Building a Developer Community in an Enterprise World

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.

Laura Cowen (IBM) - DevRelCon London 2015

Summary

• 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

Scribbles

• 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

Where did it start?

• 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

Motivating the Internal Developers

Wanted to get regular content from internal developers

• 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!

Wanted to involve developers to be involved with Social Media, StackOverflow or go to conferences

• 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

Recognising complementary roles of marketing & development

• 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.

Timelines

• Building a developer community is organic and long term.

• Marketing needs to work on short term campaign

Metrics

• Quantitative Measures: Numbers of downloads, visits to the website

• Qualitative Measures: Quotes from people, their thoughts on the product

Understanding the users and advocating for them

• 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

Don't publish everything!

• 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.

Is it working?

• Yes - Metrics are going up!

• More people are talking about the product - getting feedback