Under the Hood of Developer Marketing
By SlashData
Tech Industry pioneers from the world’s largest tech companies, share insight on developer marketing success stories with everyone who works with or plans to work with developers.
In every episode, each special guest covers a *hot* developer marketing topic, laying close to the outline of our “Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide” book. Profit from books sales is given away to a worthy coding cause.
Under the Hood of Developer MarketingApr 23, 2019
What makes a good developer advocate with Chris Riley
Trick question of the week:
How are developer relations different from developer advocates?
The role of the liaison between the company and the developer is not something new. Several titles have appeared since companies decided that engaging with developers can offer a competitive advantage. Early roles, that are still active today, were given titled "evangelist" or "advocate".
Is DevRel a natural evolution of the role with a different title or advocates and DevRel work together for a more complete approach? We're not going to spoil it for you. We'll let our guest Chris Riley walk us through this, what makes a good developer advocate and more. Chris has been long in the field and takes us through the evolution of the industry and what makes someone good at such a technical role.
Bonus: where can someone new to their Advocacy/DevRel role find resources on how to be more effective?
Tons of answers in one all-inclusive episode.
DevRelx: Our new portal comes with a bi-weekly digest of the latest industry news. You will still be notified of new podcast episodes and also news, articles and jobs. Interested? Sign-up at www.devrelx.com
Chris Riley is a Tech Advocate at Splunk, he is obsessed with bringing modern technologies to those who need to solve real-world problems, going from unicorn to reality. Chris speaks and engages with end-users regularly in the areas of DevOps, SRE, and App Dev. He is a regular contributor to industry blogs such as ContainerJournal.com, DevOps.com and Sweetcode.io and host of the podcast Developers Eating the World. As a bad coder turned technology advocate, Chris understands the challenges and needs of modern engineers, as well as how technology fits into the broader business goals of companies in a demanding high-tech world.
Engaging developers and working with agencies with Mike Pegg
Trick question of the week:
Why is it important for your product/service to engage with developers?
📢But first, an announcement.
This podcast has a new home: DevRelx.
DevRelx is a hub for developer marketing and DevRel professionals.
Along with all episodes, you can access industry news, developer population insights, job openings and more, to empower developers and build and grow communities.
#stayhome while DevRelx brings you rich content to boost your DevRel game.
Check it out at Devrelx.com.
There are numerous examples of products that opened their arms to developers. Numerous are those that saw their growth rise in levels they had never imagined. Levels that ended up shaping the world as we know it.
"How you can engage developers" is our quest in this podcast and our book. Being authentic, having solid documentation and a mindset that leads you to help developers solve problems, are the topics that have come up most often.
Today we are joined by Mike Pegg to discuss why and how Google Maps started engaging with developers (spoiler alert: It started with kind-of-a "hack") and how you can work with agencies to enhance your outreach efforts.
📍Want us to put a pin to the episode? Here it is.
Mike Pegg leads Google Maps Platform Developer Relations. His team helps developers add Google Maps to their web and mobile apps through guides, samples and outreach programs. He has been involved with Google Maps from the beginning. He would go on to incubate developer marketing efforts for several developer products at Google including the Maps APIs, Android, Chrome, Firebase and Flutter, and led the Google I/O developer conference from 2011-18. Mike is an author to the "Developer Marketing + Relations: The Essential Guide" book.
How to speak at tech conferences with Karl Hughes
Trick question of the week:
How do you go about speaking at tech conferences?
Speaking in conferences is an integral part of DevRel.
Why?
Because in DevRel, to build trust, you need to be helpful. When you stand in front of a crowd to show how people are solving problems, you are being helpful to developers.
This is one of the reasons why you should be speaking at conferences. There are a lot of benefits but there are also challenges. Where do you apply? How? How do you prepare?
In our latest episode, we welcome Karl Hughes to help us walk through the process of speaking at conferences: from finding CFPs to apply to, all the way to dealing with stage fright, right before you deliver your talk.
Ready to get up on that stage and leave everyone in awe? Listen to the episode and you will.
Karl Hughes is a hands-on technical leader dedicated to helping startups figure out teams and technology. He is the CTO of The Graide Network and helps tech conference speakers find speaking opportunities at CFP Land.
