Listen to Laura Cowen as she goes around talking about how she developed a community and DevRel culture in IBM making the organisation understand the needs and expectations of the developers.
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Define your community
Challenge the status quo to reach where you want
Fund the work properly
Build the internal sub-community within the organization as well
Understand the development and marketing relationship
Defend the target audience, understanding their needs and advocating them
Were more focused on Developer Experience but developers expected community support.
Wanted Java EE Developers to love their product (Liberty) so much that they tell their friends to use it too
Created articles, resources, GitHub codes, YouTube videos, etc.
Created shared expertise within the community
Openness within the community - meeting developers at conferences, talking to people generally, sharing experiences
Whiteboard session at Devoxx 2008 (Belgium) - comparing Java application servers - everyone complained about difficulties starting/ fixing errors and consulting fees.
Wanted to create resources for Liberty to get around this problem.
Realised that they need to create a more developer-focused website for their community.
Frequent updates, adding new articles regularly created engagement, people were coming to the website and interacting
But this became difficult for them with a day job
One developer made in charge of maintaining fresh content, working a day a week dedicated to this.
As it grew, one person was hired full time for regulating this.
Made a strict weekly publishing schedule to maintain a regularity (Made a pipeline)
Executive director motivated developers to contribute to content around Liberty - it worked!
Mentoring them to use the handles
Letting them know the use of hashtags
Creating guidelines around attending conferences
This cannot be forced - social media is genuine and if forced to post/ tweet, it reflects
Developer Advocates were hugely protected by the marketing team
Marketing is good at awareness and hooking people to the product
Marketing helps the product to shine but developers need details as well
Added a trial for developers to try out the product
If registration was added to trial download, 60% of the developers turned away, if not the marketing couldn't collect leads.
Cold calls attracted negative reactions from developers.
Building a developer community is organic and long term.
Marketing needs to work on short term campaign
Quantitative Measures: Numbers of downloads, visits to the website
Qualitative Measures: Quotes from people, their thoughts on the product
Most difficult thing: Keep the focus on who is the end-user & who is the target.
UX Terms: Primary users, secondary users, tertiary users
Developers are the main users
It is difficult to say no, but things should be relevant to the target audience
Having a clear definition of what is needed, helps in this regard.
Yes - Metrics are going up!
More people are talking about the product - getting feedback
