Measuring developer evangelism: Rey Bango

Rey Bango: Name is Ray Vango, and I have been in developer relations in some form for the last ten years. So I hope that I can bring some insight. I think I have a pretty good amount of experience in DevRel working for a variety of different efforts. I cut my teeth in DevRel on the jQuery project. Headed to DevRel.

And I worked at Mozilla as well. And now I work for Microsoft and oh sorry, wrong slide, sorry. I work for Microsoft. And we are a very different Microsoft now. It's interesting.

All right. We are pretty cool again. I think so. At least a lot of people have told us we're pretty cool. We're building some really cool hardware.

All right. Yes, that is the obligatory product placement. I have to make sure that I make Microsoft happy. It was interesting. I caught I showed up today and somebody said that my name was thrown out in vain.

And yes, I was the Internet Explorer evangelist. Alright? Contrary to popular belief, Internet Explorer did not eat glue. In fact, it had some really great features. Can Chrome do that?

Yeah. I don't I don't think so. All right. All right. Yeah.

So that's and that's standards based by the way. So, no. We we do have a very very cool browser now called Microsoft Edge. It's making life easier. But enough of that.

Now, when they told me that my name was used in vain, they told me that my dear friend Phil was the one who said it. I found out later on it wasn't Phil and I had already updated my slides to to definitely get back at Phil for that. I went on his Facebook page and pulled up some very, very wonderful images. And I'm sitting here saying, here's a man going and commenting about my browser, but there he is wearing that wonderful helmet and having this interaction with that very large dog. But then I started looking deeper at Phil, I'm like, you know, he is kinda dreamy.

He is rather dreamy. I I I mean, look at those eyes. I mean, I can I can see why he's so effective in DevRel? When he stares at you, I get Ryan Gosling tingles. Anyways, so Phil, I'm sorry but you told me I could do it.

Alright, so anyways. So back to the topic at hand. How do you scale your efforts and measure success? And I know that it's been on the topic on the minds of a lot of people in developer relations because it is an incredibly hard thing to do, scaling efforts and measuring your success. And so in my daily DevRel life I do most of the things that I think everybody who's in DevRel does.

I speak with developers. I engage with product teams. I write articles, blog posts, I code. Whatever you think a typical DevRel person does, I probably do that in some fashion. And that's just the life of a normal developer relations person.

Now what's the hardest part about my role? There's two things that I found to be incredibly challenging. Number one is leadership buy in. Now I'm going to kind of ask for a show of hands, how many of you struggled with that, having leadership buy in? And I'm going say that's probably about 30% of the folks here that have had that struggle.

That's actually a big challenge. And why? Because if you look at leadership, what do they want? They want hard numbers and metrics. Right?

They want to know that you're going to provide some level of immediate results because ultimately they want to impact sales. What they want is this, all right? The three words we all dread, Return on investment. Okay? They want you to show them the money and it's true.

And developer relations is really hard to measure. It's subjective. It's time intensive. And ultimately it's a cost center. If you really think about it no matter how much you think you bring value to the company, they have to pay you.

You're going to go out to events. You're going to travel. You're going to eat whatever it is. You're going to take out people. You're a cost center.

So if you can't measure what your results are, whether it's pulling out some number that shows that hey, you had a great crowd at your talk or something like that, it's gonna be very difficult for you to show value. This is how I kind of view DevRel. I kind of see it as like this. You get all set up and whack, management comes over and smacks you around. Alright.

They just take the feet under and I've gone through this. I've gone where managers and you know, this is kinda funny. I'm sorry. I know it's kinda morbid because you see this poor child, but it is kinda funny when whack. Okay.

And then whack. Alright. So it's a double whammy. You do get smacked around because you do have different stakeholders that have a vested interest in you supporting them in some fashion. And so whether it's your C levels, whether it's your marketing organization, your sales organization, a lot of different people want your attention.

