What the CEO needs from DevRel

Shanea Leven: DevRel gone deep dives. Yar. Awesome. Hi, everybody. As as we just said, my my name is Shania.

I'm gonna talk about, like, what the CEO needs from DevRel. And I've been running CodeSee for three years now and really excited to chat with you all today. So a little bit about, you know, who am I and why do you care. CodeSee is a developer tool. So, again, I've been serving developers for the past ten years in some capacity, and we help developers to improve code review, onboarding, planning, and more.

And before that, I was a product manager, an engineer, and a program manager in some places, but mostly working in developer tools companies such as Google and eBay and Cloudflare, Docker, and some other startups. Lob is a developer focused startup and d graph for a little bit of time as well. And so my journey kind of started at Docker for CodeSee, And it started as many of your stories start where you're seeing a problem in the space or you're part of a community and lots of people are chatting about their problems and you are you have some kind of knowledge that helps them solve their problems. I've been at Docker, and we were trying to ship a feature. It took six months to ship.

And turns out a bunch of developers left Docker for whatever reason, and all of a sudden, all of that knowledge went out the window. And so two days before the launch, there was this show stopping bug. And all of a sudden, we didn't know how to solve it. So there was no documentation. There was no past experience.

There was no one who could understand where the bug's coming from, and nothing got launched. And so out of that problem, a company was born, which turned out to be Coatsy. We visualize code bases. And why is this relevant? As I mentioned, like, I was in I was a developer advocate working on Google Developer training and doing DevRel for Android and the Android platform, working at Google IO, and all different things.

So, essentially, I was I was you. This is this is me in 2013 as one of the developer courses that I planned and also spoke in in partnership with Udacity. And it was an amazing, incredible experience, but I'm hoping that this talk allows me to kind of share my learnings kind of over the last ten years of how you can communicate with your CEO, other stakeholders in the organization, you know, coming from your perspective, but also on the flip side as well. And I hope that, you know, many of you can learn from this talk. Folks from my old team are also doing amazing things.

Like, Amir, he was the founder of Reshuffle, but then he got that got bought by Twitter, now he's the head of developer platform. People like Jonathan Barry, who is founder of Goliath, he was also on my Google DevRel team. And so I hope this talk also maybe puts, you know, bugs in your ear about how DevRel learning these skills could ultimately help you to get into an executive CEO role or founder role, like, you know, Ryan Florence or Kent Dodds who started Remix. Like, all of these people started in DevRel or serving DevRel in their communities. In addition, like, to being a founder or CTO or anything like that, just aligning with your CEO is just important for your day to day job satisfaction and career growth.

It's really important, particularly for depending on where you sit in the organization to kind of understand what the goals are and what pictures in that the CEO in their have in their minds so that you're able to really support that to the best of your abilities, and we'll dive into that a little bit more. So, essentially, what you came here to figure out was what does the CEO need from DevRel. And it all boils down to one thing, which is you need to solve problems. This might be a business problem. This might be a growth problem.

This might be an adoption problem. This might be just a general perception problem in the audience. So maybe, like, there was a big bug and or, you know, there was a security problem, and you need to change hearts and minds. Like, those things are, really important to the business. And as a person in DevRel, you need to kind of deeply understand what those problems are and how do we solve them.

So we'll get into the full realm of what it takes to actually solve the problem for the CEO. And as I mentioned, this seems like a really simple question, but it is really, really complicated. There's a lot that goes into solving problems, and there's a lot that's involved particularly in organizations. In the start up realm, you know, people are kind of coming in and coming out, and things are shifting. Priorities change all the time, and so constantly realigning yourself to what that, problem is, takes effort and time.

So starting out by figuring out, you know, what problem are you trying to solve. Said another way, what is the most urgent problem to solve right now? I mentioned, like, it could be business. It could be perception. It could be a security problem.

Like, it could be just general awareness. And how does that problem stack rank across all of the other priorities that the business has. You know, has the CEO made it clear to you, or have you been able to kind of take a holistic view of how everything is working and identify what that problem is and communicate it, in a way that will help the CEO paint a picture to unlock the rest of whatever their goals are. And figuring out who is responsible for figuring out what the problem is is also part of figuring out the problem. So maybe your the CEO has an expectation that you're gonna figure that out, but maybe the CEO already has in mind what those problems are, and that's a conversation that needs to be had.

