Value driven DevRel

Tim Messerschmidt: Hi, everybody. I'm not sure where you are joining us from right now, if it's, you know, your morning, your afternoon, or maybe even or your evening already. But, certainly, I'm happy and very grateful that all of us get to be together at this event to share, you know, that very much necessary exchange on best practices, how to do DevRel, how to serve our users best, making sure that we help our company succeed in what they try to do. And, really, I think DevRelCon has always been, you know, such a pleasure to attend in person. Hopefully, we do that very soon again.

Until then, I'm very grateful for having the chance to actually share my perspective on what I call value driven DevRel. I was already briefly introduced. So I'm Tim, and I have the pleasure of leading Google's DevRel team across the European, Israeli, and Russian kind of communities and programs and markets. And, honestly, looking back at the past eleven or so years that I spent in DevRel, working across, you know, different teams, different companies, doing stuff like working on sample codes, organizing events, structuring programs, running large scale social impact initiatives. I always really enjoyed empowering people, you know, and making sure that we can help people succeed with our technologies.

Whenever I look back, though, at, you know, the stuff that I've done and that the teams that I've worked on have done, I usually take most pride in the impact that we had, not just, you know, on our API adoption, on daily active users, number of views on certain blog posts that, you know, our team has published, but really the impact that we had on our users themselves, be it startups, be it individuals, it companies that are working with us and helping us as companies succeed as well. So today, I want to talk to you about a concept that I call value driven DevRel, and it helps managing both sideways. So keeping your peers, the collaborating teams that you have in your own company, no matter if it's, you know, a smaller sized company or a company as big of these size as Google, but also actually very effectively helps you, manage upwards as well. So very excited to kind of have the next twenty minutes or so with you and really looking forward to the QA afterwards as well. Alright.

So, usually, end of year, early early in the next year, all of us sit down, and we're asking ourselves, what is the motivation for doing our jobs? Why are we doing what we're doing? How do I explain what I do to others? How do I measure if I'm successful? In fact, that measurement question is so much top of head for most of us that even at conferences like DevRelCon, there is, like, a dedicated session.

There are panels. There are lots of thoughts and lots of leaders in this industry on helping people figure out what it really means to do DevRel and what our contribution to the companies that we support really looks like. And, usually, you know, that natural reflex for folks like me and a bunch of others that I have talked to is sitting down and really, you know, trying to share what we do with as many people as possible. And Tessa literally just now spoke about an advisory board. I spoke about having these individual meetings with other teams to keep them informed.

And the way that I usually approach that is really trying to create a strategy plan. And a strategy plan really starts for me with coming up with a mission statement. Right? Like, a very bold statement, hopefully something that is a bit of a north star that helps me define where me and my team want to go and what we want to achieve and why we're doing this in the first place. So when we look at things like a mission statement, you can see this is the one that my team is currently using in Europe for the year 2021.

We slightly altered it for next year, but, really, what we try to say is, you know, that we have a plan, that we have a direction, and we try to share it with all the others so they can tag along. And one thing that you will notice here is that we're actually quite specific when we try to answer these different questions. We try to be very specific, by saying, who's the audience? Who are we catering to? What are we in fact doing?

And how are we doing this? Because quite honestly, you know, DevRel has so many different flavors and so many different ways of being effective with what we do. There are so many different kinds of DevRel. You know? Sometimes they're very promotion focused, sometimes very community management focused.

There are so many different other flavors there depending on which organization you're part of that, clearly, you know, it's important to tell exactly that story. Who are you? Who is your team? And how do you contribute to your company's success? So we try to do that, and we try to capture that in our mission statement.

Right? And if we go back to those original questions, you know, who are we as a team? Who do we serve? How do we measure our success? What is it that we actually try to achieve?

