The duty of authenticity

Jessica Rose: So today, I'm going to be talking to you about the duty of authenticity, which sounds terrifyingly like I'm going to be telling you what you should do and what you must do. And I thought, no, authoritarianism is all the rage because Webster told me so this year. But I'm more interested in having a sort of a loose conversation. Instead of saying, you must do this and I think this is important for you to do this, I really wanted to take you on a tour of things that have been keeping me awake at night. And this is non political things that have been keeping me awake at night.

I know that developer relations is a little bit of a tiny community within the larger industry, so a lot of us know each other. For those of you who don't, hello. I'm Jessica Rose. I'm the Head of Developer Relations at Crate. And I often start talks in The UK by gently apologizing for being a little bit too happy and a little too chipper.

But all of you are also outreach professionals, and we're talking about authenticity and honesty today. So almost all of that's a lie. I'm scared all the time. I have no idea what I'm doing. Everything is pretty much terrible, but, you know But I'm going to be talking to you today about a specific type of authenticity.

This is a big fluffy word. I say, Hey, authenticity. What's true? What's honest? And that's great conceptually, but for folks working in outreach, I'm really, really interested in looking at a specific point.

I'm interested in how we can take the interactions we have and make sure that they're focused on users, on potential users, and the wider potential community. I'm really interested in boiling this down to: Do the interactions we have feel real? Do the interactions we have feel real to the people we're talking to, both on and offline? Do they feel real and valuable to us? And are they actually doing something?

Potentially, and very conveniently, you might be thinking, Jess, that's lovely. But that's not really what my boss cares about. My boss isn't asking me, How can we be more real? My boss is asking me, Does it scale? And after your boss asks you, Does it scale?

Clearly the question is, How do we measure it? And these are incredibly valuable questions. You need to be able to take your outreach efforts and really bring them to the largest number of people as effectively as possible. And you really need to be sure that you're measuring what you're doing. Authenticity is this warm, fluffy ball of weirdness which is difficult to measure.

I often say that humans are fantastic. I love humans, but we are terrible at scale. And you can't really deliver meaningful authenticity in a one to many environment. There's a reason that people who can get on stage and talk to an audience of thousands as though they're talking directly to you, there's a reason they get to run things. I think in a one to many environment where you're trying to scale, you're really left compromising.

What is my message that's going to reach most people? But also, what's the message that's going to meet most people in a real and valuable way? Balancing the need to scale with the need to be an actual human. And this gets even worse because we care about scaling and we care about measurements. It is almost impossible to measure whether or not you're having real human interactions.

Realistically, you're only going to get feedback on whether or not something feels real if things go terribly wrong. Nobody is ever going give you feedback that's like, Hey, I really enjoyed that workshop, but you felt really fake. That's never Like, I've gotten a lot of bad feedback in my day, almost all of it well deserved, and nobody has ever said, Oh, that felt weird and fake, even though we often deliver things that feel weird and fake. But my argument is that authenticity absolutely does matter, and I'm going to cling to this desperately because I think authenticity matters because we're here. If we didn't care about authentic human interactions, if we didn't care about bringing human interactions into technology and to our users and connecting marketing to product in the field, I don't think we'd work our jobs.

I think this auditorium would be empty. I think there'd be a lot more email marketing, which God knows we'd all love. And that we wouldn't spend all this money having these conferences, sending people to sponsor things like this, sending people to talk to developers about what they're building. I hope that our jobs existing is proof that authentic human interactions really matter. So we're going to do some very unscientific polling.

You can either raise your hands or look appropriately sheepish. Who here has been to more than 15 events this year? Who here has forgotten the name of somebody really important who you should care about and you do care about, but actually, this job turns us all into jerks? Who has an unanswered email which is incredibly important? Who feels really bad about most of these things?

No. Alright, I feel like a good person all of a sudden. For those of you watching this later on, hello. Just to let you know, people in the video appropriately embarrassedly went, ugh, for most of these questions except for the front row who's like, I don't feel bad now. That was great.

Yeah, whatevs. No heckling. And for all of my talks, I really like to talk about fluffy human things because yeah, humans and technology. But I also like to look at ways we can try and fix things. Unfortunately, because this is one of the things that keeps me awake at night, instead of giving you tried and tested ways to really fix these things and remember everybody's names and answer all your emails, Instead, I'm going to give you my New Year's resolutions, ways that I hope I can improve the way I interact with people, and hopefully ways that we as an industry can have more real interactions.

Unfortunately, some of these run directly counter to business needs. So how can we improve things? How can we make things more real and more meaningful? This is a weird thing for someone to say on a stage, but listen more. If you're having twenty, thirty, 50 conversations a day, I hope it's not just me, but midway through the day, it turns very into a, Uh-huh, Yeah.

Yeah. Cool. Good for you. That's great. But really continually coming back to the idea that our job is to listen and our job is to document the concerns people are bringing us, both existing users, potential users, members of our community, and people who could be members of our community.

Our whole job is to go out to where people are in meatspace or online and talk to them about what they're doing and what they need and what they care about. If we're not doing this in a real way, we're probably doing a pretty bad job. And this one, hopefully, my boss doesn't see this. I'd really like to do a little bit less. This is the opposite of scale, but how wonderful would it be to be able to spend a little bit more time at each of the events you go to, at each of the interactions?