And when you don't give them that attention or you don't drive in the way they expect, yeah, this can happen to you. It's kind of fun. The other second thing is scaling efforts. If you really think about it, most developer relations teams are rather small. Even at Microsoft, my team is only three people.

Even though we have a very large developer relations group overall, my team is only three people. So scaling efforts is very challenging. How many of you have three or less people on your developer relations team? The majority I think are in that situation. So I can imagine that you're probably using most of the typical tools.

Twitter, YouTube, blog comments, third party sites, writing articles, Slack, of course the new Microsoft teams. Yeah. Oh, come on guys. Help me out here. Give me a rousing cheer here so it's on video.

I want my manager to see it. There we go. All right. Thank you. Microsoft Teams and of course Stack Overflow.

So these are the typical tools that I think most people will use to try to scale up the message and they can be effective. It's not that they're bad. But if you think about all these different services that you might have to use to get the word out, you can see the amount of effort and work that has to go in to get that message spread out across the board. Now how do you measure success? This is the one that is most interesting to me.

Know as a manager now I need to show that my team is providing value. I need to show them that my team has something tangible to bring up to the leadership team so they can feel like the amount of investment they're making in us is worthwhile. And also it tells me when we're interacting with the community in the best and most appropriate way. It's really, really important to me because ultimately what I want to do is I just want to lounge around all day in my new tele bath. Come on, tell me you don't do that.

Really? Yeah. I do that all the time. Look at that. There's my thing.

Is really, really creepy. Yeah. Come on, I know that's you. All right? But you know the traditional methods of counting Oops, sorry.

Measuring success has been things like collecting business cards or butts in seats. How many people do I have here? Or giveaways or things like that. And honestly in my experience that hasn't really worked out. If you collect business cards, so what?

You're getting people who are coming to your booth because they want you to give them a free t shirt. If you have I have Let's say I had 300 people in here, 400, 500. So what? Does that mean that my message has landed? How would I measure that?

How can I know that of the 500 people here, how would I be able to measure whether that landed or not? I haven't found an effective way to do that short of having a sales funnel and a key registration that allows people to register under some unique ID. And as having a small team and trying to work with a web developer community that's in the millions of developers and want to get my message out, I really need to follow I need to find a way to scale out that message. I need a way to capitalize on the fact that my team has rather a rather big megaphone. 88,000 followers is a pretty decent number.

We do have a decent megaphone. But we've acquired that megaphone over a very long career working with a lot of different developers, building strong relationships, building a lot of credibility and building a lot of trust and doing that with the one group that I feel is our secret sauce. And I'm going to share that secret sauce with you. I know you guys are not going to tweet about it. You're not going to share it, all right?

Because I don't want to get fired. No, I won't get fired. This is what I've found to be the single most effective way at least for my team to be successful. Influencer relationships. What I mean by that is identifying who the top people are within the group that you're trying to target and working with them and having them build or building a relationship based on credibility and trust so that you can have real conversations with them.

Conversations about anything. Doesn't have to be about your product. But if they trust you, if they know that you're not going to lead them down the wrong path, do you will you do you think they'll listen to you? If you trusted me and I'm your friend, are you going to take my, my, my word at face value? Probably because I built that credibility with you.

And that's the thing. With influencers what we've done is we've identified several influencers who we know are impactful within the web development space. These are people that we've developed relationships over our career and we work with them on a day in and day out basis. Because as a team of three people it's incredibly hard to scale out any message when you have millions of developers. But if you're able to identify sixty, seventy people who are equally influential in the industry and they believe in what you're saying and they trust that you will tell them the right exact thing, they will help you out.

They will become a much bigger megaphone for you. And the results have been astounding. So let me give you an example. I did a briefing with three developers at JSConf when we announced Chakrakora Node. When we briefed those three developers, we had a reach of 500,000 developers.

Think about that. Three people managed to reach 500,000 developers. We invited five influencers to Microsoft Build and when we were at Build, we managed and this number is a bit I should have updated that number. We managed to have a developer reach of 3,000,000 developers. Think about that.