How quickly should that problem be solved? So if it's truly urgent, then there is a certain timeline that, some that the CEO has in their heads for a particular problem to be solved. Or if they don't, they have something that's really fuzzy, and it's kind of our responsibility to take that that mental picture and expectations and either temper it or really help drive our initiatives to meet that goal. So understanding how quickly something should be solved or have a plan to work towards. So give yourself milestones and support and making sure those expectations are clear.

How are you actually going to solve the problem? So this is probably one of the biggest questions about the question. Right? So for us, we are in a field that you really can't control people. You really can't, like, you can't go to the community and tie a rope around everybody and make them sit and watch your video.

Right? You have like, it's you can't really force anybody to do the activities. You can only really encourage them. And so how do we actually solve problems in where we have no control over what anybody does? We have no control over the time that they spend with us.

So thinking about these things such as strategy, what are you going to do versus what are you not going to do? Strategy is really important to identify what are you not going to do and understand what are those experiments that you can drive that will move the needle in whatever you're trying to solve. Separating your strategy from execution. So what's your execution plan and documenting that down and making it clear so that when you go back to understand what the results were, you can clearly understand what is where where if anything goes wrong, where the problem is. Is it in your strategy or was it in your execution?

If you don't have those plans kind of written out beforehand, it's really hard to pinpoint what went wrong when you do retrospective. Having milestones along the way. So even if they're fuzzy, putting some goalposts down in your strategy and in your execution plan, really help you to track and self correct if something is not going the way that you want. And having that diff of this is the milestone that we wanna hit, here's where we are, and here's how we're going to correct it if anything goes wrong. That conversation really helps the CEO to level set how things are going compared to the rest of the business that are dependent on your, goals.

How are you going to do the research? Right? How are you going to make sure that your, products or your documentation or your videos are landing in the right way? How are you making sure that you're gonna reach the audience? Do you have that research plan to kind of make sure you're going to the right strategy, etcetera?

How internal stakeholders, other internal stakeholders, who needs to be aligned with you to make sure that you're figuring out the problem in the right way. Any messaging, you might not actually be responsible for coming up with messaging, depending on how your organization handles it. So how do you align with creating a very kind of colloquial message that coincides with your business message? Having all of those things aligned are also kind of part of how you're gonna solve this problem. Do you have access to the right platforms?

Do you have the access to all of the places where your target audience is? And developers are busy. Right? How can you keep up the churn of content and tutorials and updates and all of those things so that they make sure they reach developers at the right time? All of those things go into how do you solve the problem and ironing that out for your CEO, particularly if they don't have a DevRel background and understanding how much work goes into all of those steps and stages, is really important to help you move your initiatives forward.

Identifying what success looks like. Is that idea, for you the same as your, the for the CEO? And making sure that if that is not clear, then it's written down and aligned. And if you need to go back and forth a couple of times, that you it's also really necessary, to make sure that those expectations are aligned. How do you know when you solve the problem?

How should you tell them that you've solved the problem? So communication is one of the most important things when you're trying to interface with the CEO. Because as a CEO, everybody is trying to communicate with you all the time about everything. And it's done in really small snippets because you can't be everywhere at once. And so how do you share the information that you need them to know?

How do you make sure that they are, receiving the information in the way that they would like the information to be received. Maybe that's a weekly email update. Maybe it's a document. Maybe it's a newsletter style across the organization. Maybe it's just in a spreadsheet.

Really understanding how to tell them that you've you're solving the problem or how you're giving feedback and updates along the way is really important. Because otherwise, you could do all this work and the CEO never knows, and it was all for not. Right? So making sure that you understand that upfront is really helpful. And if anything goes wrong, how should you give feedback, and how should you receive feedback, and where should that feedback be coming from?

Do you need to match up with other stakeholders? And having those things aligned with is really, really helpful so that all of those expectations are set and clear. Who else needs to weigh in on how you should solve the problem? So you might have to be partnering with products, engineers, sales, marketing, anybody around the organization. And it's the the CEO is going to have the ear of many people.