The Comprehensive Guide to Speaking at Tech Conferences by Karl Hughes
DevRel Metrics: Funnel and Orbit with Josh Dzielak
Trick question of the week:
Is the funnel, AAARRRP or Orbit the best framework for your metrics?
This week, we're back to discussing metrics. Always a difficult subject, as still, there is no perfect recipe for DevRel metrics.
The most popular frameworks are:
- "Devrel Qualified Leads" which we discussed with Mary Thengvall in our first episode
- "The funnel", which has been long used in "traditional" marketing
- "AAARRRP framework" aka "Pirate Metrics" and
- The Orbit model, which Josh Dzielak presents in our latest episode.
Why is the Orbit model a better fit for DevRel, compared to the funnel? Well, for starters, it also considers the big impact of the community. Something that the funnel does not.
Does the Orbit model have enough gravity to be your favourite? Listen to the episode and find out.
Josh Dzielak is a software engineer for over 15 years. He enjoys building tools for developers and creating resources that help ensure their success. Currently, he's the co-founder of Orbit, helping companies win the hearts and minds of developers. Previously, he was the Developer Relations Lead at Algolia, the VP Engineering at Keen IO and a principal engineer at Disney.
Why the Orbit Model is better than the Funnel for Developer Relations
Empowered Communities with Jono Bacon
Trick question of the week:
Why should you invest in a community and how can you empower your community?
That's a difficult one, unless you look at the value a community gives your business. If you've been following this podcast for a while, you have noticed how often the importance of communities comes up. That's because their value can be huge!
How huge?
Such that if you wanted to pay for it you probably couldn't afford it.
Today's episode is -you guessed it- all about communities. We're joined by Jono Bacon who comes with rich insights on:
- How to create your community
- How to empower it to grow
- How to measure its success
- How to avoid common mistakes
A must-listen if you care about communities.
Jono will join the Future Developer Summit for a fireside chat. Is there something you'd like to hear about at FDS? Tweet about it.
Jono Bacon is an industry-leading consultant, author, advisor, and speaker. He previously served as Director of Community at Canonical, GitHub, and XPRIZE and runs Jono Bacon Consulting where he provides community strategic development, leadership, and advisory services.
Link to Jono's article for HBR.
Save yourself from burnouts in DevRel with Anjuan and Aneika Simmons
Trick question of the week:
How can you lead a healthy community when you are not feeling healthy?
Burnouts are -unfortunately- a common theme in the Tech industry and in DevRel.
Why?
Because of our empathy. According to Anjuan and Aneika Simmons who join us for this episode, burnout is the result of chronic stress. As Anjuan puts it: "in DevRel you work with many developers that are under stress and because you care, this stress is projected back at you.".
In this episode, we discuss stress and burnouts in developer marketing and:
- Early signs of burnout
- How to recover from a burnout
- How to make yourself, and your community and team, more burnout-resistant
A hot episode about saying healthy and helping your community grow without burning out.
Anjuan Simmons is a technologist with a successful track record of delivering technology solutions from the user interface to the database. He combines his experiences working at Big 4 management consulting companies as well as small technology startups to implement practical solutions that can be understood and scaled across organizations.
Aneika Simmons is a Full Professor of Management at Sam Houston State University who specializes in organizational behavior, human resources, leadership development, team dynamics, interpersonal relationships, and principles of management.
Moving from startups to global companies with Max Katz
Happy New Year!
Trick question of the week:
How different is practising developer marketing at a startup vs at one of the world’s largest companies?
For our guest in this episode, it’s like moving to another country. Under the Hood of Developer Marketing is back in 2020 with a new episode that touches several subjects from a heavyweight in the field: Max Katz.
Max walks us through the lessons learned, the KPIs, the priorities that changed along the way as he moved from a startup to leading the developer advocacy program and a big team at IBM.
A great, all-inclusive episode you'll love, to kick-off the new year!
Max Katz is the Program Director for Developer Advocacy at IBM. He leads a team of Developer Advocates, together they provide developer education in NA West region.
Producing valuable content for developers with Martin Gontovnikas
Trick question of the week:
Is developer marketing the dark side?
