Tooling your way to a great DevRel Team
Christiano Betta talks about the importance of creating different tools and collecting metrics, especially for startups helping them grow more with a small team!
Summary
Understanding different programs at Paypal
There were developed gradually over time and not at once
Internal tools help the Developer Advocates be in sync with the latest technology by getting them to build projects
Building tools is especially beneficial for startups - do more with fewer people
Collecting metrics is a great way to increase the efficiency
Someone from the team should be in charge of what data needs to be collected and what tools need to be built around it.
Scribbles
Programs at Paypal
BattleHack - Themed Hackathon (Winners go to San Jose!)
Commerce Factory - Meetup Series of tech-focused talks on commerce
Startup Blueprint - Startups get free processing for the first 18 months
Start Tank - Free office space to 6 startups for 6 months
Braintree_Talks - Talks series
Did not start at once, created all these overtime
"We should create internal tools and services, and external-facing properties, in order to help the team deliver more, faster, and better than before."
Why create internal tools?
To stay sharp your skills need training
Going and meeting tons of developers every day, you need to keep up with the technology.
You can't stay up to date if you don't have some projects to work on.
Get to play with a lot of new tech
As the team grows, you need to do more with the same people every year - increasing efficiency.
Eliminate the repetitive tasks and simplify the process
It is important especially for startups to build side projects - tools that simplify the process to do more
Slack - It was a side project build to help people at Flikr communicate effectively
Tools created for different PayPal Programs
BattleHack
Made a whole ticketing system with metrics that helped effectively to get the engagement rates of the audience.
This was extremely useful for the operations team that ran hackathons
Knew metrics for each city to target catering necessary stuff to avoid overselling or underselling the event
Check-in system was very useful to know how many actually attended the event
Eg.: For the first year had customized badges for everyone but 50% badges were never picked up
These were expensive
So came up with a solution of printing with transparent labels
Saved a lot of cost for the event!
Started collecting information about each Hack being developed at the hackathon.
Analysed which product was being used in which hack.
Got to know how many people were interested in the technology.
Shared the information with the partners as well and it was extremely useful.
Clock, twitter wall etc were developed to encourage participants getting engaged with social media
Startup Blueprint
Developed a customised CRM tool to keep track of everything
Initially used a spreadsheet which became messy to converted it into a simple tool for everyone to use
Commerce Factory
Made a ton of sample code repositories to standardize the experience of the tech talks
Other tools
URL Shorteners
Sharktank apps
Metrics for iOS and Android
Hubot
Code of Conduct for the hackathon
Why does this matter?
If you're a startup, increasing the workforce is not the best way to increase efficiency
With the same number of people in the team, they noticed
195% increase in tickets
223% increase in attendance
~115% of confirmed attendance
~65% of attendance presented
934 hacks being presented
487 of them were unique
Got to know the most popular languages and tools being used at the hackathons
Doubled the number of events each year, with not so significant increase in hires
This is because they were able to do more with the same people each year.
Someone from the team should be in charge of strategising how to collect this data and how to build tools to help collect this data effectively.
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