Comment on page
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
- 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