Three people working with five influencers had a reach of 3,000,000 developers. And the reason is simple. If you have a good group of influencers who trust you, they're going to have your back. They're going to be willing to go out there and advocate for you. And that's there's no better person to advocate for you than somebody who doesn't work for you.

How do you measure that? I'm going to get to that. Patience. All right? You're in DevRel.

Have some patience, right? All right. So anyways, the great thing about this is again leveraging our credibility. The things that we talked about, the openness that we had with these influencers, the trust that they had is what allowed them to feel that they could advocate for us. If I say something, you might listen.

Maybe you might listen to it because you know me, you trust me or whatever. That's great. But those who don't know me might blow me off. They'll say this guy is a Microsoft shill. Why would I ever listen to him?

But if an influencer that they know goes out and says something, that's impactful. So we've decided to work with them. Thankfully I got trained on this through two three colleagues of mine at Microsoft, Jeff Sandquist, Nishant Kothari, and Joshua Allen who kind of showed me the way of this and showed me that if you do have really good, trustworthy relationships and you do the right thing, people will advocate for you because they will see that you're not that big monolithic corporation, that you are just the person trying to do the right thing. And again, we've had amazing results. The way that we measure our outreach is both qualitatively and quantitatively.

I think we get too wrapped up solely in numbers. That's something that I urge you to change and set expectations with management. If your management is solely interested in numbers they're missing a tremendous opportunity to gauge whether you are successful or not. And if you're working with influencers you have to measure both. You have to capitalize on whether you're getting positive feedback on the internet as well as a number that identifies what your reach is.

We tend to use reach on quantitative and I'll talk about that a little bit more. So in terms of qualitative results here's a great example. All right? You asked me how did I measure that? There's this wonderful company called Analytica.

I met them about three years ago when I was working at Microsoft. I left Microsoft periodically. I came back and the first thing I said was I need to have access to Analytica. And the reason is because Analytica allows me to work with them to identify the influencers that are most important to me and identify opportunities that are valuable. This includes qualitative feedback like this and quantitative information.

It's incredibly powerful. It's an incredibly powerful tool. So I can see here that when I talk to Jen Simmons who is an incredibly influential person in CSS world, I can actually mark that down and say this interaction was successful and demonstrate that to leadership. But part of that has been because I've set actual expectations of leadership that I am measuring both qualitative and quantitatively. So here, here's Sarah Sudan.

When Sarah Soudain goes ahead and says something positive about Microsoft Surface, that's huge because this demonstrates that there is a growing interest in not only our software but our hardware line. I like that. This is measurable in my opinion. This demonstrates that the work that we're doing with these key influencers is having an impact. We forget too much about this and it's important that you don't forget about it.

In addition, when you're working with influencers, it's not only take. You have to go ahead and reinforce your relationship. You have to make sure that you give them kudos, that you support the things that are important to them. Kyle Simpson is one of the top JavaScript engineers in the world. He had a crowdfunding campaign for a new book.

I made sure that I was there. Why? Because he's always supported me in everything I do. I want to make sure that I use my megaphone to get the word out about something that he's doing. Aaron Gustafson, my teammate, is one of the top designers in the world.

He's one of the few people at He's the only person at Microsoft that's ever spoken at an event apart, one of the most exclusive events to speak at. So what did he do? When Jeffrey Zelman called him out, he made sure to go ahead and acknowledge that and made sure to follow-up with an email for Jeffrey Zelman. That's huge. That level of interaction is important.

He speaks to Jeffrey on a regular basis. He makes sure that Jeffrey knows that he is valued for his contributions not only right there but the contributions he's made to the web as a whole. This is why it's important to continue to work with influencers and solidify that relationship. And this is a great example. This is really recent.

I know it works when I put something out there about Node working on Windows 10 through Bash because we have Bash on Windows 10 now. And I made sure that Remy Sharp, one of the local influencers you guys have here in The UK, knew about the fact that Nodebon, his tool worked perfectly in Bash for Windows. So when I see this and it says Ray Bango, Windows, has Bash, runs Chrome, runs Note, trying to think what keeps me on my Mac. Do you think that was impactful? Okay.

