Discover the 4 Cs of successful DevRel programs and their best practices with this API Intersection Podcast interview with Ash Arnwine from Stoplight. This week on API Intersection podcast, we interview Ash Arnwine, Director of Developer Relations at Nylas, who helped us discover the 4 C's of successful DevRel programs and their best practices.
Ash's Devrel program is unique in that both developer advocacy and the documentation team report to the Devrel program.
His team faces the challenges of scaling the platform's high-touch integration process as they work to create more of a self-serve platform. His DevRel team is also tasked with the importance of brand recognition and building credibility with developers through content creation and community engagement. We spoke with Ash about what it takes to create a solid DevRel team and how to start building a world-class program.
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To subscribe to the podcast, visit https://stoplight.io/podcast
--- API Intersection Podcast listeners are invited to sign up for Stoplight and save up to $650! Use code INTERSECTION10 to get 10% off a new subscription to Stoplight Platform Starter or Pro.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
When they're applying for these rolesearly in their career,
look for the things that you did,even if they're not necessarily
you know, “I look-I organized JavaScript meet up.” Right?
Greatif you did that, but not a requirement.
What we're looking forinstead is evidence that you've done
enough of community leadershipand/or organizing and or moderating
(00:24):
to know that you're not going to hate itas soon as things get difficult.
I'm Jason Harmonand this is API intersection,
where you'll get insightsfrom experienced API practitioners
to learn best practices on thingslike API design, governance,
identity, auth, versioning and more.
(00:53):
Welcome back to API Intersection.
We're bringing back an old name todaywith a new face.
So sometime just last year
we had Gleb from Nylas on
to kind of talk about the businessof kind of what they did.
Today we've got Ash.
Ash Ryan Arwin?
(01:14):
Say your name for me, sorry, AshRyan Arnwine.
Yeah, I’m the new face.
That part I was afraid to screw up. Sorry.
I usually get the name right in the greenroom, but every now and then I forget.
Sorry.
Anyways, we got Ash on.
So Ash tell us a little bit aboutyourself and what Nylas does.
Yeah, sure.
So, hi, I'm.
I'm Ash.
I am Director of DeveloperRelations at Nylas and I joined to Nylas
(01:39):
about a year and a half ago to bootstrapthe developer relations function.
So now this is an API platformthat lets you put
email, calendar and contactsfunctionality into your application.
So folks use this for thingslike extracting insights from email
or customizing scheduling workflowsand that kind of thing.
(02:01):
Lots of different use casesthat we could potentially talk about.
But the idea here, of course, is builda developer relations function
that gets developers excitedand inspired to build with our APIs.
Cool.
You know, fundamentallynow this is kind of an API aggregator
in the sense that you are making a varietyof different APIs easier to use
(02:21):
by kind of providing your own designinterface to it.
And we we covered that pretty wellwith cloud before.
I think today is really more just a yearin setting up a different program.
What are the things that you've hadto think about and set up?
And you certainly havesome past experience at this.
I think that's that's the different take.
We'll look at kind ofwhat's going on at night with us today.
(02:43):
So that'smaybe the first place to start in my mind
is the year ago you came on boardthe function didn't exist.
How do you think aboutsetting up a team to succeed?
Yeah, and luckilyI've gotten a couple of different passes
at walking into a placethat needs Devereaux or believes it does.
And then that's basicallywhere the sentence starts.
(03:05):
And you come in to starttrying to figure out what that means
when it cameto, you know, where Neelix was a year
and a half ago, we had an awesome productmarketing team and,
you know, great support and sales folks,lots of outward facing people in general.
But when it came to really startingto understand, like, what do we need to do
(03:28):
to better enable developers, betterhelp them understand what it is that we do
have that message connectand then ultimately help them feel like
they're being taken care ofwhen they're building on the platform.
There were some aspects of thatthroughout,
let's say the sales and implementation,engineering and support cycle.
But when whenwhen you start looking at, for example,
(03:51):
one of the paths that we're on atthe moment is getting to
a place as a platformwhere it's truly self-serve.
A year and a half ago we weren't.
So you would always have the high touch
white glove treatment from Nike+when integrating.
And that's amazing.
But at the same time,that's tremendously difficult to scale.
(04:12):
And I probably don't have to get into why
most of the listenershere would know that.
So how do you start to build out
developer education
pieces where people can come in and reallywithout having to talk to somebody
or knowing a phone number of somebodyat Nihilist, if they don't want that,
they can just build?
(04:33):
And how do you ultimately make surethat they even know
who we are in the first place?
If it's not someone directly reaching outthrough some sort of sales mission?
Again, that'sa super valuable part of what we do.
But we also needed to go biggerand really kind of blow up in the top
end of the funnel,
if you will, to enable developersto find us and ultimately to succeed
as they started kicking the tires onwhat our APIs can do for them.
(04:56):
So those were kind of the openended questions.
When I started out about a yearand a half ago,
had tremendous amount of supportfrom around the organization.
And yeah, we're about a yearand a half into that journey.
So you kind of mentioned like,you know, this sort of brand recognition
piece and I almost would sort of reframethat is just building
street cred with developersis kind of the way I heard you say that.
(05:20):
But I think all of this, what you're
sort of enumerating through in my mindand this is just from years of seeing
folks go into devel and find themselves inprecarious situations is sort of
you have to justify why the role existsand why it brings value to the business.
And i thought that was interestingthat you're touching on.
There were customer folks, customer facingfolks before trying to deal with this.
(05:45):
Do you see it that this booststhe capacity of sort of those support
customer success, whatever other functions
at some point?
Yes, although I wouldn't draw necessarilya direct line.
You know, if there's athere's certainly a Venn diagram there
and we'll be figuring outsome of that stuff continually.
But at the same time, like let'slook at it, for example, just like people
(06:07):
knowing that nihilists existsin the first place
when they have a problemthat we can solve.
One of the main things we really wantedto focus on early on as a small team,
as a team, kind of getting up and runningeven internally at the company,
was focusing more on what can we do
that has the capacityto be high leverage activities.
(06:27):
And so for example, like
a lot of times
and I certainly had this when I firstjoined, we'd be like going out,
meeting different people in the companyand saying,
Oh, so you're going to be our hackathons?
Guy And you know, that's pretty typical.
So I'm used to hearing that as a responseto developer relations in the beginning.
But quite honestly, no, that wasn'twhat we wanted to started at all,
(06:49):
you know, And the reason is it's justincredibly resource intensive and all,
you know, sort of meanings of the wordresource to do things like that
and then to turn aroundand prove some sort of result.
It's a valuable activity at some point,but that's really not
where we needed to start,
where we needed to start was really arounda couple of different things.
(07:10):
One was
we had a sort of
discovery issue, if you will, where
let's just say the organic traffic
at the time wasn't what it could be,especially for the developer audience.
And part of that just had to do withwe didn't have the content out there.
So really starting to figure outhow can we bring on
some developer advocateswho are super creative, great at writing,
(07:34):
greatto kind of putting their ideas together
and communicating them in a waythat get developers interested.
So we've had, especially over the past
six months, just a tremendous
interaction and partnershipwith our SEO team
on the growth marketing side.
And it's been incredible.
So we're just really excited about that.
(07:56):
At the same time, let's say, for example,
a developer
has found us, they knowthey want to do something with our APIs.
Maybe they have a use caseand it's one thing to have
marketing contentthat speaks to the purchaser persona
or the decision maker,but it's totally different to sort of
have content out there that would also
(08:19):
help the developer connect with whatthe possibilities are inside of our
our APIs to give them some fodderfor things to consider.
So we focused a lot at the outseton, you know, doing things like blogs,
going out and doing livestreams
on both YouTube and LinkedIn
and ultimately building outthis catalog of live
(08:41):
streams that the developer advocateshave done over time.