It's okay if you cannot always answer every single question of these. That's why conferences like these are actually there so that we start hearing from other people that are in this field, hearing from other teams what worked for them and what didn't. And, hopefully, I can kind of take you on a quick ride on, you know, how we approach this challenge. Because, clearly, you know, we're not quite done yet. Creating a mission statement, creating a strategy plan, submitting that into some kind of process, asking for some budget to make it happen, that's an important and very key part of this process, but we're not there yet.

So I want to run you through three things that, in my eyes, help you really get closer to what I call value driven developer relations. Alright. So the three things, the three aspects that I want to run you through is what I call belongingness. Meaning, you know, how much belonging do we create in our community, in our users, in the audiences that we're catering to, and how does that relate to our company's success? I want to speak about social impact very specifically because it turns out that it is one of those very constant themes that a lot of us care about, the positive contribution the technology has on our users, how our products can enable, and hopefully also even sometimes tackle very difficult situations.

And then finally, I want to go and, you know, try to take a step at moving from the very abstract metrics that we oftentimes discuss to make sure that other teams understand what we're doing. And I want to move from abstract metrics towards what I consider more tangible, more concrete metrics that hopefully also help your team connect with them and help your peers connect with them a little more. So let's start with belongingness. So at Google, we are very community focused in the way that we work in DevRel, the way that we try to address our audience, the way that we actually even internally in Divinity company run. And if we try to take a step at defining what a community really is, it is usually a group of enthusiasts that have a common interest, a shared interest in something.

And, usually, they also care about each other enough that they actively, hopefully, actively participate within this community. Alright. So that sounds good enough. Right? So we have an understanding that community, which could be our users, which could be our peers, which could be the people that we come and go to work with, that those folks are a community.

Now if we look at community, usually, are different ways to measure, you know, the engagement with them and make sure that we can actually ensure that they get some value. And one of them, that I really like is defined by Holly Firestone, and, it's called the SNAP model. So if we look at community and the people within our community, it's important to, you know, take care of a few pillars that really make a community great and make it work. It's about recognizing people for their contributions, is the status, recognizing if people are actively contributing or rather passively consuming within our community. The next one is networking.

Do I enable connections between these different individuals? If I want to make them care about each other, I need to make sure that there's a way for them to reach out to each other, that they recognize that, you know, these people want to collaborate, want to engage with each other. Access, which means, you know, I want to enable a conversation between our company and the community. Do I ask them for feedback? Do I involve them in early access programs and so on?

And finally, for those that are really actively, you know, supporting the community, helping out, and really going above and beyond, are there certain perks? Do I give them, you know, API access? Do I invite them to certain exclusive events? Do I send them swag? Whatever it might be.

But, usually, those are the pillars of community. Now if we go back to community for a moment, though, I think one of the key concepts that I tried to get across today is a person is usually not just a member of a single community. So even if, for instance, you want to cater to somebody that is core of your own community, which could be, you know, something that you run as a program, or it could be language enthusiasts. It could be people that align around a certain framework. Usually, those people are also members of many, many other communities.

It could be that sometimes they are community members very consciously, and they associate themselves with, let's say, in my case, smart home enthusiasts, people that really love Google technology, and maybe people that are passionate about DevRel. And sometimes very passively, we're actually members of a community without even, you know, proactively knowing about this. But the key here and the thing that I want to get across is that we can usually create more belongingness if we don't just isolate a user into a single community. If we just, you know, focus on that one thing that you know, the one connection that we have with them, a member of my community, a user of my product, a peer that I work with, usually, there is not just that single connection. It's usually the sum of the connections that I have with them.

Sometimes the knowingly one, the one that we are very well aware of, sometimes those that may even just have to be discovered. But if we can find out what our users really care about, we can really start catering to them. We can start appealing to them in many, many other flavors. And that really helps to lead to some really impressive results. So let's take a step.

