Max Katz

March 26-27 I attended a Developer Relations conference hosted by Evans Data in Palo Alto, CA. I was a good conference, with great content and speakers. The conference probably had about 100-150 people which I really liked.

These are my notes from sessions and keynotes I attended. Again, these are my notes and what I was able to write down and not necessary what the presenter said/showed.

Anatomy of an Amazon Alexa Evangelist
Paul Cutsinger, Amazon – Head of Alexa Voice Design Education

• You have to love to teach
• You have to love to travel
• Workshops == training
• Send internal newsletter to show what you have been doing
• User feedback loop
  • Important to be in meeting with product and tell them what works and what doesn’t work

Virtual Event ROI: Experiments and Learnings
Cliff Simpkins, Microsoft – Director, Azure Developer Marketing

• Developer events
  • What has worked well
    • Focus more on in-person value, less on deep content
    • Do lecture for an hour
      • Do 15 minutes lab
  • Setup your labs so that developers get the “ah-ha” moment
  • Community events
• Bringing engineers/experts to places that don’t usually see them
•  Anti-hackathon
  • Tell about the hack upfront and help with the last “mile” of the project

Future Directions for Developer Relations and Developer Technologies Panel
Michael Aglietti, ThingWorx – VP of Developer Relations
Mithun Dhar, HERE – General Manager Developer Relations (Evangelism, Marketing, Engineering, and Product Management)
JJ Kass, Dropbox – Head of Developer Programs
Lothar Schubert, GE Digital – Director, Developer Relations

• How do you measure KPIs today?
  • Lothar
    • Active users
    • NPS
    • The key is to make progress
  • Mithun
    • Good KPI – time to first “Hello World”
    • How easy to get started
    • How good is the documentation – old but time tested!
    • Revenue
• What is a developer today?
  • JJ
    • Citizen developers, hobby developers, internal developers, external developers
    • A person a trying to solve a problem with Dropbox
    • We are not just targeting a software developer
  • Mithun
    • Many years ago the dev. was well defined
    • Students, hobby, enterprise dev.
    • A developer is who is successful on your platform
• How do you think Dev. Relations will change?
  • JJ
    • Old way
      • Get more API calls
      • Do more events
    • New:
      • Enable developers to build innovative solutions with Dropbox
      • Hired a Data Science to look at trends
      • Meeting
        • Sales – Product – Dev. Relations == new feedback loop
  • Lothar
    • Establish Developer Relations as an accepted practice in an organization
    • Best practices
    • How to run Developer Relations, Developer Programs
    • Marketing will learn a lot from Developer Relations
  • Michael
    • Developer Relations —> new voice
  • Mithun
    • As more organizations are becoming platform companies —> Developer Relations role is becoming more ubiquitous
    • More organizations will start investing Developer Relations
    • Hackathon fatigue

IBM and The Developer Economy
Jonas Jacobi, IBM – Head of Developer Advocacy, Worldwide

• IBM has long history with developers
• Long history of open source
• 70k developers that might work on open source
• IBM transitions
  • Hardware —> services —> software sales —> software as a service
• Enterprise sales (old way)
  • Top down
    • Selling to senior executives
    • Most large enterprise companies sold this way
• Change needed to work with developers
  • Not easy to change how 400K people think
• Very difficult to be a CTO of a company to know everything and have a clear understanding what is needed
  • The decision has been pushed down to developers
• How do you convince senior executives?
  • Client case studies
  • External and internal research
  • The New Kingmakers book
• Developer Relations should genuinely care about developers and their success
  • We are building trust and respect with developers
  • Not a short term commitment
• How do you measure success? KPIs?
  • No KPIs!
  • Build trust, relationships, developers love our projects
  • Put a KPI on a mission – then everyone will gravitate towards that KPI
• Active Developers
  • Developers active for more than 30 days
• What can I do to make any give developer a hero? Not sell to them.
• IBM Developers Advocates
  • Developers
  • 50% spend writing code
  • Working hand in hand with developers, communities and clients
• Engagement strategy
  • Code
  • Community
  • Culture
  • https://developer.ibm.com/code
• Federation model
  • Get other Business Units to participate in Developer Advocacy
  • Can be 1 day a year or 1 weekend a year

Starting a Developer Program Begins with Data
Mike Guerette, Red Hat – Global Developer Program Manager

Two books recommendations:

• The New Kingmakers, by Stephen O’Grady
  • I read this book and it’s great.
  • This is a great book for anyone (not just Dev. Relations people) who wants to understand the the new world where developer are the influencers
• The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

Building Sticky Relationships with Developer Experiences
Lothar Schubert, GE Digital – Director, Developer Relations / Product Marketing

• Why developer marketing
  • Not yet an accepted practice in this space
  • Need to explain what is Developer Relations
• Developer deal influence – excellent slide!
  
• A happy developer will share his/her experience with other developers!
  • Make sure it’s a positive ❤️ experience!
• More developers than ever
  • Full stack
  • Data science
  • Citizen developers

Developer Relations “Fireside” Chat
Guy Kawasaki, Canva – Chief Evangelist

• As an advocate you are probably an evangelist and if you are an evangelist you are advocating
• For product to be successful, a company can’t do it by itself, it shouldn’t, not optimal
• Evangelism is a sub-set of sales
• Evangelism
  • Making other people successful
  • You can sell a product – good or bad
  • You can only evangelize good products
    • Positive, clear conscious
  • Evangelism is about helping other people
  • Developer relations is easy for awesome products
    • Developer Relations is hard for crap
  • It’s about making other people successful using your products/services

Digging Deeper: Understanding Developer Motivations
Michelle Little, Evans Data Corp – Analyst

I think this is a great slide showing motivation and type of events different developers prefer:

• Beginners and younger developers prefer in-person events
• More senior and enterprise developers online events such as webinars