That tells me that the work that I'm doing, the conversations I'm having are working. This is qualitative. This is important. This is the type of information that demonstrates to management your value as a storyteller. This is the type of information that you want to present to show that the conversations you're having, the fact that I'm out here talking with you, Andrea, the fact that we had a conversation today, you're gonna remember that, right?

I do. You are mean. That's it. I'm blanking out any information about your hiring process. That's it.

Alright?

Speaker 2: I wish you never get.

Rey Bango: No thanks. So mean. Tough crowd. Anyways, this is the type of stuff that's really important for you to keep track of. Are there numbers associated to it?

There might be some likes. I could care less about the likes. This is what matters to me. That somebody who's incredibly influential that easily has thousands of followers, responded to something positively and may consider switching over to Windows one day. That's important.

Now quantitatively, there's typical stuff that I use. I use Twitter analytics. Why? Because it gives me some semblance of an idea of how some of my tweets land. I want to know what my engagement rate is.

I think an engagement rate of 3.2% is pretty good. I'm fairly happy with that. I'd like it to be higher but I don't depend solely on that. That's just day to day. I might do something like that.

Again, the software that I use is Analytica. And this might sound like a rah rah sales pitch for Analytica but I can tell you right now that if I didn't find this software so incredibly valuable and if it didn't allow me to be successful in my job, I wouldn't have this slide up here. I want you to know about it because I think it's important for everybody who wants to go into DevRel to have the best possible tools. Whether you use Analytica or I was speaking to the Mobilize folks just yesterday, use the tools that are best. Best for you to measure and engage with developers or your particular user base.

This is a great example again of the Chalker Core announcement. This was a graph that I was able to present to leadership where it demonstrated that of the people that were briefed versus the non briefed influencers, notice the impact they had on the total number of outreach. This is where the numbers come in. I can now go to the leadership team and say we've reached in excess of 500,000 developers and when we briefed these three influencers, look at the impact that they had on the total number of these. That shows that our motion to work with influencers actually worked.

And here's Dave Goes Windows. This is a very important effort for us. We're obviously doing our best to help developers get to Windows 10. That's why we released Bash on Windows. We know that a lot of developers like Bash.

Dave Rupper came to us and said, I really want to try to transition to Windows. And I made it happen. I wanted to make sure that happened because he is an incredibly influential developer. And if he wants to go to Windows, I'm gonna do what I can. So we set him up with Surface.

And these were his interactions, his blog posts, his tweets. And we tracked it over a period of time. And over a period of time the net result has been over a million developers touched in some fashion. Tell me, does anybody else here want to have those numbers? If you work in DevRel, wouldn't you love to be able to have a reach like that?

But more importantly, wouldn't you love to have a tool that told you this is the impact of your work to tell you if you're being successful or not? And that's the benefit of this software. I now have insight into the efforts that we're doing. I can track it over a period of time and I can show my leadership that this motion, this work that we're doing to work with influencers and ensure that they can transition over Windows on a supported basis makes sense. Why?

Because now Dave has become one of our biggest advocates. He's writing blog posts to help other developers in the community transition over to Windows. That's a huge win. I love that. I'm very proud of that.

And I know it's worked when I see I get a DM from Tim Kadlec, one of the other influential developers I work with. And he says, whoever came up with the original Go's Windows idea on your end deserves a massive raise. Hearing plenty of folks discussing the most recent wave of people attempting to switch. Well, I can tell you that I got a promotion. So I'm pretty happy about that.

Thank you. Thank you Microsoft and thank you for Neil Hudson, my leader, for taking care of me. Really appreciate your support during that. I had to give my former manager kudos there. My new manager is equally awesome.

Davey. Yeah, Dave, you're awesome. All right. You'll watch that video and then I'll go, Okay. All right.