Looks like we will be continuing for a second week with parallels that could make Freakonomics fans jealous.
In our latest episode, we discuss the value of content. Marketing, by default, involves selling (aka the dark side) but there are more ways to go than aggressive tactics or excessive spending on paid ads. Try content for example. By producing high-quality content, you can stand out as a thought-leader in your area. And this will bring more high-quality leads than any ad.
Up to what point? Up to the point that content accounts for 95% of your company's revenue. At least that is what happened to Martin Gontovnikas.
Should dev marketing people be developers?
A favourite question in the field. Martin says yes, but if they don't, they should spend some time with the product teams to get a better understanding of the product.
Another great episode in Season 2, full of useful....well, content!
Martin Gontovnikas is the VP of Marketing and Product at Auth0. He is a software engineer that now works in Marketing. Yes, you heard right. He found a way to combine his two passions and apply his engineering thinking model to marketing.
Helping developers grow with Jesse Davis
Trick question of the week:
What does developer marketing have in common with Star Trek Borgs?
Sounds like a stretched parallel, but hear us out. While Borgs want to create a better version of humans, developer marketing should be helping developers grow into the best version of themselves.
Back to Earth. - In our latest episode, we discuss how developer marketing should start with developers' needs and then help developers grow, to build a community that's welcoming to everyone, why you should not blame developers for and self-driving car accidents, all with a touch of (you guessed it) Star Trek.
Why to run or NOT run a hackathon with Shaharris
Shaharris, CEO of HackerNest joins us on our first episode of season 2 to discuss hackathons.
He talks about the benefits of running a hackathon, the reasons why you shouldn't run a hackathon and what aspects make a group of developers a real community.
Inclusion and diversity to build developers of tomorrow with Arabella David.
Two tips for developer advocates: maintain the curiosity and always make sure to keep developers' needs and wants prioritised.
In this episode, Arabella David joins us to discuss how developer advocacy can become more inclusive and diverse and how to build a community that sustains itself in a way that your engineers will want to "crash" their meetings.
Trailhead platform | TrailheadDX Conference
Your competitive advantage and metrics with Adam FitzGerald
Remember the popular saying "can't see the forest for the trees"?
Today we're looking at the tree. Assume your dev community is the forest. You know how valuable a forest is. However, how about a single tree? If a single tree is added to the forest, how much does the forest value increase?
In our latest episode, we welcome Adam FitzGerald to talk about not only the value of the community as a whole - and as a competitive advantage - but we look deeper, into the value a single, incremental developer can add to your developer program.
Skills for better developer community engagement with Jeremy Meiss
Developers don't care that you know until they know that you care.
Jeremy Meiss, Director of Community for Solace, joined us to talk about developer communities and what skills a community manager needs to have.
Plus, how can running a coffee shop and watching Doctor Who teach you for better engagement with your developer community.
Jeremy Meiss Article: DevRel is like coffee.. and other profundities
Developer Communities and Forums with Adrian Speyer
Are forums dead? Adrian Speyer from Vanilla Forums thinks not.
He joined us to discuss developer communities: where developers discuss about (praise or criticise) your product.
What are the benefits of building your community? Do you need to be a developer to work in developer marketing?
All discussed in this episode.
Plus, a touch of old internet nostalgia.
Links to Adrian's Blog posts:
Don't ship your community without C.A.R.G.O. | Are you building your community with the most valuable people in mind?
Our book "Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide"
Developer Events with Katherine Miller
Katherine Miller from the Cloud Developer Relations Events Program at Google, joins us to talk a major aspect of developer marketing: events. From meetups to global events, we talk about the challenges and what an event should offer for developers.
Our book "Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide"
Developer Relations with Mary Thengvall
Mary Thengvall joins us on our first episode along with SlashData CEO Andreas Constantinou to discuss developer marketing and developer relations, their importance and the trends coming in 2019.
Our book "Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide"
Intro
What is the Under the Hood of Developer Marketing podcast?
Tech Industry pioneers from the world’s largest tech companies, share insight on developer marketing success stories with everyone who works with or plans to work with developers.
DevRel? Hackathons? Personas? In every episode, each special guest covers a *hot* developer marketing topic, laying close to the outline of our “Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide” book.