Practicing holistic evangelism

Grace Francisco: Can you guys hear me in the back? Isan working. Can you guys hear me in the back? Raise your hand if you can. Yay. Awesome. In case you were wondering, I am in fact Grace Francisco from San Francisco. No joke.

I grew up here. This is my town. So much so that there's also a Grey Street and a Francisco Street. They don't actually intersect like they do here in Chicago, sadly, very sadly. And since of course we're talking about holistic evangelism, I had to put in a church photo here, and this is the Chapel of Grace within Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. And I did in fact get married there. So that makes me Grace Francisco from San Francisco, married in the Chapel of Grace in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Now that you need to try to get that out of your head, let's take a quick poll.

How many of you have been practising evangelism for a year or less, or aspiring to be an evangelist? Awesome, thanks. Hands down, two years or less. Okay, hands down. And then five years. Five years, 10 years or less. Some vets. Awesome.

Anyone over 10 years. Cool. All right. Let me take you on a quick trip down memory lane. I started in evangelism in 2004, kind of scary at Microsoft of all places where we already had a global organisation of evangelists at corporate. We were about a hundred some odd people worldwide. We were in the thousands. I ran a number of different initiatives there.

My first role was of course, as a technical evangelist. It was when Visual Studio team system was about to come out. Their whole focus was around just visual studio, the IDE. And suddenly we had to approach the enterprise. And so I came in to be one of their first evangelists for that.

And then I moved around for another eight years in a variety of different roles, including my last role was to work with open source communities. That was probably one of my toughest jobs in the last two and a half years. Imagine going to an open source community as a Microsoft evangelist. The first remark would not surprisingly be, what the fuck are you doing here? You're with Microsoft. I spent a lot of that two and a half years winning them over. And by the end of the two and a half years, I'm happy to report that we were a welcome member of those open source communities that we were participating in. It was a really tough job.

After Microsoft, I left and then I went to Intuit for some time as well as Yodlee, which is a FinTech company and ran developer initiatives there. And for the last two years, I've been working at Atlassian, building up a net new team of developer advocates and bringing the discipline of evangelism to Atlassian.

So I just realised recently that this June will be a remarkable 12 years for me in evangelism. So either I'm just ridiculously lucky, as ridiculous as my cat reading a book about ridiculous of my children, or I'm a glutten for punishment, depending on how you look at that. So are you practising holistic evangelism? How many of you have been asked while you're travelling or going somewhere? Are you the religious type of evangelist? I have multiple times over the years, and yet we actually have quite a lot in common with these religious evangelists. For instance, you can't do your job well as an evangelist if you don't have that passion and conviction of your products and platform that you really and truly believe that is the right solution for your developer community. It will show if you don't believe in that product.

So you have to have that passion conviction just like a religious evangelist does.

And yet we have so much more in common. We have to really genuinely know our audience, just as religious evangelists, need to know who their congregation is, what that makeup is. Not every congregation is the same. We serve a developer audience and yet we have the same problem. Not every developer audience is the same. Now, these are sort of arbitrary labels that I've put up here just to give you a sense for the really broad spectrum of developers that are out there, whether it's by skill level, right, or by their specialty in the stack or the language that they identify as their specialty, whatever that practise is or vertical. In some cases, I'm a FinTech developer that's meaningful. And you should know where your tools and products have the highest affinity because there is probably a developer event every single day of the year somewhere in the world.

You can't go to all of them. IDC reports, 18. 5 million developers are out there in the world. You are not going to see all of them in a event. So prioritising who your audience really is, where you have the highest affinity of that audience is really important. So now assuming you've figured out who your audience is, where your tools are going to really resonate, now you got to figure out how to work with that audience. And starting with a point that Adam had earlier in one of his presentation this morning, you have to know, are you offering developers a product or are you asking them to build on top of your platform? So if you're doing product evangelism as we do at Atlassian, you really need to understand that you're offering a product that you want to drive adoption.

Your goal is all around driving adoption of that product.

And with product evangelism, as many of you already probably know, you can't go do product pitches at a conference. You have to pick that technology that is vendor neutral, that will have mass appeal that you go and teach and add value to that community. So as an example, at Atlassian, we don't go around talking about UG at conferences. What we do is we go and talk about Git, advanced Git workflows. How do you really master Git? How do you deal with workflow issues? So that's what we do with product evangelism. And again, back to the point around knowing your audience.

We don't go to all the developer events. We pick and choose those events carefully. We prioritise enterprise developers. We have a high affinity with Java developers. So we go to a lot of the big Java conferences and then we go, I think you said we go and spend time really writing articles online.