And so making sure that you have aligned with those people and it's, yes, it's extra work to make sure that everyone's on board and everyone kind of understands the value that you're providing, but it really helps along the way, particularly in conversations when, you know, we're going into prioritization conversations, when we're going into budget conversations that everybody is aligned to the initiatives that you think is important to the organization, particularly in a developer tool environment. What resources do you need to solve the problem and making sure you have all of the resources that you need. And the answer is going to be you never have enough resources. So really figuring out what resources can help you to reach your goals faster and articulating it in that way. Right?

So if you're doing a super manual process, if you're manually posting social posts all the time, having a tool to invest $10 in, $20 in, whatever it is, like Orbit, for example, can help with speeding up that process. Right? And being able to frame it in that sense really does typically help CEOs to get thing that you need forward. So do you have people that are helping you? Maybe it's a contractor or maybe it's, you know, someone in the Discord community that can you can throw a couple bucks to to help moderation or anything like that.

It can be contractors to help you move faster towards your goal or whatever the CEO has in mind. Articulating that really helps. Research, as I mentioned earlier, takes a ton of work. And so if there's any video tools or interview software that you could use to kind of cut snippets from videos, to help with the research process to make sure that when you do put in effort, it lands well, is something to think about, kind of bring up with your CEO. In my experience, video editing just takes a really long time if that's not your expertise.

So thinking about video editors, thinking about any processes that you might need, and framing it in a way that helps the CEO understand how that helps you reach your milestones. Do you understand the urgency the CEO has in their minds for how the problem should be solved? I'm gonna say this a couple times in the presentation, but CEOs are people. They're people just like us, and I know I am one, which is why I can say that because we have a ton of things on our minds, a lot of pressure, and a lot of conflicting priorities. You know?

Most CEOs, I would say all, you know, really love their employees. They love their team members. They wanna do right by them. And having those conflicting priorities for how we move everything forward, typically involves saying no. And helping the CEO understand that the thing that you are doing is urgent if the CEO doesn't have it as an urgent problem is really important.

And if the CEO does, say that this is an urgent problem, making sure you understand the urgency for how you and that will basically dictate how you should do your work. Right? Like, is in the CEO's mind so that you're aligned to that. And are you the right person to solve this problem? You know, there might be a CEO that says, like, hey.

We just need you to go into hyper growth. Get a 2,000,000 developers, and then we'll be golden. Right? Are you the right person to to do that? Maybe you're just a community builder, and that's really what you wanna focus on, and that's fine.

Or maybe you're, on the flip side, you're a community maintainer and don't want to build a new community from scratch. Right? That is all perfectly okay. It's just given what the CEO has in mind for what you want to accomplish, you should really look deep inside yourself to ensure that you're the right person with the right skill sets for the job that they have in mind. And, again, it's perfectly fine if you're not, but this is a conversation that you should have.

You should make sure that all of those things are aligned, because otherwise, it can create resentment. It can create that the the CEO doesn't understand. And all of these things basically help you to align what those expectations are and making sure that you're the right person. The other thing is it's perfectly fine if you're not the right person, but having going back to the previous thing that we talked about, having tools or having contractors or having processes to fill in your gaps of where you're not strong is also a perfectly reasonable approach. Product people do this all the time.

You can't be good at everything all the time. And making sure that you frame it in the way that, hey. I can try to write 10 blog posts in two days, but it actually is probably gonna take me a month to do that. So maybe what I can do is if you want me to crank, like, blog posts out every hour, maybe I can partner with an agency to do that, for example, is a great way to have that conversation. And I love this concept of managing up.

And the way I think we've talked a lot about, you know, expectation setting and communication, but managing up is a term that people talk about. They don't really know what it is. It is the fact that your CEO, as we mentioned, has conflicting conflicting priorities, is probably anxious about something. They're probably under pressure about something, whether that's general, hey. We need to hit this milestone or, hey.

I need to return this investor dollars or, hey. We don't have product market fit yet, and we need to fix that. There's something or I just got $90,000,000, and now we need to super grow, which I did not, by the way. So so your CEO probably anxious about something. And whether they tell you what those what they're anxious about, it doesn't matter.

