Get executive buy-in or else
Jessica West, who heads up developer relations for LaunchDarkly, lays out the importance to any developer relations programme of having the support and commitment of the company’s leadership.
Video
- Three types of executives
- They get it.
- Middle ground.
- No clue.
- Implement Strategy
- Program your initiatives
- Creating measurements
- Communication
- The key is that you need to understand your value to the executive team.
- Then you need to use that to measure against their priorities.
- Defining executive buy-in
- Looks different for a lot of places.
- For the purpose of this talk, executive buy-in is an executive that understands your goals at a high level and advocates for you.
- Not only defends you but advocates for you and says yes I understand what this person is doing, here’s the value they bring in, and I am behind it 100%.
- Questions to ask executives
- Overall value.
- Success Factors
- Teamwork
- Communication
- They get it.
- They’re on your page.
- They have a clear plan, there’s no question on budget or initiatives.
- They’re all in.
- Middle ground.
- Understand developer relations.
- They think it’s a cool thing, I’ve heard it and they’re “bought-in” and I do quotes and we’ll talk about that in a minute.
- No clue.
- They’re not quite sure what they need
- “Dev rel” and they’re like “Yeah I don’t know. I don’t need to talk about that”.
- How do you maintain buy-in and make sure there is no single point of failure?
- Because yes they bought in but it doesn’t mean they’re always going to be bought in.
- How can you maintain it?
- Communication
- Internal evangelism
- Create a Roadbook for your future advocates so they know when they come in.
- What does it mean to be an onboarding developer advocate at your specific company?
- Ultimately you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle, and if your executive doesn’t have that buy-in, there’s not a lot of point for anything else. -- look for another job. ~ Speaker’s opinion.
- Where a lot of developer relations departments and teams are right now.
- The executive is there, they’ve heard of it.
- How do we measure and execute? Not sure, kind of in-between space.
- Ask more questions.
- Make a clear path to align company values with yours.
- Discussing what success factors look like for that department.
- Communication, Teamwork, and ultimately, some strategy questions.
- “Why do you think developer relations are important?
- What value do you think it brings?
- What are you looking to get out of dev rel?”
- If the answer’s “I don’t know”. --- maybe it’s time for another job search.
- If you have that question and they say they saw another company doing it and that’s the only reason they have, that’s a warning sign.
- What does a successful dev rel person or team look like?
- “How are you measuring success?”
- And not just in developer relations but in the whole company.
- How are they measuring success for Engineering? For Marketing? For Sales?
- What does success look like to the board?
- How is that divided amongst the whole company?
- What does Marketing do, what do Sales do, what does BizDev, do you even have a BizDev?
- Do you have a Customer Success team?
- Do you have an Education team?
- Changes in scale from companies from 0 to 50, 50 onwards and that could look different at one 50 person company to another, or even 1,000 person company.
- How is the goal distributed?
- And are stakeholders goals being represented around the team?
- What goals are associated with them?
- Are those goals then represented in your team?
- How are they being found?
Communication
- How do you currently communicate?
- Are there newsletters that go internally? Externally? Is it all in a forum?
- You can see how they communicate within departments and how you can communicate as a developer relations department.
- How is communication handled between other departments?
- Looks different for a lot of places.
- For the purpose of this talk, executive buy-in is an executive that understands your goals at a high level and advocates for you.
- Not only defends you but advocates for you and says yes I understand what this person is doing, here’s the value they bring in, and I am behind it 100%.
- It is a tough place where people say “I believe in developer relations but I’m not quite sure how to measure and execute it”.
- You might be going back and forth but you have a path and it may not always be clear.
- Digging in and going back to those questions you have to ask the executive team.
- Help start lining up your strategy and your goals.
- Program your initiatives
- Setting up programs for what you’re working on.
- Creating measurements
- What is it that you are measuring?
- You need to set that measurement up. And with that reporting ideally. And then
- Communication
- Segmenting your developer relations teams or your developer relations initiatives into programs is really beneficial.
- It May look like an ambassador program or a hackathon program,
- Different types of events.
- Education initiative.
- Segment into programs and then you can have clear outcomes.
- Developer Engagements
- How many people were in your audience?
- I’m giving a talk here so I can report back that x many people showed up and heard me speak.
- Example - Goal as a company and we want to be in this forum, and we want to measure how many users are on there, and how many active users are there.
- Communicate internally.
- Because then nobody in your company knows what you did.
- They think you’re doing work.
- But you have to communicate that. And that may look different in a lot of different places.
- Letting the company know what you’re working on is really key.
- Important because they may not know and maybe they missed the email because we get a lot of them.
- That’s really big and it won’t take much of your time.
- Doing an internal wiki to showcase your work.
- Have a homepage page that shows what we’re up to, here’s what we’re working on, and come talk to us about it.
- Sitting in on other department meetings.
- Coming into your partner department and going and asking what they’re up to.
- Learning about what they are working on once a month or whatever that cadence looks like is really important.
- Doing event recap internally and externally.
- Do a quick recap on why you thought it was important for the developer community.
- Team meetings
- Having an open invitation for any department to come to join your teams.