That's where you're going to get your scale, right? If you're not prioritising what you do online and you're thinking about just conferences, you're missing out on reaching those 18. 5 million developers. It's really important. And then you really need to ensure that your content is digestible. The digestible content, meaning the skill level of developers that you're working with, you need to make sure it's in the right format, that it's diversified in the format of the content. Meaning don't just blog, don't just write articles. You need to think about things like videos.

Taking advantage of the organic trafficking can get in YouTube, API evangelism. How many of you guys are doing API evangelism? So today, everyone under the sun seems to be offering an API. So much so that it feels like an Oprah Winfrey moment. You get an API and you get an API and you get an API.

Everybody gets an API, which is fantastic. But now as you had an evangelist for that particular API, you go to a TechCrunch Disrupt, you're competing with a bunch of other people who also have APIs. So how do you get the attention of that particular developer to say, this is the one you want to build with me, right? So the remarkable thing too about API evangelism is make sure you go with eyes wide open. When you go do API evangelism, that will mean you're probably going to a bunch of hackathons on the weekends, kiss your weekends, goodbye. Two, you're probably doing developer support for that. You're probably also writing documentation and samples. Somebody's got to do that because there's only so much automation of the API docs that you can do.

Someone's got to do that glue documentation for the API. The other thing you need to do is to really prioritise how you reach them.

How many of you have developer portals? Awesome. If you don't have a developer portal, you're really missing out on engaging with the audiences that are coming to you. My first developer portal was working on Channel nine. Channel nine was a developer portal, not for the purpose of putting just content and how-tos and tutorials. It was a transparency project. Channel nine was named from the fact that channel nine on an aeroplane is when you can listen to what's going on on that flight so that you know that you're safe, that the plane is operating, that the pilots are awake and doing their job. It's about transparency in a day and age when you're a Microsoft and you've earned the reputation with developer communities as the evil empire, you need to work at scale to build the relationships again with those developer communities.

And just a quick remark here, history evangelism. I've heard too many times recently that Roberts Gobel was the first evangelist. Love that guy, but he sat across from me in building 18, and he was part of this charter team, but he was on a floor full of a hundred some odd evangelists at that time. Second portal here, learning lesson here. I walked into Yodlee, that portal that they had at that time, you had to register a long form log in. You got three large PDFs that could not get you from one end to another of actually using A-P-A-P-I and building anything. So I walked into this situation where clearly developers could not get anything done. They would wait for weeks, sometimes months to get access to the API.

In that case, your focus is to go and advocate for those developers internally. You go and hard the cats and get what you need to get done to ensure that they can, in fact, even in a three month scale, build something using your a p, get that sandbox done.

This required going to Bangalore for me and evangelising to a bunch of engineers, ops people, security people, why we needed to make this self-serve. They'd been so used to working with the banks that they had no idea that we were trying to make this a self-serve portal for developers broadly. And so that three month timeframe was about getting engagement and excitement internally so that we could support what our developers really needed externally. That resulted in a tenfold reduction of people onboarding as well as actually buying the API and scaling through your fan base. Just as religious evangelists scale through their congregation, they pick the people that are real believers of their products, of their religion. We too have to scale through our found base. Star Wars. Great example.

Star Wars celebration 2015. There was 45,000 people. 40 years later after the first meet. 45,000 people going to the celebration.

They started lining up 28 hours before this event. Crazy fans coming in costume and celebrating this. And what was remarkable for me when I started Atlassian, when I started going to events was we would get people coming to our booths. By the way, we have no Salesforce at Atlas because you've never heard that. We get people coming to our booth, they have no official, they don't have any ongoing relationship managers for them. They would come to our booth saying, I love your products. I love what you guys stand for. I just want to stop by and say hi.

And what we were also seeing was that people would actually create content. They would tweet. We had crazy fans of Atlassian that we weren't doing anything with. It was such a huge opportunity for us. We had fans in three piece suits that would put on our angry nerd shirts at conferences.

And so we started a programme last year to harness that fan power of our congregation, of our biggest fans. And they would write blog posts, they would help us promote our launches. They would go out and actually do presentations all about Atlassian. So if you're not taking advantage of that scale and throughput through your fans, you're really missing out. So just to recap, because I'm out of time, know your audience. It's really important you really prioritise who that audience is. Don't go to random developer events. Two, prioritise really how you reach them.

Developer portals is one thing. The other point is make sure you go where they are. They're not all going to come to you. You need to make the effort to reach them online as well. And three, of course, leverage that audience base. Really tap into that congregation pool and make sure that they're helping to enable their evangelism for you. And that's it. Thank you.