Sustainable DevRel strategies

Atsushi Nakatsugawa: Thank you, Matthew, and the rest of organization team for safety in my talk. And my talk is suitable for people who are thinking of starting DevRel and the expert. There is wide range of method in DevRel, and there is no way this is DevRel. So many people are confused about what to do at first. I hope this session will help them and you.

So let's start the start, sustainable developer relations. First, let me introduce myself and my background. My name is Atshi, and I've been providing developer support services in Japan since 2014 and organizing the DebraCon Tokyo series since 2017 and running a community called Debra Meetup in Tokyo. I'm the biggest Debra fan in Japan. And I will hold a conference named DevRel Japan conference twenty twenty one in this weekend with community members.

So this T shirts that I put now, this is a stuffed T shirts on the conference. Well, I have been supporting various companies in my dev dev dev dev support service. Some are Japanese and some are foreign companies. Some companies have been continuously worked on Deborah. However, others have unfortunately quit.

I will explain the differences. Those companies that continue have clear goal and objectives. On other hand, companies that quit tend to think while executing. They are starting to write a blog article before setting the goal. This is because they don't think of the strategy that suits their company.

As I mentioned be before, there are barriers of strategy in DevRel. It is difficult and inefficient to do all. You have to choose a low risk and high return strategy that suits your company. Next is team structure. One of the future of Japanese company is the periodic departmental transfer of the employee.

This is a mechanism to solve the problem of losing new ideas and a no share in work if people are continuously assigned the same position. And Western company often have position clause and job changes. In the case of DevRel, we often start with a small team, so changes in the human resources have a strong impact on their DevRel. So what went smoothly with the first person in charge may suddenly stop producing results with the next one. Since many developer activity rely on characteristic of the person in charge, like a evangelist or advocate, change in the team members can have the big impact on the suit sustainability of developer relations.

So like evangelist, advocate, and community managers are important position in Deborah, you know, people with this role will often attend and speak at the community or conferences. In doing so, they will have a lot of exposure to other companies and new technologies. Some of these companies will be advanced and attractive technologies or startups that sparkle and shine. Then suddenly, your technology may seem faded. Also, evangelist or advocate will be attractive to companies that are also thinking of starting developer relations.

Evangelist or advocate are often job hoppers, but companies need to keep them together. Finally, the mindset of the management team. This is often the case with foreign companies and startups. They suddenly change their mind one day. Especially in startups that have got investment, the investor have very serious eyes about how the company spends their money.

So start up executive tend to think very short sightedly and change their mind very quickly. DevRel is not silver bullet, and every time I talking about DevRel is mid to long term marketing strategy. At first, executives say, I understand about it. However, after three months, they suddenly changed their mind. In many cases, they are concerned about investors, not developers.

I've heard a lot of story that companies quit or decrease their DevRel programmings by COVID nineteen. Many expo and conferences were canceled around the world, and Budget have to rearrange to set up distribution facilities. I have also had some companies have decreased their marketing or hiring activities due to the uncertain future. Some companies have switched from expanding strategy to support, supporting strategy for existing customers. DevRel is one awareness builders that focus on existing customers will change their approach.

COVID nineteen came out of nowhere for us, and it had had a huge impact on the companies and communities. Then we we have to shift from offensive to defensive. With all these issues, how do we achieve sustainable developer relations? In this session, I'll focus on three. The first one is visualization.

Running without any KPIs have a problem, but, there are many things you can't know about develop developer relations until you try it. What works in the past may not necessarily work this time, and, therefore, it is difficult to define March oh, sorry, define the must achieve goal, but we should first set the goal to aim for. Then actually do it and measure how much difference there there is from the goal and visualize the result in the graph so that executives can understand the situation. Even if you don't reach your goal at first, you can gradually get closer to it by making improvements. If it doesn't work at all, you should switch to different strategy.

The first key point is quantitative, not, qualitative data. KPI must be measurable. And second key point is your KPI has to involve your company's KGIs. Oh, it's too so much wrong, Marshall. Oh, it a good you it is good to use broad PV and the number of register user registrations as KPIs, but they are meaningless if they are not connected to the company's KGIs.

If you are achieving your KPIs, but it is not connected to the goal of the company, management will not give you a good evolution. Therefore, the indicators to be set should be carefully considered. We should not rely on the goals that are easy to achieve and measure. The next step is educating about Deborah to your coworkers. Deborah is becoming somewhat well known, but awareness is still low.

Therefore, we need to make sure that people in your company understanding who we are, then they will appreciate us. Evangelist travel a lot and eating delicious meal on the airport lounge and taking a picture of conference and posting them on the social medias. To the people inside the company, this looks like we are praying. This was despite the fact that we are actually suffering while posting the photos. It's hard to keep a job that is not understanding by by your colleague and executives.

I often heard of people are changing job to the company that understanding DevRel because past management doesn't understand your work. In order to avoid such tragedies, we need to spread the DevRel culture within the company ourselves. Also, by educating coworkers about DevRel, you can expect a smooth transition when the person in charge changes. It's hard to explain DevRel every time when the person in charge changes, and it's program if each person has a different understanding of developer relation. A strong developer culture has to connect with comp company cultures, especially for start up company sorry.

Especially for small company, it is problem if Deborah is greatly shaken by change in the person in charge. You should firmly create common understanding with within your company. Finally, this is a essence of DevRel is marketing strategy to build good relationship with developers. This has no meaning online or offline. While offline channel has disappears due to the COVID nineteen, however, online channel are expanding at the rapid pace.

The purpose of DevRel has not changed it, so we must make the most of available channel to support our developers. The developer doesn't stop their work at all. Rather, in this new era, new types of services are being created one after another, such as virtual communication tool, medical AI tool, or infected people dashboards, and so we need to advocate and inspire the developers and stand by them all the time. We can't stop when they are running. Rather, we must be the ones who continuously inspire and motivate them to develop.

So, conclusion. I recommend the following three way to keep your DevRel even if you were getting suffer in a situation. First is try, visualize, and improve continuously. Second is educate your coworkers and executives. And last is forecast the essence of developer relations.

K. So thank you, everyone. I look forward to seeing your developer activity get better, and have a good conference together. Thank you.