Like, responsibility for whether it's a CEO or just a general boss is to manage up, to kind of deep dive with them, to understand, build a relationship with them, to deeply understand what the anxiety is and be able to temper it. So you're communicating in a way to temper those anxieties. And it takes a little bit of practice, but typically how this plays out is you'll get a random email being like, hey. This random cost blah blah blah blah blah. What is that for?

Kinda comes out of the blue or kind of an offhanded comment. That's your spidey sense should be going off being like, this person's probably anxious about something that they haven't communicated. Let's take a step back and dive in and start asking questions so that you can make sure that you're answering the right question and tempering those anxieties in the right way rather than just responding to random requests. And have empathy. As I mentioned, CEOs are people, and they're probably under a lot of pressure.

Even if they don't, like, communicate it in the right way, you know, there's a lot at stake typically, and there's a lot of things happening. Right? So CEOs need to build a product that devs want, and they are finicky, and that that a product that scales, that resonates in a space where, like, investors need to be happy. They also need to build good cultures at the end of the day, trying and also, like, trying to make the world a better place. So having empathy for that, really helps to move things forward.

Helping kind of temper those anxieties, understanding the business goals, milestones, and the market. Right? So very quickly following the news every occasionally to understand who's getting funded, who's not getting funded, if we're in a recession, like, what's happening in the world because your CEO is likely also following those things. And so having that little bit of empathy tends to help. And being able to have some self awareness.

So self awareness looking inside yourself to understand your strength and your weaknesses, what you're good at, what you're not good at, and if something is a struggle. So you have a diff of where you need to be if you need to grow in a particular area that the CEO expects you to grow. As I mentioned, setting and getting clear expectations. I've said it a couple times because it is so important to being able to do your job effectively and making sure that you are successful. Having leadership with your CEO is also really important.

So sometimes you're not going to align, and it's your job to kinda guide them to understanding what the importance of your initiatives are. And that really typically is a struggle for people to guide them because of the conflicting priorities. So really understanding and persuading and speaking in their language is all of all part of leadership. And finally, being a good feedback giver and good feedback receiver as a backup for when things go wrong. I've got some really great resources.

Oh, there we go. So these two books have completely changed my life. Crucial Conversations and thanks for your feedback, really helps to, one, have hard conversations with your CEO, or basically anybody. And then understanding how to be a good feedback giver and a good feedback receiver and what the right feedback is at the right time, is absolutely incredible. And that is the end.

Speaker 2: Well, thank you. Thank you very much. That was wonderful. I think that one of the questions that I would have is is that you have spent three years as a founder and CEO. What has surprised you about the change in your own perspective as a result of of becoming a CEO?

Shanea Leven: Yeah. A a couple of things, actually. So I didn't I didn't get into Coatsy to be a CEO. Right? I got I got into Coatsy to build a good product for a developer.

I saw that it sucked, and I tried to solve a problem. Right? And so then my perspective changed when you're like, oh, shiznit. Like, there's legal and accounting and HR and and marketing and, like, all of these other things that actually need to all come together and work together to not just get the product out, but, like, build an actual functioning company. Right?

And those are separate. Like, a functioning a good product and a functioning company are very different, and they all have to work together and all play off of one another. And I think the other surprising thing is so if you have, vulnerabilities or if you have insecurities, no matter what they are, they're gonna come out when you're a CEO. It just it just is, and understanding the type of CEO that you want to be, and, what expectation what other people's expectations are when you put a CEO hat title on, was really, really surprising for me. Because I tell my team all the time, don't look at me as a CEO.

I'm just product right now. I'm just gonna put my product hat on, and it's just very different. So, those are a couple I can keep going, but that's just a couple surprising things.

Speaker 2: And in terms of of reaching, developer audiences Mhmm. When you're obviously, for a developer tool, that's that's generally important. But, did it ever occur to you that maybe the the top sorry, the bottom up approach isn't isn't the right one? Because, you know, when we're embedded in DevRel and doing DevRel, then it's easy to kind of live and breathe that as as being the ultimate thing. But plenty of companies that sell to tools that are used by developers actually do the the top down enterprise sales thing.