Yeah, I, I believe for quite some time
that endeavor all like content's kingget that part right.
Everything else isnice to have. And I feel like
the kind of COVID
period really kind of killed off
a lot of live eventsthat have struggled to come back to life.
(09:04):
So I feel like now more than ever,that's super relevant
because you're talking about,you know, people
like, good at writing understandSEO. Like,
you know, workshops,all this kind of stuff.
It's all content creation, right?
So that's an interesting onefrom a skills standpoint for folks
who are looking to hire,seems like priority one, right?
(09:26):
So I would agree with that.
This is a this is a fun thingto get to chat about actually,
because like recruiting endeavoris like such a hard thing to do.
Oh yeah.
And why is it hard?
Well, at first, as a hiring manager,I get to go on a journey
with the recruiterthat I work with, wherever that context is
(09:48):
and or wherever, wherever thecompany happens to be typically, you know,
while you might have recruitersthat specialize in hiring engineers,
because a lot of times you're doing that,especially in, you know,
maybe the before times it was at scale.
Whereas with several teams,you're typically not hiring
that frequently.
(10:09):
Not the sameas like in engineering organization.
So that means we get to talk abouttalk to the recruiters
first about what is it,what is it that we're looking for?
My take on this and I know there are
multiple takes on this out therein the universe when it comes to dev role.
But for me, all other things being equalwithout any other data
(10:30):
in terms of what the role is or whatthe goals are or anything like that,
what I'm going to focus onor is what I ended up calling
and pardon me for having an acronym here,but what I ended up calling the three CS,
which is I'm looking for coding ability.
That one's going to be controversial.
But in, in my situation every time, it'salways been a requirement.
(10:52):
I'm also looking for contentcreation ability
and sometimes a track record there.
If we're looking for a senior or aboveand also community engage ment experience.
So happy to dive into any of those.
But typically you're looking forthose three things
and one of them kind of coming backjust to, to the events.
(11:13):
Part of the question for just a moment,one of the things that I found
is really niceabout not having to, let's say,
have that sort of X percent travel
requirement baked into every job
description is thatit makes your hiring more inclusive.
We've been able to bring people onwho quite frankly
(11:36):
couldn't travelfrequently for different reasons.
And, you know, whether it's familyor whatever else it might be
and and that feels awesome.
So because there's a there's a role therefor someone like that who,
you know, there
there are somewherewe can find the best person,
wherever they are,in a remote environment.
And then we don't have to likeput them on the road constantly.
(11:57):
And so that helps them kind of like
feel comfortable raising their handand saying, Yes, I too can do this role.
Yeah, for sure.
I love the three CS thing
that's actually really simpleand straightforward and makes sense.
So I think we already touched on contenta couple of different ways there.
I guess from, you know, you said codingis, is one of those which seems
(12:20):
kind of obvious if you're in developerrelations that you got to have something.
But I guess do you look for a particularsort of spin or flavor or,
you know, I'd imagine, for instance,you don't want to
go find somebody who spent the lastten years building some, you know,
stupendousgiant backend for a massive platform
and then go, okay, go write samplesall day.
(12:40):
Right. Like, how do you approach that?
Totally. Well.
And so coding in the contextof also the content in the community
will often filter that, right?
Because one of the reasons I'm
really looking for, even for someone,let's say they're going to be a new grad,
you can still look for community
leadershipor engagement in some of their background.
(13:02):
Typically, if someone's been spendingten years building out a back end
and is super deeply expert in that,
if they have tried at all to, you know,
do the contentand do the community pieces of,
you know, chances arethey're going to realize that
that's not what they want to spend timedoing anyways.
So in some ways, having that balanceof these different areas is helpful.
(13:24):
In that way, it helps people self filter,
especially as they start to interrogatetheir own background and say,
Well, where is my history of,you know, creating content in some way?
Whereas my historyof community engagement,
when it comes to the coding piece of itthough, you know, if someone's
like an excellent developerand happens to want to move into
(13:47):
developer
relations, we can absolutely make spacefor that.
I found, for example, in the pastthat, you know, people like solutions.
Engineers
can be excellent developer advocates
because they know how to interfacewith customers.
They understand what it means to have
a business need for building on an APIso they can be really awesome,
(14:09):
you know, as long as they're finekind of going into, let's say,
like the more ephemeral aspects of whatwe're going
to need them to dokind of at a community level.
The other things that we might be lookingfor, though, in terms of codes are,
you know, you know, look at your whateveryour API happens to be offering.
And in our case, like,you know, at Nihilist, we have for SDK,
(14:29):
we've got Node.js, Java, Ruby and Python.
So bare minimum, we'dlike to have coverage on that if we can,
if we're going to be creating content.
And that's all I know.
Jobs, for example,which is kind of my personal fave
and none of the other
ones, then that kind of sendsa weird mixed signal to your customers
and you want all of your SDKis being a first class citizen.
(14:51):
So what does that mean?
Well, it doesn't mean that
we're looking for a developer advocateswho are an expert at all languages
because one that's not really possible.
And two,maybe that's an unreasonable expectation.
But if we can find somebodywho is really good in one area and shows
a healthy amount of curiosity in another,that might be enough to go with.
(15:14):
And occasionallyyou'll just get really lucky like we have
and find, you know, one or two folksthat happen to be like
really into the ideaof being a polyglot developer.
And that can work out really well.
But I would say that likethat would be setting the bar too high.
If that's all you're filtering on.
Generally you're looking forsome depth of capability
in in one particular language or stack
(15:37):
and natural curiosity and abilityto learn across the other ones.
Yeah, So this
sounds like a smart way to think about,especially if there's SDK support and
I guess community being that third leg,
you know,I know for me, like I try to always
get a recognition within an organizationthat yeah, like customers are important
(16:01):
but especially if you have developercentric things and open source,
there is a community of developers aroundwhat you're doing that may be customers,
but you have to have a community voicefor it.
I guess
in some cases,especially if it's open source, it's easy
to go find that track record, easyto find how they've engaged.
(16:22):
But in other more kind of like, say,partnership API
kind of things, harder to see that stuff.
So how do you look at gauginglike how successful someone's been,
you know, building communities?
Well, I think it'sgoing to be a mix of different things.
And I've operated in two
different contextsof leading developer relations
(16:44):
where the core product wasn't open source.
But that doesn't mean thatwe can't do things in open source.
So that's one areawe'll focus on for sure.
But I suppose, like I like thatyou called out, for example,
that customers, not your communitynecessarily, and that gets so easily
overlooked that I find myselfsomewhere in the back of my head.
(17:07):
There's a talk on thisthat I just never get around to doing,
but basically exploiting the that
the concept of different
kind of outward facing stakeholdersor sort of external stakeholders.
Right.So you're going to have, for example.
Yes, of course you have your customersand they're super important.
You also have a community.
There's naturally going to besome overlap there.
(17:30):
But just because I think it'sreally important to remember that
just because someone'sa customer doesn't mean
that they want to be involvedin your community effort.
Some definitely don't.
And it's important to remember thatand use language that reflects it.
But I would also add that, for example,there's probably a couple of other areas
that we should be thinking aboutthat would again have some overlap here.
(17:51):
One is your audience.
So again, what's an audience compared to
your customer basecompared to your community?
And there's an overlapping circle here.
The audience could be potentially waybigger depending on how you handle
building that audience.
And you know, cultivating it.
The last one I'd probably addis contributors.
(18:13):
So contributors are in some ways,I think again, like you could
maybe put them into community,but to me, like that's just like a special
like next level sort of thingthat you really want to take care of.
And so, you know,there are things out there
and developer relationslike for example, I've, I've seen the,
the orbit model talked about whereit's like different sort of circles
(18:38):
and people are cominglike closer and closer to the center.
This is a good thing usually.
And that'sprobably I like that view of the world.
