How to report on community relationships without being creepy about it

Microsoft’s Sarah Thiam spoke at DevRelCon London 2019 about tracking community metrics without crossing the line into creepiness.

Summary:

  • 3 Step Process

    • Listening

      • When push comes to shove and everything is happening really, really quickly, it’s hard to remember to listen.

      • Function as a team, don’t function as individuals.

    • Acting on feedback

      • If you create something, you have a responsibility to listen, but you also have an accountability to act on the feedback that you will receive.

    • Optimising

      • How do you optimize it a step further so that you can not only just meet requirements but also lead the conversation?

  • Anything in the developer ecosystem, things are always gonna change, things always need to refresh, and this is the only way that will keep relevant, and to keep improving.

Scribbles:

Why it can be creepy

  • It’s around the business value that

    • As dev rel professionals, we are paid to do a job.

    • And at the end of the day, those stakeholders, in order to continue their investment, will continue to ask us

      • “What is it exactly that you’re doing?

      • What is the business impact you’re bringing back to our business?

      • Continue to invest in your travel, your budget, your swag, and your stickers?”

  • How exactly are we gonna format this?

  • How do we avoid commoditizing community connections?

Process

  • Listening

  • Acting on feedback

  • Optimising

Listen

  • Listening is something that is easily forgotten.

  • When push comes to shove and everything is happening really, really quickly, it’s hard to remember to listen.

  • It’s hard to remember when you are being tasked with a certain thing and expected to deliver, it’s hard to remember to listen to your teammates around as well.

  • Function as a team, don’t function as individuals.

  • Lots of feedback questions

    • What is it that you’re not comfortable about?

    • What do you think the reporting needs to entail, and what do you want to be able to put down into a form so that we can record what you’re doing?

    • So, two things that we heard, and these are my learnings, I’m gonna do both at the same time.

Privacy

  • How far can someone go to violate privacy in order to do well at their job, or to be able to prove their impact?

  • Have a reporting program that you can fall back on that is able to respect people’s privacy.

Authenticity

  • Only trusted people will be more open with their feedback.

  • Be more invested to give you better engagement and better feedback for you to improve that technology

  • It’s a symbiotic relationship

Oh, I’ve done 10 community connections, “I’ve done 10 trips, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh” it becomes a number. And, by making these things a number, are we dumbing it down to something that is so much less than the meaningful relationships that we make?

Acting on feedback

  • If you create something, you have a responsibility to listen, but you also have an accountability to act on the feedback that you will receive.

  • It’s gonna be really redundant if you just leave that aside, or you don’t demonstrate how that has directly connected to you building your program.

  • So, acting on feedback was really important.

Privacy

  • Put in a baseline requirement of how privacy is key.

  • Only focus on publicly available information.

    • Example --

      • Only things that people have posted up on their public Twitter sites if it’s not privatized.

      • They posted it on a public Facebook group and not a closed Facebook group.

  • Use the GDPR standards.

    • European standard for privacy.

    • Use this as a building foundation for you to build up additional requirements that you wanna add to privacy filters.

  • Keep the reporting process a bit more open, and encourage more authentic dev rea behaviour.

  • Let people continue doing as they are doing without feeling pigeonholed.

Authenticity

  • Acting on that feedback

  • Really important to defend authentic DevRel behaviour.

  • Being able to provide the right metrics.

  • Metrics drive behaviour

    • If something is celebrated in your company or your team, it’s going to influence the way that people act moving forward -- make sure that you have the right metrics in place.

    • Authentic dev rea behaviour, we have metrics that are qualitative and quantitative at the same time.

  • Defend authentic dev rel behaviour

    • Come up with something really creative and new to engage the developer community.

    • Open-ended to be able to celebrate things that are new and creative as well.

Optimize

  • How do you know you’re going in the right direction?

  • How do you know your reporting program’s going in the right direction?

  • How do you optimize it a step further so that you can not only just meet requirements but also lead the conversation?

Privacy

  • Optimizing the reporting process in a sense of being more community-focused.

  • But what if we also moved away from individuals as a whole?

  • Reporting -- focusing on the community only.

  • The community is the thing that matters, not the individual.

    • Individuals in the community keep changing, it's natural it's fine.

  • Encouragement to become more inclusive in the developer environment and not the potentially toxic behaviour of focusing on a few exclusive individuals.

Authenticity

  • Focus not just on what you did but the learnings that came out of it.

    • You’re centred more on the objective of improving developer engagement.

  • You’re not actually changing the way that they behave at all, zero.

  • Reporting mechanism to feed into what they are focused on, which is improving developer engagement.

  • And, not just for them, but also how do you share these learnings with the rest of your business to say, “Hey, as a whole company, “this is how we can better engage developers”?

  • And, it’s not just what we did, but it’s more important than the learnings and the best practices that came out of it.

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