Spend time at user groups talking to people before and afterwards about what they're doing. Getting to a conference the day before, really spending time going out, not just to the people who come to you or the people who come into your spaces online, but doing meaningful research. Do less things to do a bit better of a job. Our jobs are pretty great, but they're also a little bit stressful. Essentially, everybody said, Yeah, yeah, more than 15 events this year.

That gets hard. Doing a little bit less to take some time for you and to take some time to more meaningfully advocate for the people you're aiming to serve, that would be amazing. I also want to slow down. I would love for all of us to just slow down a little bit. I would love to not look at Slack while on the road.

I would love to not answer emails on my phone I'd during love if we could spend a little bit more time focusing on things we're doing as we're doing them. Giving people the chance to come to us meaningfully. Oh, sorry, I see some of you closing your laptops. I didn't mean to shame you. Taking time to meaningfully interact in the spaces we're in.

This is so fluffy, isn't it? These words mean essentially nothing next to each other. It's like, yeah, do the things that really matter, do what's important to you, but no, genuinely, in the most obnoxiously earnest way. Everybody's company has a value statement, right? We care about these things for these reasons, so we do X.

I would love if we could all sit down and write out the things we care about. Developer relations has often been talked about as the gig economy, that you're going be in a job for a couple of years, you'll go on and do something else, you'll go on and do something different. And I think based on my conversations with my peers, that happens to a lot of people. Burnout's high, we move around a lot. How wonderful would it be to have a little written paragraph, maybe a bio, of the things that you want to carry with you project to project, job to job, campaign to campaign?

What are the things that you want to continually be spotlighting and working on? And I want us to be compromising in a knowing and aware fashion. Compromise happens. It would be great to stand up here and say, Oh, you know what? We're marketing, but we're the good guys, we're the good people.

We're not always as good as we could be, and it's not always going to happen. Being aware of when and how you compromise, and being aware of when and how you aim to bring authenticity to people. When I say, go out there and be real, be authentic, I don't mean to be completely honest. People don't need to know that you're really tired and your inbox is full and actually this is boring, could you leave now? That's not helpful.

Compromise in a way that's real. You still have to represent your company, you still have to represent your projects, and you still have to represent your industry, but you can do it in a way that's a little bit more honest. Say, Hey, we're working on this right now, and you don't have to please never, never directly slate your employer's projects. That's probably a terrible idea. Say, Hey, we're working on this right now.

We're going in this direction. I think some things around this. What do you all think about it? So if there's ever a point where you're having to compromise and you feel uncomfortable about it, check-in with that. Say, Why are we doing this to your team?

Why am I doing this to yourself? And if you're in a position where you're still compromising and don't really like it, ask the people you're serving. Hey, what do you think about this thing? Open ended questions let people draw their own conclusions in a way that I am so in love with. And this is really interesting.

I would love if we were continually reframing our jobs as service focused. And this is something I kind of wish for the whole world. If everybody was focusing on who you're serving, how would our interactions be different? So standing up here, I'm serving the needs of the conference who's been so happy to have me here. Hopefully, my employer will be like, Oh, that Jess is okay.

Maybe I want to go work with her. And ideally, of my audience and potential audience, keeping in mind who's out there, who you're speaking to, and why you're speaking to them is so important. Looking to serve our communities is something that I hear all of us talking about every single day, which is I see a couple of people in the audience going, No, I don't talk about that. Which makes me feel optimistic that things could be okay. I'd love for us continually to be looking at serving our users, serving our communities, and really serving not tech because that's a bit weird, but collectively working towards a version of the industry we're a lot happier with and a lot more comfortable with.

I think the thing that I'm most interested in personally is keeping things in perspective. Developer relations is stressful. Who here is a little bit tired right now? For those of you watching at home, everybody either raised their hands or looked appropriately. Don't ask.

I was already asleep. Except for someone in the front row who's asleep. The travel is hard and the jobs are difficult and public speaking is stressful and managing online communities is just an exciting, weird thing to do. But I'm going say, as a whole, our jobs are fantastic. Clearly, your own mileage may vary.

But last week, was talking to someone and they were saying, Oh, where are you going next? And I said, Oh, no, it's just Berlin. I said, Just Berlin, like I was taking the train to Slough. How great is my job? We get paid to write about the things we care about, we get paid to talk to brilliant people about what they're building, and we get to spend all of our time thinking about technology and humans.

That's great. Who here has worked jobs outside of technology? What? Who here has worked real miserable jobs outside of technology? This is better, right?

And it becomes practical as well. Every time we complain, I say, Oh, I'm really tired, everything is terrible, I don't know what I'm doing. I think framing things in perspective makes things a little bit easier. Looking at the last DevRel survey, the first one that came out, 76% of people surveyed make more than £60,000 a year. Coming from a non tech background, this is great!

This is double the national average. We get paid what I'm still going to class absolutely silly money, and again, I really hope my employer isn't watching this, to travel around the world and talk to people and chat online. We get paid amazing money to do exactly what I always wanted to do when I was 13. This job, and maybe not everybody's job right now, is absolutely fantastic. By continually coming back to that and being like, Oh, I'm a little bit tired.

Things are great. I get to do this, and I can pay all my bills. Yeah. By keeping this in perspective as we go out into the world and chat to our users and to people who might want to get into tech, hopefully we can continue to be as optimistic as we'd like to be and bring users the better version of ourselves that's as real as our employers will let us get by with. Thank you very much.