But there's also
part of me that thinks likemaybe these circles are not all sort of
sort of nested Russian dolls,if you will, but there may be some overlap
and then some partswhere the orbits kind of
are elliptical, so to speak.
(19:00):
So, yeah,
we can in any one of those areas,whether it's customers,
whether it's audience, whether it'scommunity or open source contributors,
measure effectiveness in different waysdepending on what we want to focus on.
One thing, though, and I'm happyto get into details on any one of those.
(19:22):
One thing I would call out though, is in
both of the companiesI've worked leading dev role
we have, even if the core productwasn't open source, we have had success
engaging developers through open sourcewith our own projects in different ways
and you just don't want to overlookthat possibility as having
(19:45):
some way to get out there into the opensource community, even if it's not like
exactly traditionallywhat we might think of is as open source.
There's some really good stuff you can do,and I think
that's somethingthat all developer relations leaders
and even like folks onthe teams should really be thinking about.
(20:05):
Yeah, well said.
Boy, I feellike I poked Bear on that subject, man.
You're fullfull of great advice is awesome.
Yeah.
I mean, I think like at stop lightyou know
certainly like the idea of,Hey, let's have a podcast.
It's like, all right, but
straight up upfront, very clear,like this is for the community.
(20:26):
This is not a place that we're doingproduct demos
and, you know, doing stuffcustomers want to hear.
We have webinars for thatand all those things. That's fine.
But like this is where, you know,we get folks together
who are in our circle and,and just share and learn from each other.
I was, you know, still my favorite way to,to describe a basic
(20:47):
principle of how to approach communityfrom Adam to vendor.
One of my priorco-hosts on here is Teach Don't Sell.
Like it's as simple as that, right?
It's just not a place to sell thingswhen we're doing community stuff.
But I guess bringing it
back again to like looking forhow to build a team to do this.
You kind
of touched on the open source bit,but what if there is no evidence, right?
(21:11):
What are the kinds of maybe questionsthat you're probing out
that tell youwhether or not this is somebody
who's going to be a good communitybuilder?
Right.
So do you mean for candidateswhen you're looking at hiring?
I'm still trying to get threeor three CS there deep CS, So yeah.
Oh, I love it. I love it.
So yeah, I honestly,
(21:31):
I don't know that I've been in a situationwhere I could necessarily
get to a place
where someone who had hadno kind of involvement
in, especially as a community leaderof some kind,
I would have felt comfortablebringing them in.
(21:53):
And that's not to say that that's a hardtruth about developer relations,
but it does definitely speakto my previous experience.
And so let's let's
kind of blow open the doors a little bit,though, on what that experience can be.
And at the extreme end, I think, you know,like people coming out of college
(22:15):
and going straight into developerrelations is a thing they can do.
Now, if we were having this conversationfive years ago, even, maybe
we wouldn't have seena lot of evidence of that, surely.
But let's say if you're looking to hirea new grad, what could you be looking at?
Well, chances are they're not, you know,probably they're not leading like,
I don't know, New York'sbiggest JavaScript meetup, for example.
(22:38):
Maybe they are that be pretty cool.
But there are other thingsthat we can be looking at
and you're not necessarily looking for.
Like, was it a technical community right?
So you can start to insteadlook at different aspects of what
they've been doing, for example,where they had to in college
or did they have some kind of club
(22:58):
that they were actively involved infrom a leadership perspective?
And if they can really talk youthrough that
and have a have a great story to tell,I think that's important.
The reasonwhy this matters ultimately is this
A lot of people think they wantto be in community until they're in it.
I think at least I've seen this overand over again.
Yeah.
You know, and so, like,this is one of those things where
(23:20):
especially when you're
if you're hiring for a teamthat isn't going to be huge and it's
or you're bootstrapping a team,this is I've done a couple of times now,
you're really looking for people
that already know thatlike this is their happy place,
even if they don't, you know, again,like you could have been
an organizerfor your local soccer club or whatever.
Great.
If you were in collegeand that's what you were doing,
(23:41):
and you also integrated JavaScript in toyou like writing articles about plants.
Somehow or another,all of these things come together.
We, I can work with that as,as a, as a manager
to get all of those skill sets alignedfor someone earlier in their career.
And so that's what I would often encouragecandidates to consider as well.
It's like when they're applyingfor these roles early in their career,
(24:02):
look for the things that you did,even if they're not necessarily,
you know, I look,I organized a JavaScript meet up, right?
Greatif you did that, but not a requirement.
What we're looking forinstead is evidence that you've done
enough of community leadershipand or organizing and or moderating
(24:24):
to know that you're not going to hate itas soon as things get difficult.
Yeah, yeah. It's
this is definitely one of
those jobs that's like if someone goes,Hey, I think I want to be Devra.
Yeah. You know, this isn't for everybody,right?
It's a weird, ambiguous thing.
And to your point, like,community can get messy real fast.
(24:44):
I love that, though, that
in some sense,you're looking really more for a mindset,
an approach,and a comfort with the crowd, so
to speak.
Another you know, another thing
for me,and I'm I'm not, you know, just chit
chatty stuff here, not necessarilya hard question, but I'm curious to hear
your take is having done a bit of thiskind of hearing myself before,
(25:09):
I'm always looking for somebodywho has that understanding
of how to sort of like hacka trend, right?
It's like if all of a sudden everyone'stalking about a subject
that, you know, they just go,Oh, I know what'll get attention on that.
So I'm going to pick on Nikolai Grenier,
who I hired at Typeformand is still there, as far as I know,
(25:29):
while we were interviewing
and and kind of had like a little lullbetween interview people,
I think it was like Slack had announced aa feature
around form stuff and we're like, Oh,how's that going to fit in with Typeform?
And I start getting calls one morning or,you know, messages and stuff
from like our executivesand our salespeople,
all these different people saying,Did you see this
(25:51):
this thing that this guy builtagainst this Slack forums thing?
It's so cooland I'm just grinning ear to ear.
I'm like,
because he went off and built
the thing that got everybodyin the company's attention.
And I was like,okay, that's it. You got it.
You understandthe like how to jump on something.
People were paying attention to youanyways and getting some free marketing
out of it.
(26:11):
So, you know, I'm curiousfrom your perspective that
on this set of weirdsoft skills that you're looking for,
is that a thing that you sort ofthink about? Yes.
And we're literally thinking about itthis week,
and you can probablyguess what it's about.
We we've had our
developer advocates starting to alreadyput out content related
(26:31):
to leveraging GPT APIs
inside of, say, for example,an email integration.
So like the most recent live streamon our YouTube channel
that our developer advocatesdid is around basically
working with the nihilist APIsto, I believe, send and receive emails.
But ultimately, like when you writesomething and then you want to translated
(26:56):
or localize it, you can use GPG for thatand then ultimately send that.
That's something that they're kindof broaching that topic
kind of a little bit here and there.
But I love thatwe're having open conversation about it.
And by the way, for,for the people that manage teams,
one of the really importantthings about this is
(27:17):
if you have content
creation processesthat are on a schedule that we do,
I mean, we ship a blog post into livestreams that week, which is a lot.
You've got to, as a manager, make spacefor people to have these crazy ideas
and push some other stuff out of the wayto get it out there while it's hot.
And that's something that is,you know, I'd say
(27:39):
that we're still figuring that out,but we are actively
we know that that's a thingthat we've got to inject
some more flexibility in our processand make the space for it.
The other part of itthat's really important in my mind,
it's just kind of the way I think aboutdeveloper advocates in general is they're
equal parts
(28:00):
engineer and creative.
Both of these things require
a ton of like time to focus ondeep work, to experiment,
to really get in thereand just be left alone and, you know,
let them play and ultimately
know that when they knowwhat their sort of schedule
(28:21):
is or their OKRs or whatever elsethat they will deliver on that.
But you've got to get out of their wayand let them work.
