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.
Video
- 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.
- 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?
- Listening
- Acting on feedback
- Optimising
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.