And, usually, you know, a lot of you probably have gone through exercises like public speaking trainings, storytelling exercises. So if we take that step and try to actually create that, you know, sense of belonging, we can actually take a very simple storytelling exercise where if you introduce yourself, for instance, in public speaking, a lot of folks will share, you know, what they are, who they are, who they work for, and why they are, for instance, in DevRel, why they do what they do. We can do the same when we look at our community members. We can find that sweet spot between the individual that we're working with, which could be, again, our peer or the user or somebody on our team, and the thing that we want to achieve, the ultimate effect, which could be more product adoption, which could be leading people from product a to b. And if we have identified that sweet spot, let's really, really try to invest into that sweet spot, and let's make that as tangible as possible.

Alright. So one way that we found that actually works really well is to look at social impact, social contributions that go beyond just product adoption. Now last year has been tough for all of us, and it has been a massive shift for all of us getting used to, you know, doing DevO in a very different way, adjusting our lifestyles. And the pandemic has been, you know, crazily tough on people all across the globe. Google, you know, who I work with, they've recognized that a lot of our products could help in many, many different ways to help kind of tackle the hardship of the pandemic and help users, you know, maybe have a bit of better quality of life, succeed a bit more in what they want to do, have an easier time.

And in Europe, we defined what I call the primary goal, lead with helpfulness. So what we try to do all across Google Europe, no matter if you're part of the marketing team, of the sales teams, of DevRel, or whoever else team, was really to kind of anchor ourselves around this one guiding goal, this guiding principle, leading with helpfulness. And I want to talk about a very specific initiative that my team has been supporting and, you know, that really gave us a lot of meaning and connection. Connection. So you may have heard about this hackathon that ran last year called v versus virus or v versus virus.

And it's been an event that attracted more than 30,000 people. It's been a big online hackathon where people really try to come up with technological ways to solve the hardship of the pandemic. They realized that a lot of these projects had so much success that, you know, just a weekend working on them wouldn't be enough to get them into fruition. And it almost became something like a startup accelerator, like a bootstrap, you know, incubator to get these projects from a to b to make them happen and really make you know, help them to become realization. So our team, we looked at, you know, different ways to help them.

We picked specific programs and projects and really doubled down on our support. So instead of just giving them access to our products, we almost, you know, were virtual team members of these projects and helped them, you know, get to where they wanted to be. We used as many of our social media channels, event sponsorships, newsletters, local Googler sites to really amplify what this event did so that, you know, there was a lot of awareness, within the company on making sure everybody knew what our team was up to, but also what the developer community really, really cares about right now. And that, in that case, was really tackling the hardship of corona. And then finally, we actually sourced opportunities to get people that are not necessarily involved in the DevRel field, you know, really hands down with these projects to give them an opportunity to, you know, have a bit of a different flavor of their day to day and really feel like they're helping.

That was donating money to these projects to make sure that they can actually run and happen, but also actually donating themselves almost like a volunteer as a virtual team member of these projects. Why I'm telling you that is because we've been very successful creating a lot of very impressive results. 150 projects or so were supported, and we were almost part of every single one of them. They used our cloud. They used our analytics.

They built mobile applications and so on. We had dedicated Googlers that spent, you know, literally 100 percent of their time for a month on these projects. We had workshops that attracted really broad audiences. We worked with the marketing team to create case studies to really make sure that we can support these different teams, you know, get as much attention and awareness as possible. And internally, that really helped to evangelize, to talk about what our team does for Google to connect with this very important goal of leading with helpfulness.

So let's take the you know, take a look at the actual results because metrics are great, But something that is even better is the feedback that we have received. We got feedback from teams such as Facts of Friends that said, you know, that we really helped them make things happen, that we accelerated their process, that we really supported them, and, you know, that it was very much appreciated. This is something that is actually far more meaningful to me than a 4.9 quality score NPS, you know, user survey, something like that. It's very tangible. Also, if we look at, you know, the impact that we had on Googlers, and this is somebody who hasn't been in that role, is that they felt like they really had an impact, that they really felt like they've supported a use you know, a a great cause.

And that is something that helps us keep the conversation open with collaborators, with people all across the company, because, really, this is what people care about. Alright. So I promised we speak about tangible value, so let's do that. So we looked at social impact as one of the many ways to, you know, really show how DevRel can have an influence on the company on, you know, what your company does and what your users care about. But how do we capture these going forward?