So I think kind of both of these thingsis really important
in your content process.
They need enough space to play with thingsas they come up.
Even if you are planning contenttwo months in advance, which we do.
So that's an interesting balancethat you have to strike.
(28:43):
One other facet of this that I mightrecommend folks consider is also
yes to the external trends,
whatever it may be, but also consider that
internal trends are equally as importantwith your product, for example.
So one of our developer advocateshas really been focusing
on our new onboarding flow,which we've just started rolling out
(29:05):
at Nihilist to, you know,a small percentage of our new signups.
This onboarding flow is super coolas dreamed up by our product team
and our engineering teamand our designers, which is like
you show upand you basically select a use case,
say I want to send and receive email inmy application that you pick your stack.
(29:27):
It's like I'm going to do Node in React.
Then on one sideyou get a tutorial and live kind of
like you can follow through with the codeat the same time.
Like you can export that code as a repoand pull it on down and follow along.
If you want to.
So this is obviouslyreally important for us.
And we've had the Devil teamalso super involved in this process.
(29:50):
But what's really cool about itis I've already seen before
we've even done the full launch
that our developer advocates are usingthat internal trends
and taking those little applicationsthat we can bootstrap for our customers
and extrapolating from there on livestreams already.
And it's super cool.
I mean, it helps us move faster,
but we're also like dogfeeding the experience
(30:10):
and we're just coming upwith like better ideas
with perhaps even like a nicerUI than we might have on our own.
Well, I'm going to suggest right now
that your three CS needs to be amendedwith a fourth C of creative,
because certainlya lot of what you're touching on there,
I think it's critical attributeand I totally agree with you
(30:30):
that like makes space to playand just come up with ideas.
Right.
But I also think herethat you're touching on really this
what I see is is really a more matureview of developer experience is that,
you know, if you're bringing developersonto your platform,
there's a whole lot of variables
to consider and it's not like devil'sjust going to go master that alone.
(30:53):
There's product,there's engineering, there's marketing,
everybody's got to kind ofhave the shared perspective on what makes
the experience greatfor developers, right?
But I'm curious on this topicof kind of developer experience, are there
other facets that you look at to say, youknow, gauge whether or not it's working?
Yeah.
So currently, for example,and actually let me start with
(31:15):
just affirmation of what you just saidthere, which is, you know, when, when
I joined Naylor's,
we were already startingto talk developer experience
a high leveland realized that this is something
that we needto get a lot better at it as a company.
And you know, I've heardit said in multiple contexts,
(31:36):
not just at Nellis but in other places,that if you asked ten people
what developer experiencemeans, you're going to get,
you know, 11 different answers.
And so that
maybe that's not always the worst thingas long as you're aligned on the outcomes.
Because, you know, to me,when Gleb was on,
our CEOGleb was on this podcast last summer,
(31:57):
he alluded to the factthat Devex isn't just a team
now in a large corporate environment,sure, it could be but 150 people
if we're only thinkingabout the experience of our customers
in an isolated sort of silo of fiveor ten people like that, that's trouble.
And so that's one of the thingshe was really working
on engendering acrossthe company was like, Hey,
(32:19):
we've all got to be thinking about this.
And and so for us, like we,we look at making sure
we've got an awesome solid collaborationskill across
marketing and productand engineering and design
bare minimumso that we were able to ship products
and ultimately experiences that are reallygoing to connect with developers.
(32:44):
How we know it's working.
Let's say, for example, in our onboarding,you know, like you're looking at things
like the ability for developers
to get to completion in the first placeor feature discovery, right?
That's another thing we're focusing onis just like,
are peoplefinding our new onboarding experience
and then arethey getting to the end of that and so on?
(33:04):
And so forth.
So I'd say that right nowwe're really at a stage where,
particularly for onboarding, where as weslowly ramp up the launch of this thing,
looking at the numbersand seeing what we can learn from them.
The other thing that I really likeis we're starting to reach out to folks
that got that experienceand just like offer to sit down with them
(33:26):
and ask questions about it.
Metrics are super important,
but there's something about being ableto sit down with a developer
and kind of really understand like,what were you expecting?
What are you trying to get out of this?
How did it work for you?
There's just insightsthat you're going to pull from that.
So sometimes there's going to be a bit of,let's say,
(33:51):
resistance to the notion of, oh,
this doesn't scalesitting down and talking to customers.
But of course, the reality iswe've known to talk to all of them.
But you know, early onin the endeavor, it's
really importantto try to champion for that.
And I'm really glad that we're doing itwell.
There's kind of a habit to have hereas we get through, you know, 20,
(34:12):
30 minutes of talking about a disciplineor how to, you know, to build something.
And I'm
try to be empathetic to listeners whomaybe haven't done any of this stuff yet.
And they're just going like,
I found this episode because I'mtrying to decide what I should do for Dev.
I don't really know what this is,
and you just listed off a whole lot ofthings, a whole lot of activities, right?
(34:32):
And it's like, Oh my God, I'm overwhelmed.
How do you get started?
If you had to go inand do it all from scratch?
Maybe one of my favorite questionsis how you get started.
So I think a lot of companies out theredefinitely approach developer relations
as something they feel likethey might need
but don't totally knowwhat that's going to entail.
(34:55):
And so one, I'd say approachingthis was an open mind
and talking to practitionersthat have done this stuff is important
because if you know, if your first thought
is let's do hackathonslike I would, I would
submit that you're probablynot exactly on the path to success.
So taking a more open mind about this and
(35:15):
finding folks that can help you bootstrapthis function,
the developer relationsfunction is rooted in the in the business,
so it can be easy to jump right pastthat and move into tactics
and, you know, that kind of thingthat devil does really well.
But you really want to start
by kind of focusing onwhere is this business right now?
(35:37):
What do developers needthat they're not getting currently?
And then unpack that into different areasof responsibility for that team.
So I think really if you're just like,I think I need this, but I'm not sure
what it is one you really like kind ofdo a little bit of the homework.
There's some great books out there.
I'm sure some of them have been mentionedon this podcast before, but
(35:59):
the business value of developerrelations is a great one by Mary thing.
Well, there's one called DeveloperRelations Full stop, I believe,
and it has a number of different authorson, but I won't turn around and look it up
and you know, I've seen some by slash
data as well that they do a compilationof essays around developer relations.
(36:20):
But I know it's tough,but maybe you could ask chatbots to
summarizesome of these things you're interested,
but ultimately get a wider view of whatdeveloper relations could potentially
do to your business and bring on somebody
who is willing to start at that place
and not jump straight into tactics.
(36:40):
And really,I think those are the two places
I would startto be quite honest from there.
If you've got a good person who can say,okay, this is where the businesses
where we need to go and help you definethose areas of responsibility.
After that, it's just unpackingthe tools in the belt for your specific
situation right now.
Awesome.
Yeah, I can.
(37:01):
Couldn't agree more on this one.
I guess.
Like I said at the opening,and this is just from having
lots of friendswho do Dev Patel full time.
I've dabbled,but it's never been a thing I've done
full timeas seeing how often they get sort of
feeling ambushed at some pointwhen suddenly the business goes,
Why did we do this at all, you know,and just reboots.
The whole thingfrom scratch happens all the time.
(37:24):
And I think it's because of whatyou're saying is it didn't do step one.
Why does this exist?
Why do we need it, andhow is it going to help grow the business?
Right. Yeah, I love that.
I think for Dev else out therewho don't have that scramble to get it
just for your own job security. Right.
Fantastic.
Thanks so much for sharing.
(37:45):
I think I'm loving youryour brand new forces framework
we just came up with here.
I'm obsessed with this and I think it'sgoing to make a great accompanying blog
for a lot of folks to kind of quicklylearn how this discipline works.
So thanks so much for for being openand sharing this with us.
