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!
Christiano Betta (Braintree - PayPal) - DevRelCon London 2015
- 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.
- 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."
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Made a ton of sample code repositories to standardize the experience of the tech talks
- URL Shorteners
- Sharktank apps
- Metrics for iOS and Android
- Hubot
- Code of Conduct for the hackathon
- 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.