to just think about who needs you, who within the community are being underserved right now, or maybe you're not reaching, or maybe there's an opportunity there. And so if you think of that and you start to mull it over and you want to reach out to me and have a chat, always welcome. So please do email me or find me on Twitter.

And thank you all so much for your time and for being here.