Yeah, thanks, Jason, for having me andthanks for adding a C to the framework.
I fully endorse that and will be using itin the future.
(38:08):
Awesome. Creatives welcome
always.
Thanks for listening.
If you have a question you want to ask,look in the description of whichever
platform you're viewing or listening onand there should be a link there
so you can go submit a questionand we'll do our best to find
out the right answer for you.
(38:30):
API Intersection Podcast listeners
are invited to sign up for Stoplightand save up to $650.
Is the code intersectionand tend to get 10% off a new subscription
to Stoplight platform starter or pro.
Take a look at this episode'sdescription for more details.
When they're applying for these rolesearly in their career,
look for the things that you did,even if they're not necessarily
you know, “I look-I organized JavaScript meet up.” Right?
Greatif you did that, but not a requirement.
What we're looking forinstead is evidence that you've done
enough of community leadershipand/or organizing and or moderating
(00:24):
to know that you're not going to hate itas soon as things get difficult.
I'm Jason Harmonand this is API intersection,
where you'll get insightsfrom experienced API practitioners
to learn best practices on thingslike API design, governance,
identity, auth, versioning and more.
(00:53):
Welcome back to API Intersection.
We're bringing back an old name todaywith a new face.
So sometime just last year
we had Gleb from Nylas on
to kind of talk about the businessof kind of what they did.
Today we've got Ash.
Ash Ryan Arwin?
(01:14):
Say your name for me, sorry, AshRyan Arnwine.
Yeah, I’m the new face.
That part I was afraid to screw up. Sorry.
I usually get the name right in the greenroom, but every now and then I forget.
Sorry.
Anyways, we got Ash on.
So Ash tell us a little bit aboutyourself and what Nylas does.
Yeah, sure.
So, hi, I'm.
I'm Ash.
I am Director of DeveloperRelations at Nylas and I joined to Nylas
(01:39):
about a year and a half ago to bootstrapthe developer relations function.
So now this is an API platformthat lets you put
email, calendar and contactsfunctionality into your application.
So folks use this for thingslike extracting insights from email
or customizing scheduling workflowsand that kind of thing.
(02:01):
Lots of different use casesthat we could potentially talk about.
But the idea here, of course, is builda developer relations function
that gets developers excitedand inspired to build with our APIs.
Cool.
You know, fundamentallynow this is kind of an API aggregator
in the sense that you are making a varietyof different APIs easier to use
(02:21):
by kind of providing your own designinterface to it.
And we we covered that pretty wellwith cloud before.
I think today is really more just a yearin setting up a different program.
What are the things that you've hadto think about and set up?
And you certainly havesome past experience at this.
I think that's that's the different take.
We'll look at kind ofwhat's going on at night with us today.
(02:43):
So that'smaybe the first place to start in my mind
is the year ago you came on boardthe function didn't exist.
How do you think aboutsetting up a team to succeed?
Yeah, and luckilyI've gotten a couple of different passes
at walking into a placethat needs Devereaux or believes it does.
And then that's basicallywhere the sentence starts.
(03:05):
And you come in to starttrying to figure out what that means
when it cameto, you know, where Neelix was a year
and a half ago, we had an awesome productmarketing team and,
you know, great support and sales folks,lots of outward facing people in general.
But when it came to really startingto understand, like, what do we need to do
(03:28):
to better enable developers, betterhelp them understand what it is that we do
have that message connectand then ultimately help them feel like
they're being taken care ofwhen they're building on the platform.
There were some aspects of thatthroughout,
let's say the sales and implementation,engineering and support cycle.
But when whenwhen you start looking at, for example,
(03:51):
one of the paths that we're on atthe moment is getting to
a place as a platformwhere it's truly self-serve.
A year and a half ago we weren't.
So you would always have the high touch
white glove treatment from Nike+when integrating.
And that's amazing.
But at the same time,that's tremendously difficult to scale.
(04:12):
And I probably don't have to get into why
most of the listenershere would know that.
So how do you start to build out
developer education
pieces where people can come in and reallywithout having to talk to somebody
or knowing a phone number of somebodyat Nihilist, if they don't want that,
they can just build?
(04:33):
And how do you ultimately make surethat they even know
who we are in the first place?
If it's not someone directly reaching outthrough some sort of sales mission?
Again, that'sa super valuable part of what we do.
But we also needed to go biggerand really kind of blow up in the top
end of the funnel,
if you will, to enable developersto find us and ultimately to succeed
as they started kicking the tires onwhat our APIs can do for them.
(04:56):
So those were kind of the openended questions.
When I started out about a yearand a half ago,
had tremendous amount of supportfrom around the organization.
And yeah, we're about a yearand a half into that journey.
So you kind of mentioned like,you know, this sort of brand recognition
piece and I almost would sort of reframethat is just building
street cred with developersis kind of the way I heard you say that.
(05:20):
But I think all of this, what you're
sort of enumerating through in my mindand this is just from years of seeing
folks go into devel and find themselves inprecarious situations is sort of
you have to justify why the role existsand why it brings value to the business.
And i thought that was interestingthat you're touching on.
There were customer folks, customer facingfolks before trying to deal with this.
(05:45):
Do you see it that this booststhe capacity of sort of those support
customer success, whatever other functions
at some point?
Yes, although I wouldn't draw necessarilya direct line.
You know, if there's athere's certainly a Venn diagram there
and we'll be figuring outsome of that stuff continually.
But at the same time, like let'slook at it, for example, just like people
(06:07):
knowing that nihilists existsin the first place
when they have a problemthat we can solve.
One of the main things we really wantedto focus on early on as a small team,
as a team, kind of getting up and runningeven internally at the company,
was focusing more on what can we do
that has the capacityto be high leverage activities.
(06:27):
And so for example, like
a lot of times
and I certainly had this when I firstjoined, we'd be like going out,
meeting different people in the companyand saying,
Oh, so you're going to be our hackathons?
Guy And you know, that's pretty typical.
So I'm used to hearing that as a responseto developer relations in the beginning.
But quite honestly, no, that wasn'twhat we wanted to started at all,
(06:49):
you know, And the reason is it's justincredibly resource intensive and all,
you know, sort of meanings of the wordresource to do things like that
and then to turn aroundand prove some sort of result.
It's a valuable activity at some point,but that's really not
where we needed to start,
where we needed to start was really arounda couple of different things.
(07:10):
One was
we had a sort of
discovery issue, if you will, where
let's just say the organic traffic
at the time wasn't what it could be,especially for the developer audience.
And part of that just had to do withwe didn't have the content out there.
So really starting to figure outhow can we bring on
some developer advocateswho are super creative, great at writing,
(07:34):
greatto kind of putting their ideas together
and communicating them in a waythat get developers interested.
So we've had, especially over the past
six months, just a tremendous
interaction and partnershipwith our SEO team
on the growth marketing side.
And it's been incredible.
So we're just really excited about that.
(07:56):
At the same time, let's say, for example,
a developer
has found us, they knowthey want to do something with our APIs.
Maybe they have a use caseand it's one thing to have
marketing contentthat speaks to the purchaser persona
or the decision maker,but it's totally different to sort of
have content out there that would also
(08:19):
help the developer connect with whatthe possibilities are inside of our
our APIs to give them some fodderfor things to consider.
So we focused a lot at the outseton, you know, doing things like blogs,
going out and doing livestreams
on both YouTube and LinkedIn
and ultimately building outthis catalog of live
(08:41):
streams that the developer advocateshave done over time.
Yeah, I, I believe for quite some time
that endeavor all like content's kingget that part right.
Everything else isnice to have. And I feel like
the kind of COVID
period really kind of killed off
a lot of live eventsthat have struggled to come back to life.
(09:04):
So I feel like now more than ever,that's super relevant
because you're talking about,you know, people
like, good at writing understandSEO. Like,
you know, workshops,all this kind of stuff.