Usually, you know, the challenge that we have with abstract metrics number of views on the post and so on, is that, you know, they don't always really feel relevant to our peers, to the people in our community, to our users. Do they care how many people read a blog post, or do they care about the impact this blog post had on people? And that is a very different story to me. So, you know, it's always a bit of an act of balancing the qualitative aspects of the metrics and quantitative metrics. I think it's really important to capture both.

And, you know, the qualitative ones, they are really capturing the depth of our work, you know, how much time we invest and what the really you know, the impact of our work is. And quantitative metrics really help us capture the breadth of things. You see, many, many things that your dev rel team does to support your users, to support your company really reach their goals. Alright. So if we look at metrics, I think it's completely fine, and it's totally okay that, you know, a lot of these differ from job to job, from team to team, and that, you know, they're sometimes a bit generic.

I would almost say, you know, that these are metrics that help us pay the bills because they are very easy to track. But do you really connect to these metrics and, you know, many other metrics that you probably hear about at this event? Do you connect to them on an emotional level or not? So let's look at that. First of all, I think it's really important that we start measuring abstract metrics, like, you know, number of views that we try to push for a blog post, number of people that we want to cater to to at an event.

Let's actually set targets. And by becoming a bit more concrete, you know, at least the teams that we work with know how much they can rely on us, how much they can trust our teams to enable what they want to do. And that is the first step. But when we really look at, you know, metrics that people care about, it's not just that they can rely on us hitting our goals, but really capturing the essence of the impact of our products on our audiences. So, really, you know, normally, when we look at metrics, if we talk about the success of our teams, usually, what sticks is not necessarily the number of million users that are a part of your community.

It is usually that story of one person that got promoted because they've been going through certifications in your technology. It is about the start up that managed to raise additional funding because, you know, you and your team, you help mentor them to be more successful. It's those little things that, you know, if we capture them right and if we tell them if we tell the success of them, if we promote them, that's what people care about. That's what sticks with people, and it makes them really, you know, connect with your team in many other ways than just metrics. Alright.

Really important. We clearly need to track these. I recommend to go with OKRs. If you're not familiar with them, they're a methodology that Andy Grove from Intel has defined. They're used across the industry, and they're really helpful in making sure we know exactly what we want to achieve, that we actually measure success against it, and that we're also time bound and that we stay ambitious.

So we really know what we're aiming for. I really recommend using OKRs, and I know that there are more sessions on OKRs and KPIs in this event as well. Alright. So let's really try to kind of wrap this up. I highly recommend to not just create strategy plans for the sake of, you know, writing down your plan and then just starting to execute.

Use it as a conversation starter. Reach out to all the other teams that you work with. You know, make your strategy plan as understandable as possible so that your company really knows what you try to achieve. Make sure they understand exactly what you do, and give them room for feedback. Help them shape your strategy if possible.

Create more belongingness by not just looking at your user as a user of your product. Look at them as a person who cares about many things, and you and your team and your company can then start identifying which of these many things you can really effectively support and, you know, tackle with the many things that you and your programs and your products do. I highly encourage you to look at social contributions because everybody cares about the impact of technology. You know, we're in a very privileged world where technology can really help make things happen. So let's, you know, let's all try to, every now and then, look at, you know, not just how can we support our power users, the leading x percent of the, you know, of the fold.

What can we do for those, you know, that are not as privileged to be part of this yet? And then finally, you know, consider metrics that are paying your bills. Track them like you did hopefully already. But, also, you know, capture those things that you really care about, that users care about, that your team care about, and really, you know, use these as stories and anecdotes and be proud about them. And with that, all I can do is really thank you for attending my talk.

I'm gonna be on the Discord channel. I'd be happy to take any kind of questions. And thanks again to the amazing team, you know, that has running this event for having me. Really appreciate it. Enjoy this event.