# Tooling your way to a great DevRel Team {% embed url="" %} Christiano Betta (Braintree - PayPal) - DevRelCon London 2015 {% endembed %} ## 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**](https://battlehack.org) - Themed Hackathon (Winners go to San Jose!) * [**Commerce Factory**](https://commercefactory.org) - Meetup Series of tech-focused talks on commerce * [**Startup Blueprint**](https://blueprint.paypal.com) - Startups get free processing for the first 18 months * [**Start Tank**](https://london.starttank.com) - Free office space to 6 startups for 6 months * [**Braintree\_Talks**](https://braintree-talks.com) - 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.