Shanea Leven: I think about it every day. And the the common misconception I've talked to a lot of DevTools founders about this. I've talked to Guy and Edith Harbaugh, and, like, turns out that this bottoms up growth, like, mindset is, like, no sales whatsoever, and that's just simply not true. Right? They particularly, the developer audience is a very finicky bunch.

Like, we are a special group of people, and we have a lot of expectations, and we have a lot thrust upon us with the company expectations around security and with, like, following up. And, like, developers, we're busy writing writing code and trying to figure out and solve hard problems. And so if getting into that workflow and making sure that you follow-up with people requires a person, typically. And if they run into a problem where your sample code or your sample is, like, on in the documentation and there there's a problem with that, then they're stuck. They're done.

Right? And then you're gonna lose that user. And so bottoms up is they need to be married with a human approach in in from my perspective. Right? And sometimes you do need that that top down person, that CTO or end director or end manager to kind of approve what you're doing.

Right? And so it's it has to be a combination.

Speaker 2: Robert, in the companies that you've you've run over the years, and moving now into a developer relations tool specifically, does does that kind of resonate with you, the the the view that, actually, a lot of things are are movable, in those early days?

Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I think you said it right. There's there's no one size fits all. And top down plus bottoms up is the right formula. You just gotta get the sequencing right for the business you're trying to prosecute.

Yeah. Like, there's there's no substitute for people who are trying to sell talking to the real humans using the product. Right? Because they learn a ton about how to message, what what the value is. Salespeople have a a way of very quickly honing in where and if there's money, And you need that feedback as a CEO, I'm sure you so making sure you don't talk to them too early or talk to them at the wrong, you know yeah.

So they're not scaring them away is always the important part. But I think they can also be a really important coach. So once somebody loves your product and they're using it happily, they might need some coaching saying, hey. Here's how you articulate to your manager or your VP to secure its use for your entire company. You know, not every developer is comfortable having that conversation.

Salespeople, good ones, are great at coaching their champions on how to have the business conversation. So getting the timing and the sequencing is right, but you'd need that DNA in the company, you know, at some point for sure.

Shanea Leven: Mhmm.

Speaker 3: There is a there is a perspective, you know, in some VCs, as you know, is that the you you should hire a salesperson very, very early in the company, but you don't incentivize them like a salesperson too early. Right? So you incentivize them almost like a BD person, market development person because they're awesome listeners and understanding where the value is, what's gonna cause this person to make a decision to use and to recommend so they can add something special to your team dynamics as long as you goal them correctly. Mhmm.

Shanea Leven: And that's what we did. I have an amazing VP of sales who's done this for twenty years, and we hired her in early because, like, an enterprise sale is hard. Yep. There's a lot that goes into it, and there's a lot of touch points in an organization and mapping that whole organization and figuring out legal terms, right, and figuring out red lines and all of those things that this not only legal teams would be happy, but accounting would be happy. Right?

And so having a person who understands that flow as opposed to you just kind of and sending a striping voice is great if you can get away with it. Right? But, like, having like, eventually, like, you have to get off of that and do, like, real company things for real reasons and, like, rather than wasting our time figuring that out, kind of going through the motions and making mistakes, having that person who's done it, been there, done that to help. So you can focus on building a good product because building a good tool is hard. It's really hard.

And so like, that that's that's the approach that that we took.

Speaker 3: Cool. Yeah. So that means a skill set. Right? There's a bunch of process that the experience people know, and there's also a certain kind of EQ that a salesperson brings to the table because they, again, they just stay, they're good at connecting with how the other person's reacting and judging what's the, you know, is it time to push or is it time to back off?

Those are the soft things that, you know, for those of us that came up through the engineering ranks don't always get right. To us, it's very black and white.

Speaker 2: Well, that leads on to something I wanted to ask about, which is that it's it's one thing to say, well, we're gonna go with a largely developer focused go to market. But actually, as you go along, I'm I'm guessing that you learn that there's a lot more nuance to it, than just we're gonna target developers. So I wonder if you've got any any advice for DevRel leaders as as they as they plan out their strategy of well, what are the actual what are some of the things that people aren't thinking about when they're looking at a DevRel strategy? Yeah.