So the great thing is that, again, Analoga comes through. It gives me the feedback that I want. In this case Aaron's running a 10 ks apart. And here I can see the total number of impressions that he's had, tweets and blog posts. And it gives me insight into been, his reach but more importantly it gives me insight into what his six degrees of separation, what is his influencer network, who are the people that he's interacting with the most and who are the people that we should be ensuring we're having more conversations with.

So whether it's Matt Marquise or Sarah Soudain or Remy Sharp or Jeremy Keith, these are the people that he's interacting with and when he's interacting with these folks, these are the ones that are creating this massive megaphone. And that's what you want. You want to be able to scale that message. Not only are we getting the data, but we're also seeing where that massive megaphone is being built. That's pretty huge.

And I can also see something like Christian when his look at his network. Isn't that amazing? Think about the information that you have here. The ability to determine who are the people that are closest to his network and the ones that are really feeling The ones he's interacting with the most. That's amazing.

And I can tell the number of user influencer engagements he has every month. And we can see the ups and downs and the ebbs and flows of how those engagements work. So yes, am I sitting here cheerleading on Analytica? Absolutely. Because I think they've done a tremendous job of providing a tool that offers the insights that I need to successfully lead a developer relations team.

And those results are amazing. I can tell you that our leadership team is really, really impressed with Analytica and they've actually spread it out much farther than my team. So within our developer relations organization, Analytica is heavily used. Now part of that is also the fact that we have a tremendous amount of engagement. I wanted to bring up these just some talking points about the engagements we actually participate in.

And this was in fiscal year, last fiscal year fiscal year 'sixteen, the first half. In the first half of fiscal year 'sixteen we attended eighteen third party events and twelve first party events as speakers. That's huge. We were out there shaking hands and kissing babies. Alright?

We had 36 blog posts. Aaron published a new book. We had standout events like Brazil JS. We had JSConf and we are out there all the time speaking with developers. And I say that word, speaking with developers and I'll get on that.

Please remember that phrase. It's important. But we're out there talking with them all the time and ensuring we're listening to what they're saying. We are part of the community. We're not just sitting out in Microsoft and saying, Oh, we'll wait for them to come to us.

No. We're a very proactive team so we will go out there and engage. And engagement is so critical. And we do it in a way that's genuine. I challenge anybody in here to find something that would make me look like a shill because ultimately I'm not.

I love Microsoft. I love the tools we bring but I have acknowledged the shortcomings. Somebody mentioned Internet Explorer again earlier today. I can tell you that I was one of the first people to be up there bashing Internet Explorer and you saw my slides. I have zero problems with acknowledging the shortcomings of Microsoft or any company that I'm with because ultimately that leads to genuineness, leads to trust and credibility.

And that's what my team is all about. And that's why we've been so successful. We put ourselves out there. We have everyday conversations. We're just like every other person.

Know. I'm sure all of you have used Snapchat filters at some point. All right. We just put it out there and we try to be just like everybody else because that's all what, that's what we are. We're humans.

We work for a big monolithic company but we're human beings at the end of the day. And we have our own teamwork. We interact with each other. We feed off each other. You see something like that where I use masquerade and then Christian tries to one up me and we do this all the time.

Mean Christian's just crazy. So I think this was after one of his, I don't know, massive trips. He just came back and his hair is all wild. It's crazy. So anyways, and we do that all the time.

And we try to be careful on how we interact with the community because perception counts. You need to own your brand. You need to understand your community. You need to engage with developers in the way that's appropriate. You cannot be a shill.

You cannot be disingenuous. Developers are smart. They will read it. When you hear about the talk about marketing, it's market you can be a marketer. That's fine.

But you don't have to be a shill. You have to keep the genuineness about your communication and that's where people will learn to trust what you say. Now part of that is also getting social and we are very social. I think many of you have seen that I like to jibber jabber for a very long time. Some of you forget my name.

Andrea.

Speaker 2: Don't forget the movies that you commended.