It's all content creation, right?
So that's an interesting onefrom a skills standpoint for folks
who are looking to hire,seems like priority one, right?
(09:26):
So I would agree with that.
This is a this is a fun thingto get to chat about actually,
because like recruiting endeavoris like such a hard thing to do.
Oh yeah.
And why is it hard?
Well, at first, as a hiring manager,I get to go on a journey
with the recruiterthat I work with, wherever that context is
(09:48):
and or wherever, wherever thecompany happens to be typically, you know,
while you might have recruitersthat specialize in hiring engineers,
because a lot of times you're doing that,especially in, you know,
maybe the before times it was at scale.
Whereas with several teams,you're typically not hiring
that frequently.
(10:09):
Not the sameas like in engineering organization.
So that means we get to talk abouttalk to the recruiters
first about what is it,what is it that we're looking for?
My take on this and I know there are
multiple takes on this out therein the universe when it comes to dev role.
But for me, all other things being equalwithout any other data
(10:30):
in terms of what the role is or whatthe goals are or anything like that,
what I'm going to focus onor is what I ended up calling
and pardon me for having an acronym here,but what I ended up calling the three CS,
which is I'm looking for coding ability.
That one's going to be controversial.
But in, in my situation every time, it'salways been a requirement.
(10:52):
I'm also looking for contentcreation ability
and sometimes a track record there.
If we're looking for a senior or aboveand also community engage ment experience.
So happy to dive into any of those.
But typically you're looking forthose three things
and one of them kind of coming backjust to, to the events.
(11:13):
Part of the question for just a moment,one of the things that I found
is really niceabout not having to, let's say,
have that sort of X percent travel
requirement baked into every job
description is thatit makes your hiring more inclusive.
We've been able to bring people onwho quite frankly
(11:36):
couldn't travelfrequently for different reasons.
And, you know, whether it's familyor whatever else it might be
and and that feels awesome.
So because there's a there's a role therefor someone like that who,
you know, there
there are somewherewe can find the best person,
wherever they are,in a remote environment.
And then we don't have to likeput them on the road constantly.
(11:57):
And so that helps them kind of like
feel comfortable raising their handand saying, Yes, I too can do this role.
Yeah, for sure.
I love the three CS thing
that's actually really simpleand straightforward and makes sense.
So I think we already touched on contenta couple of different ways there.
I guess from, you know, you said codingis, is one of those which seems
(12:20):
kind of obvious if you're in developerrelations that you got to have something.
But I guess do you look for a particularsort of spin or flavor or,
you know, I'd imagine, for instance,you don't want to
go find somebody who spent the lastten years building some, you know,
stupendousgiant backend for a massive platform
and then go, okay, go write samplesall day.
(12:40):
Right. Like, how do you approach that?
Totally. Well.
And so coding in the contextof also the content in the community
will often filter that, right?
Because one of the reasons I'm
really looking for, even for someone,let's say they're going to be a new grad,
you can still look for community
leadershipor engagement in some of their background.
(13:02):
Typically, if someone's been spendingten years building out a back end
and is super deeply expert in that,
if they have tried at all to, you know,
do the contentand do the community pieces of,
you know, chances arethey're going to realize that
that's not what they want to spend timedoing anyways.
So in some ways, having that balanceof these different areas is helpful.
(13:24):
In that way, it helps people self filter,
especially as they start to interrogatetheir own background and say,
Well, where is my history of,you know, creating content in some way?
Whereas my historyof community engagement,
when it comes to the coding piece of itthough, you know, if someone's
like an excellent developerand happens to want to move into
(13:47):
developer
relations, we can absolutely make spacefor that.
I found, for example, in the pastthat, you know, people like solutions.
Engineers
can be excellent developer advocates
because they know how to interfacewith customers.
They understand what it means to have
a business need for building on an APIso they can be really awesome,
(14:09):
you know, as long as they're finekind of going into, let's say,
like the more ephemeral aspects of whatwe're going
to need them to dokind of at a community level.
The other things that we might be lookingfor, though, in terms of codes are,
you know, you know, look at your whateveryour API happens to be offering.
And in our case, like,you know, at Nihilist, we have for SDK,
(14:29):
we've got Node.js, Java, Ruby and Python.
So bare minimum, we'dlike to have coverage on that if we can,
if we're going to be creating content.
And that's all I know.
Jobs, for example,which is kind of my personal fave
and none of the other
ones, then that kind of sendsa weird mixed signal to your customers
and you want all of your SDKis being a first class citizen.
(14:51):
So what does that mean?
Well, it doesn't mean that
we're looking for a developer advocateswho are an expert at all languages
because one that's not really possible.
And two,maybe that's an unreasonable expectation.
But if we can find somebodywho is really good in one area and shows
a healthy amount of curiosity in another,that might be enough to go with.
(15:14):
And occasionallyyou'll just get really lucky like we have
and find, you know, one or two folksthat happen to be like
really into the ideaof being a polyglot developer.
And that can work out really well.
But I would say that likethat would be setting the bar too high.
If that's all you're filtering on.
Generally you're looking forsome depth of capability
in in one particular language or stack
(15:37):
and natural curiosity and abilityto learn across the other ones.
Yeah, So this
sounds like a smart way to think about,especially if there's SDK support and
I guess community being that third leg,
you know,I know for me, like I try to always
get a recognition within an organizationthat yeah, like customers are important
(16:01):
but especially if you have developercentric things and open source,
there is a community of developers aroundwhat you're doing that may be customers,
but you have to have a community voicefor it.
I guess
in some cases,especially if it's open source, it's easy
to go find that track record, easyto find how they've engaged.
(16:22):
But in other more kind of like, say,partnership API
kind of things, harder to see that stuff.
So how do you look at gauginglike how successful someone's been,
you know, building communities?
Well, I think it'sgoing to be a mix of different things.
And I've operated in two
different contextsof leading developer relations
(16:44):
where the core product wasn't open source.
But that doesn't mean thatwe can't do things in open source.
So that's one areawe'll focus on for sure.
But I suppose, like I like thatyou called out, for example,
that customers, not your communitynecessarily, and that gets so easily
overlooked that I find myselfsomewhere in the back of my head.
(17:07):
There's a talk on thisthat I just never get around to doing,
but basically exploiting the that
the concept of different
kind of outward facing stakeholdersor sort of external stakeholders.
Right.So you're going to have, for example.
Yes, of course you have your customersand they're super important.
You also have a community.
There's naturally going to besome overlap there.
(17:30):
But just because I think it'sreally important to remember that
just because someone'sa customer doesn't mean
that they want to be involvedin your community effort.
Some definitely don't.
And it's important to remember thatand use language that reflects it.
But I would also add that, for example,there's probably a couple of other areas
that we should be thinking aboutthat would again have some overlap here.
(17:51):
One is your audience.
So again, what's an audience compared to
your customer basecompared to your community?
And there's an overlapping circle here.
The audience could be potentially waybigger depending on how you handle
building that audience.
And you know, cultivating it.
The last one I'd probably addis contributors.
(18:13):
So contributors are in some ways,I think again, like you could
maybe put them into community,but to me, like that's just like a special
like next level sort of thingthat you really want to take care of.
And so, you know,there are things out there
and developer relationslike for example, I've, I've seen the,
the orbit model talked about whereit's like different sort of circles
(18:38):
and people are cominglike closer and closer to the center.
This is a good thing usually.
And that'sprobably I like that view of the world.
But there's also
part of me that thinks likemaybe these circles are not all sort of
sort of nested Russian dolls,if you will, but there may be some overlap
and then some partswhere the orbits kind of
are elliptical, so to speak.
(19:00):
So, yeah,
we can in any one of those areas,whether it's customers,
whether it's audience, whether it'scommunity or open source contributors,
measure effectiveness in different waysdepending on what we want to focus on.