Shanea Leven: So and I can just tell you from my own experience. Right? So at CodeSee, like, we create visual summaries of your code. Right? So if you if you need to onboard a new engineer to a code base, if you need to, like, do a quick code review because you're pushing out 10 PRs a week or whatever and you still need to go to those meetings, Like, those summaries, like, really help move you forward.

But turns out that there are a lot of other sort of technical people, but not as technical who sit in the code base all day every day that need to understand, like, how your code works too. And so for us, kind of under mapping out a dev mapping out a strategy, kind of taking the approach that, like, Figma did with design. Right? They started with design as, like, a homogeneous team, only designers, but then eventually, in our case, expanding to those heterogeneous teams who interface with engineering. Right?

So for us, we we have a lot of fintech users because compliance and auditing and operations also need to understand how the code works, but don't sit in the code every day. Product managers need to understand how the code works. We for us, having those cross functional communications, particularly with your sales leader, right, of, hey. Your your CEO is probably expecting your eng team to build that thing to close that deal. Right?

And having visual summaries helps with that communication. And so for DevRel leaders, thinking about, okay. Maybe it's a heterogeneous team right now, but expanding to other teams and what are those use cases and what could that look like, typically helps you grow and expand the business. Now when you do expand the different teams, that it gets really complicated with use cases and and there's a lot of work involved. But that typically is where you see a lot of product market fit when you can go from one group to another.

Speaker 2: Great. Thanks. Mhmm. Well, we're we're coming to the end of our of of our day, in fact, as as a conference. So, Robin, any any last questions or comments from you?

Speaker 3: Well, wanna kinda congratulate Shanann on her journey. I'm curious about how one of the most challenging things for every leader, whether a CEO or a you know, they get more senior in the ranks

Shanea Leven: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Is learning how to let go of the stuff that got them there. Right? So particularly, you being a a very accomplished DevRel practitioner and leader, how do you deal with your DevRel your own DevRel team and and kinda keep yourself from getting in in their business?

Shanea Leven: Yeah. I it's it's funny because my DevRel leader, Anna, is a mate like, she's amazing. And it just so happens that she was also a founder herself. Yeah. Right?

And turns out that a lot of the things that I talked about me doing as a DevRel person, she just does because she knows what it's like to be in my shoes. And I think that's where I can fully take step like, take a step back because that the person in that role does all of the like, does the things that I mentioned without me having to even ask. And so I just know that it's handled. Right? My my biggest support for her is be like, how can I get out of your way?

You need me to come do a talk? Awesome. I can do a talk. You need me to go to a conference? I'm super down to go talk to some talk to some devs because that's what I really love.

But, like, the commute like, the management stuff, social stuff, I'm really bad at Twitter even though I'm trying to be better. Like, I am happy to let somebody else handle that and focus on, like, the really hard move code detection technology that we're working on right now. That's where I really need to be. You know?

Speaker 3: Awesome. K. Yeah. Well, knowing how to hire the people around you is the most important skill. Right?

So

Shanea Leven: Yeah. It's you know, I've tried to invent being in, you know, two places at once, and it it didn't work out in the first startup. I'm just I'm just kidding. Like, you can't be in two places at once.

Speaker 3: There's there's moments for that in crisis, but you can't sustain it. Right?

Shanea Leven: Totally. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Wonderful. And, Shalaya, would you like to is there any closing thoughts from you?

Shanea Leven: I just I I think, like, the biggest thing is is remembering, like, CEOs get really a bad rap. And if you've got a good one, like, just be honest and open and transparent with them and have hard conversations with them. It it sucks in the moment, but having a hard conversation with someone really will help in the long run and help you achieve your goals. And it that's probably the best the the the best advice can give is just to have the conversations.

Speaker 2: Wonderful. Well, thank you very much, Shanair.

Shanea Leven: Thank you so much for having me. Blast.

Speaker 2: So co coatsy.io. Is that right?

Shanea Leven: That's right.

Speaker 2: Great. Alright. Well, thank you, and, see you again.

Shanea Leven: Talk soon. Deep Dives. Yar.