Rey Bango: There you go. X machine, remember. All right. And you know, when you're, what I mean by getting social is getting out there in the community. If you're going to build influence, if you're gonna work with influential developers, you have to be part of the community.

You have to understand what it means to be there. You have to understand their pain. You have to Listen, I was using a MacBook for a very long time. I came back to Microsoft about two years ago and the first thing I said was give me a MacBook. Why?

Because how could I talk with web developers about their pain points if I was using Windows 10? Or back then it might have been Windows eight. How? And Microsoft said yes and they gave me a MacBook and I've lugged around a MacBook for almost two years and only until last week did I decide to switch back to Surface because I wanted to now understand what it would take for somebody on a Mac to switch to Windows 10. That's what it takes to be a developer evangelist, a developer advocate, somebody who wants to be part of the community and understand what it really means to be a software developer.

You have to be willing to get out of your comfort zone. You have to be willing to get into the trenches, get your fingers dirty, roll up your sleeves. Understand what they do and be a part of it. And engage. I mentioned it before.

You talk with people. I see entirely too many developer advocates talking to people. I don't want to talk to people. I want feedback. I want it to be a two way conversation.

And I use the word conversation. If you If I only come to you guys and say you need to use Edge and you need to use Windows, your immediate reaction will be, what? But if I sit down and understand what you're doing every single day and I discuss how Microsoft may be able to get into that conversation, that's a whole different scenario. You have to be willing to lend an ear, listen. And if you listen, that's when you'll be able to be You'll have much deeper relationships with those people.

Be a facilitator. Listen. This is the the most important part of our job. You can sit I could sit here all day and talk to Unblue and that's great. But this is what's important to me.

If I'm able to build bridges, if I'm able to pair people, if I'm able to help somebody solve a problem, this is what matters. This is what our whole job should be, helping people. We need to be the bridges. We are the bridges. We are advocates for the community first.

We are not advocates for our company. We are the conduits and the bridges that allow us to be advocates for the community and bring that feedback so that our company can build software or tools or products that solve your problems. If we're not having this conduit, this bridge and we're not facilitating conversation and solving problems, there's no way any company could ever ever produce the right products. So remember you are a facilitator and you need to do that. And demonstrate leadership.

Get out there. Talk about the things that are value whether it's your latest code. Do a speaking engagement. I loved the fact that I saw so many people putting themselves out today. And this is hard.

Doing this talk is hard. I've done this for ten years. I've given talks for twenty eight and it never feels easier. My heart starts racing right before. I get super nervous.

I have to take off all these different things that I feel like all weirded out. It's a whole process and it's really difficult. But I appreciate the fact that you guys do it because if you don't do it, how will other people learn? We need to be the thought leaders. We need to put ourselves out there.

All of us in here that came to learn about DevRel. As you progress in your career, you need to be out there. Because when you become a thought leader, you will get noticed. When you are putting yourself out there you will be noticed. The influential developers will notice you.

They will want to talk to you because they know that you have the confidence inside of you to help lead a community, to be that facilitator, the person that engages. And once you do that then you can build your own influencer network. You'll build that network that will make you successful. That network that will allow you to build and scale out your efforts to have that big megaphone. And your bosses will get that in return on investment.

Okay? These are some resources that should help you out. My colleague Christian Haumann wrote developer evangelism dot com. Great online site that covers everything you can imagine about developer relations, developer evangelism. This book by Frederick Harper, Success in Programming, is amazing.

I love it not because I have a quote in there but actually it's a really good book. I actually asked my daughter who's going into marketing to read that book because I think it's important to understand how to manage your own personal brand. And of course there's Analytica. And by the way there are two representatives from Analytica here. Alistair, Joe, do you mind standing up real quick?

You're here? There they are. So if you guys have questions feel free to talk to them please. They'll be here. And of course on Twitter follow me and my two teammates Christian and Aaron so you can know what we're up to and all that fun stuff.

And with that I thank you very much for your time guys.