One thing, though, and I'm happyto get into details on any one of those.
(19:22):
One thing I would call out though, is in
both of the companiesI've worked leading dev role
we have, even if the core productwasn't open source, we have had success
engaging developers through open sourcewith our own projects in different ways
and you just don't want to overlookthat possibility as having
(19:45):
some way to get out there into the opensource community, even if it's not like
exactly traditionallywhat we might think of is as open source.
There's some really good stuff you can do,and I think
that's somethingthat all developer relations leaders
and even like folks onthe teams should really be thinking about.
(20:05):
Yeah, well said.
Boy, I feellike I poked Bear on that subject, man.
You're fullfull of great advice is awesome.
Yeah.
I mean, I think like at stop lightyou know
certainly like the idea of,Hey, let's have a podcast.
It's like, all right, but
straight up upfront, very clear,like this is for the community.
(20:26):
This is not a place that we're doingproduct demos
and, you know, doing stuffcustomers want to hear.
We have webinars for thatand all those things. That's fine.
But like this is where, you know,we get folks together
who are in our circle and,and just share and learn from each other.
I was, you know, still my favorite way to,to describe a basic
(20:47):
principle of how to approach communityfrom Adam to vendor.
One of my priorco-hosts on here is Teach Don't Sell.
Like it's as simple as that, right?
It's just not a place to sell thingswhen we're doing community stuff.
But I guess bringing it
back again to like looking forhow to build a team to do this.
You kind
of touched on the open source bit,but what if there is no evidence, right?
(21:11):
What are the kinds of maybe questionsthat you're probing out
that tell youwhether or not this is somebody
who's going to be a good communitybuilder?
Right.
So do you mean for candidateswhen you're looking at hiring?
I'm still trying to get threeor three CS there deep CS, So yeah.
Oh, I love it. I love it.
So yeah, I honestly,
(21:31):
I don't know that I've been in a situationwhere I could necessarily
get to a place
where someone who had hadno kind of involvement
in, especially as a community leaderof some kind,
I would have felt comfortablebringing them in.
(21:53):
And that's not to say that that's a hardtruth about developer relations,
but it does definitely speakto my previous experience.
And so let's let's
kind of blow open the doors a little bit,though, on what that experience can be.
And at the extreme end, I think, you know,like people coming out of college
(22:15):
and going straight into developerrelations is a thing they can do.
Now, if we were having this conversationfive years ago, even, maybe
we wouldn't have seena lot of evidence of that, surely.
But let's say if you're looking to hirea new grad, what could you be looking at?
Well, chances are they're not, you know,probably they're not leading like,
I don't know, New York'sbiggest JavaScript meetup, for example.
(22:38):
Maybe they are that be pretty cool.
But there are other thingsthat we can be looking at
and you're not necessarily looking for.
Like, was it a technical community right?
So you can start to insteadlook at different aspects of what
they've been doing, for example,where they had to in college
or did they have some kind of club
(22:58):
that they were actively involved infrom a leadership perspective?
And if they can really talk youthrough that
and have a have a great story to tell,I think that's important.
The reasonwhy this matters ultimately is this
A lot of people think they wantto be in community until they're in it.
I think at least I've seen this overand over again.
Yeah.
You know, and so, like,this is one of those things where
(23:20):
especially when you're
if you're hiring for a teamthat isn't going to be huge and it's
or you're bootstrapping a team,this is I've done a couple of times now,
you're really looking for people
that already know thatlike this is their happy place,
even if they don't, you know, again,like you could have been
an organizerfor your local soccer club or whatever.
Great.
If you were in collegeand that's what you were doing,
(23:41):
and you also integrated JavaScript in toyou like writing articles about plants.
Somehow or another,all of these things come together.
We, I can work with that as,as a, as a manager
to get all of those skill sets alignedfor someone earlier in their career.
And so that's what I would often encouragecandidates to consider as well.
It's like when they're applyingfor these roles early in their career,
(24:02):
look for the things that you did,even if they're not necessarily,
you know, I look,I organized a JavaScript meet up, right?
Greatif you did that, but not a requirement.
What we're looking forinstead is evidence that you've done
enough of community leadershipand or organizing and or moderating
(24:24):
to know that you're not going to hate itas soon as things get difficult.
Yeah, yeah. It's
this is definitely one of
those jobs that's like if someone goes,Hey, I think I want to be Devra.
Yeah. You know, this isn't for everybody,right?
It's a weird, ambiguous thing.
And to your point, like,community can get messy real fast.
(24:44):
I love that, though, that
in some sense,you're looking really more for a mindset,
an approach,and a comfort with the crowd, so
to speak.
Another you know, another thing
for me,and I'm I'm not, you know, just chit
chatty stuff here, not necessarilya hard question, but I'm curious to hear
your take is having done a bit of thiskind of hearing myself before,
(25:09):
I'm always looking for somebodywho has that understanding
of how to sort of like hacka trend, right?
It's like if all of a sudden everyone'stalking about a subject
that, you know, they just go,Oh, I know what'll get attention on that.
So I'm going to pick on Nikolai Grenier,
who I hired at Typeformand is still there, as far as I know,
(25:29):
while we were interviewing
and and kind of had like a little lullbetween interview people,
I think it was like Slack had announced aa feature
around form stuff and we're like, Oh,how's that going to fit in with Typeform?
And I start getting calls one morning or,you know, messages and stuff
from like our executivesand our salespeople,
all these different people saying,Did you see this
(25:51):
this thing that this guy builtagainst this Slack forums thing?
It's so cooland I'm just grinning ear to ear.
I'm like,
because he went off and built
the thing that got everybodyin the company's attention.
And I was like,okay, that's it. You got it.
You understandthe like how to jump on something.
People were paying attention to youanyways and getting some free marketing
out of it.
(26:11):
So, you know, I'm curiousfrom your perspective that
on this set of weirdsoft skills that you're looking for,
is that a thing that you sort ofthink about? Yes.
And we're literally thinking about itthis week,
and you can probablyguess what it's about.
We we've had our
developer advocates starting to alreadyput out content related
(26:31):
to leveraging GPT APIs
inside of, say, for example,an email integration.
So like the most recent live streamon our YouTube channel
that our developer advocatesdid is around basically
working with the nihilist APIsto, I believe, send and receive emails.
But ultimately, like when you writesomething and then you want to translated
(26:56):
or localize it, you can use GPG for thatand then ultimately send that.
That's something that they're kindof broaching that topic
kind of a little bit here and there.
But I love thatwe're having open conversation about it.
And by the way, for,for the people that manage teams,
one of the really importantthings about this is
(27:17):
if you have content
creation processesthat are on a schedule that we do,
I mean, we ship a blog post into livestreams that week, which is a lot.
You've got to, as a manager, make spacefor people to have these crazy ideas
and push some other stuff out of the wayto get it out there while it's hot.
And that's something that is,you know, I'd say
(27:39):
that we're still figuring that out,but we are actively
we know that that's a thingthat we've got to inject
some more flexibility in our processand make the space for it.
The other part of itthat's really important in my mind,
it's just kind of the way I think aboutdeveloper advocates in general is they're
equal parts
(28:00):
engineer and creative.
Both of these things require
a ton of like time to focus ondeep work, to experiment,
to really get in thereand just be left alone and, you know,
let them play and ultimately
know that when they knowwhat their sort of schedule
(28:21):
is or their OKRs or whatever elsethat they will deliver on that.
But you've got to get out of their wayand let them work.
So I think kind of both of these thingsis really important
in your content process.
They need enough space to play with thingsas they come up.
Even if you are planning contenttwo months in advance, which we do.
So that's an interesting balancethat you have to strike.
(28:43):
One other facet of this that I mightrecommend folks consider is also
yes to the external trends,
whatever it may be, but also consider that
internal trends are equally as importantwith your product, for example.
So one of our developer advocateshas really been focusing
on our new onboarding flow,which we've just started rolling out
(29:05):
at Nihilist to, you know,a small percentage of our new signups.
This onboarding flow is super coolas dreamed up by our product team
and our engineering teamand our designers, which is like
you show upand you basically select a use case,
say I want to send and receive email inmy application that you pick your stack.
(29:27):
It's like I'm going to do Node in React.
Then on one sideyou get a tutorial and live kind of
like you can follow through with the codeat the same time.
Like you can export that code as a repoand pull it on down and follow along.
If you want to.
So this is obviouslyreally important for us.
And we've had the Devil teamalso super involved in this process.
(29:50):
But what's really cool about itis I've already seen before
we've even done the full launch
that our developer advocates are usingthat internal trends
and taking those little applicationsthat we can bootstrap for our customers
and extrapolating from there on livestreams already.
And it's super cool.
I mean, it helps us move faster,
but we're also like dogfeeding the experience
(30:10):
and we're just coming upwith like better ideas
with perhaps even like a nicerUI than we might have on our own.
Well, I'm going to suggest right now
that your three CS needs to be amendedwith a fourth C of creative,
because certainlya lot of what you're touching on there,
I think it's critical attributeand I totally agree with you
(30:30):
that like makes space to playand just come up with ideas.
Right.
But I also think herethat you're touching on really this
what I see is is really a more matureview of developer experience is that,
you know, if you're bringing developersonto your platform,
there's a whole lot of variables
to consider and it's not like devil'sjust going to go master that alone.
(30:53):
There's product,there's engineering, there's marketing,
everybody's got to kind ofhave the shared perspective on what makes
the experience greatfor developers, right?
But I'm curious on this topicof kind of developer experience, are there
other facets that you look at to say, youknow, gauge whether or not it's working?
Yeah.
So currently, for example,and actually let me start with
(31:15):
just affirmation of what you just saidthere, which is, you know, when, when
I joined Naylor's,
we were already startingto talk developer experience
a high leveland realized that this is something
that we needto get a lot better at it as a company.
And you know, I've heardit said in multiple contexts,
(31:36):
not just at Nellis but in other places,that if you asked ten people
what developer experiencemeans, you're going to get,
you know, 11 different answers.
And so that
maybe that's not always the worst thingas long as you're aligned on the outcomes.
Because, you know, to me,when Gleb was on,
our CEOGleb was on this podcast last summer,
(31:57):
he alluded to the factthat Devex isn't just a team
now in a large corporate environment,sure, it could be but 150 people
if we're only thinkingabout the experience of our customers
in an isolated sort of silo of fiveor ten people like that, that's trouble.
And so that's one of the thingshe was really working
on engendering acrossthe company was like, Hey,
(32:19):
we've all got to be thinking about this.
And and so for us, like we,we look at making sure
we've got an awesome solid collaborationskill across
marketing and productand engineering and design
bare minimumso that we were able to ship products
and ultimately experiences that are reallygoing to connect with developers.
(32:44):
How we know it's working.
Let's say, for example, in our onboarding,you know, like you're looking at things
like the ability for developers
to get to completion in the first placeor feature discovery, right?
That's another thing we're focusing onis just like,
are peoplefinding our new onboarding experience
and then arethey getting to the end of that and so on?
(33:04):
And so forth.
So I'd say that right nowwe're really at a stage where,
particularly for onboarding, where as weslowly ramp up the launch of this thing,
looking at the numbersand seeing what we can learn from them.
The other thing that I really likeis we're starting to reach out to folks
that got that experienceand just like offer to sit down with them
(33:26):
and ask questions about it.
Metrics are super important,
but there's something about being ableto sit down with a developer
and kind of really understand like,what were you expecting?
What are you trying to get out of this?
How did it work for you?
There's just insightsthat you're going to pull from that.
So sometimes there's going to be a bit of,let's say,
(33:51):
resistance to the notion of, oh,
this doesn't scalesitting down and talking to customers.
But of course, the reality iswe've known to talk to all of them.
But you know, early onin the endeavor, it's
really importantto try to champion for that.
And I'm really glad that we're doing itwell.
There's kind of a habit to have hereas we get through, you know, 20,
(34:12):
30 minutes of talking about a disciplineor how to, you know, to build something.
And I'm
try to be empathetic to listeners whomaybe haven't done any of this stuff yet.
And they're just going like,
I found this episode because I'mtrying to decide what I should do for Dev.
I don't really know what this is,
and you just listed off a whole lot ofthings, a whole lot of activities, right?
(34:32):
And it's like, Oh my God, I'm overwhelmed.
How do you get started?
If you had to go inand do it all from scratch?
Maybe one of my favorite questionsis how you get started.
So I think a lot of companies out theredefinitely approach developer relations
as something they feel likethey might need
but don't totally knowwhat that's going to entail.
(34:55):
And so one, I'd say approachingthis was an open mind
and talking to practitionersthat have done this stuff is important
because if you know, if your first thought
is let's do hackathonslike I would, I would
submit that you're probablynot exactly on the path to success.
So taking a more open mind about this and
(35:15):
finding folks that can help you bootstrapthis function,
the developer relationsfunction is rooted in the in the business,
so it can be easy to jump right pastthat and move into tactics
and, you know, that kind of thingthat devil does really well.
But you really want to start
by kind of focusing onwhere is this business right now?
(35:37):
What do developers needthat they're not getting currently?
And then unpack that into different areasof responsibility for that team.
So I think really if you're just like,I think I need this, but I'm not sure
what it is one you really like kind ofdo a little bit of the homework.
There's some great books out there.
I'm sure some of them have been mentionedon this podcast before, but
(35:59):
the business value of developerrelations is a great one by Mary thing.
Well, there's one called DeveloperRelations Full stop, I believe,
and it has a number of different authorson, but I won't turn around and look it up
and you know, I've seen some by slash
data as well that they do a compilationof essays around developer relations.
(36:20):
But I know it's tough,but maybe you could ask chatbots to
summarizesome of these things you're interested,
but ultimately get a wider view of whatdeveloper relations could potentially
do to your business and bring on somebody
who is willing to start at that place
and not jump straight into tactics.
(36:40):
And really,I think those are the two places
I would startto be quite honest from there.
If you've got a good person who can say,okay, this is where the businesses
where we need to go and help you definethose areas of responsibility.
After that, it's just unpackingthe tools in the belt for your specific
situation right now.
Awesome.
Yeah, I can.
(37:01):
Couldn't agree more on this one.
I guess.
Like I said at the opening,and this is just from having
lots of friendswho do Dev Patel full time.
I've dabbled,but it's never been a thing I've done
full timeas seeing how often they get sort of
feeling ambushed at some pointwhen suddenly the business goes,
Why did we do this at all, you know,and just reboots.
The whole thingfrom scratch happens all the time.
(37:24):
And I think it's because of whatyou're saying is it didn't do step one.
Why does this exist?
Why do we need it, andhow is it going to help grow the business?
Right. Yeah, I love that.
I think for Dev else out therewho don't have that scramble to get it
just for your own job security. Right.
Fantastic.
Thanks so much for sharing.
(37:45):
I think I'm loving youryour brand new forces framework
we just came up with here.
I'm obsessed with this and I think it'sgoing to make a great accompanying blog
for a lot of folks to kind of quicklylearn how this discipline works.
So thanks so much for for being openand sharing this with us.
Yeah, thanks, Jason, for having me andthanks for adding a C to the framework.
I fully endorse that and will be using itin the future.
(38:08):
Awesome. Creatives welcome
always.
Thanks for listening.
If you have a question you want to ask,look in the description of whichever
platform you're viewing or listening onand there should be a link there
so you can go submit a questionand we'll do our best to find
out the right answer for you.
(38:30):
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