Architecting Developer Relations for a New Development Platform

Developer Relations programs typically grow from platforms that have matured over time, providing the foundation for building out robust developer programs and outreach. When exploring the value of developer relations a question arises here, does developer relations have value before a platform has launched and as its features are first developed for developer and partner consumption?

In this talk we’ll explore the answer to that question, looking at:

· How developer relations should be used to define the early developer experience and product decisions.

· Methods and techniques for working in tandem with sales, business development, and marketing to define the first personas, partners, and customers.

· Defining the growth paths, operational programs, and cross-functional initiatives to drive platform success long-term.

While exploring these techniques and methods you’ll see how these concepts can be applied to build a developer relations program, at any maturity level, that is tightly tied into the core functions of the business, from product, engineering, and architecture to business development, sales, and marketing.

Transcript

1. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 1 1 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. Architecting Developer Relations for a New Development Platform Jonathan LeBlanc VP, Platform Product & Services, TraceLink linkedin.com/in/jcleblanc/
2. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 2 2 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 2 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 2 What we’re trying to answer today • Is there a purpose for Developer Relations before an external development platform exists? • What stages, operations, tools, and services can you put in place to not only set up a future developer relations program but also guide the platform forward.
3. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 3 3 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 3 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 3 Developer Relations role in a platform Questionable quotes overheard over the years • “Developer Relations works at the behest of product” • “Since the platform isn’t ready yet, developer relations can help build the platform functionality” • “Our main focus is to build interesting demos to draw attention to the product” • “We don’t work with sales” Traits of successful programs • Understand the customer & developer experience in your industry, and the challenges they currently face. • Own the broad platform integration story. • Guide the platform product, engineering, services, and sales functions forward.
4. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 4 4 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 4 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 4 The problem we were trying to solve TraceLink has built a successful supply chain digitization offering in the life science space. New products developed through the Opus platform are shifting our focus from compliance-oriented products to value-add products. This represents a fundamental paradigm shift for the company where we need to engage with customers through products that they want to use vs. have to use.
5. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 5 5 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 5 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 5 Building the foundation for the first integration and development platform. Refining, operationalizing, and identifying future growth paths. Breaking down the timeline Automating and improving time to delivery / value. Building repeatable success programs to create a delivery factory. Defining the infrastructure and processes for early programs. Setting the broader platform vision. Year 0 Year 1 Year 2+
6. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 6 6 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 6 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 6 Year 0 Initial assessment & programs
7. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 7 7 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 7 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 7 Assess the industry and target segments Company / Organization targets & OKRs: Aligned initial programs and targets based on company and organizational targets. In our case we were targeting growth beyond life sciences into broader supply chain. Industry analysis: These processes consisted of early partner and customer calls, independent research of industry processes, and targeted download sessions with sales. Segment Analysis: With an understanding of industry / customer needs, we identified who would integrate and how. These were geared around the industry problems and ways of integrating with the platform.
8. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 8 8 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 8 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 8 Assessment results: Partner operations Segment / persona prioritization target documents outlined: • Integration paths • Use cases • Functional responsibilities • Challenges • Products • Sales methods The first developer relations segment / hire. This segment set: • Onboarding stages • Standard operating procedures (SOPs) • Trackers / metrics • Program management • Training The initial partner program consisted of a cross-functional team consisting of developer relations, business management, and sales. This team set the standards for future platform partnerships. Early partner program Segment Targets Partner Operations
9. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 9 9 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 9 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 9 Assess the platform Platform onboarding: No external APIs or integration methods existed. Developer experience teams ramped up as internal engineers to identify potential integration methods for first programs. Developer journey: With an understanding of the targeted personas, map out the ideal onboarding paths that developers and partners would go through to integrate with the platform (assume all products / platform features are in place). Gap analysis: Take the developer journey workflows and assess the platform features that are missing to bring the path to fruition. This may be technology (e.g. auth methods), operations (e.g. app approvals), or any other blockers. Think cross-functionally.
10. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 10 10 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 10 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 10 Assessment results: Developer Experience Engineering Gap analysis document to help guide the product roadmap, from the customer perspective. Includes: • Problem statement (the issues) • Use cases (expected result) • Proposed solution (how to fix it) An agnostic mature platform view (from eng, marketing, business, DR, product, etc.) didn’t exist and hampered our ability to show a complete view of our multi-year goals. This included the interconnected nodes and deeper segment analysis. Platform onboarding with internal engineering opened up a path for first integrations (which later began an external channel) These methods allowed us to prototype the first integrations with early partners / products. First integration path Product 1-pagers Mature platform view
11. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 11 11 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 11 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 11 What didn’t work Initial work towards building onboarding pricing / platform access pricing, marketing strategies for new developers and partners, as well as a marketplace strategy was far too early. Pricing and marketing strategy Standardized partner agreements We revamped the existing lightweight partner agreements to onboard new partner types. With the shifting nature of our target markets this effort was put on hold in lieu of the simpler, existing agreements.
12. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 12 12 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 12 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 12 Pivot: A change in focus Refocusing on life sciences Through customer engagement, feedback, and industry analysis, TraceLink focuses on expanding within life sciences. Our primary targets are existing customers. First value-add product & APIs We have our first value-add product and initial external API offering, now what?
13. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 13 13 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 13 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 13 Year 1 Zeroing in on industry needs
14. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 14 14 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 14 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 14 Lessons in preparing for pivots The challenges that customers and the industry faces don’t change, even if your approach does. Understanding and building for customer needs / industry should be central to any development. Building your research, tools, and services around fixing customer problems means pivoting requires minimal effort. Always include a research phase to new service / tool development. Challenges don’t change Waste nothing
15. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 15 15 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 15 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 15 Building the foundation Building developer foundation: To support the growing partner program and initial integrations as we scaled, we needed an initial developer self-serve offering Operationalize new partner program: Partner onboarding until now was completely manual and hands on. The program needed to operationalize to scale. Research new program segments: As product / engineering released new product offerings we focused on defining integration methods for the platform.
16. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 16 16 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 16 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 16 Building the developer foundation (API Reference) • AsyncAPI spec driven: To support alignment with engineering efforts around internal documentation. Initial prototype targeted REST endpoints. • Centralized code & payloads: Single language code samples & separate payloads centralized in Github. First Postman collection generated. • Productized: API reference scoped and planned using engineering best practices.
17. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 17 17 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 17 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 17 Operationalize new partner program Alignment between ops & dev Shared stage operations, timelines, and assets are defined between partner operations and development. Standardization Repeatable asset generation and templates are defined for each stage (e.g. partner ops document, functional spec, workflows). Refined use cases for sales Standard workflows, use cases, and integration overviews are generated for sales operations.
18. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 18 18 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 18 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 18 Research new program segments (connectors) In conjunction with product development, our focus was to define repeatable integration methods to integrate with customers where they work for resource planning, quality management, warehouse management, etc. Research targeted: • Defining target systems: What are the top systems used (customer + industry). • Research system viability: How can we integrate and where are our product gaps? • Industry knowledge: Internal industry training sessions. Important lesson learned: When should you scope new programs / targets? During my time at PayPal I was a new manager. Our program lead would pull management into future planning sessions when we were in the middle of execution of previous targets (e.g. in the middle of a hackathon). It was an exhausting endeavor but ultimately made us one of the most successful teams in the company.
19. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 19 19 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 19 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 19 Pivot: Tight product focus New refined products New product launches zeroed in on product market fit. Previous targets became a secondary focus. Organizational / team refinement Realignment of development teams under services to support integrations. Opened up new opportunities. Developer offering refocus GraphQL became the de facto integration method to align internal and external segments. Provides a unified internal and external integration paradigm.
20. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 20 20 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 20 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 20 Year 2+ Scaling programs and operations
21. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 21 21 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 21 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 21 Operationalize and Automate Automate developer platform offerings: Taking the developer platform to the next level and adopting a north star target. Build the connector network: Using industry knowledge, build the tools and services to integrate with customers where they are. Scale the offerings: Building new onboarding paths by defining the development package offerings for external partners and developers.
22. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 22 22 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 22 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 22 Automate developer platform offerings Adopting AI tooling (Copilot, ChatGPT) we’re developing two major enhancements to the processes: • Automatic code sample generation. • Unit / test case generation. Early AI services such as AgentGPT are showing promising results for generating industry use case analysis documents and speeding assessment and workflow development. These are being explored for reducing manual assessment / use case analysis. Due to research phase during initial build, changing to GraphQL required minimal effort. Using the internal auto-generated ASyncAPI spec we extracted public nodes and auto-generated the doc build process. API Reference Code Samples Use Case Analysis
23. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 23 23 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 23 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 23 Build the connector network Adopting product and engineering development standards, and in partnership with their teams, the research from previous year led to the development of a standard connector and data transformation framework. Building the initial MVP Building the supporting tooling to reduce time to value Efficiencies where build through tooling: • Sandbox: To allow parallel development between us and engineering. • QA automation: To auto-generate QA tests based on specs. • Data transform spec automation: Using ChatGPT to auto-generate our specs.
24. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 24 24 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 24 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 24 Scale the offerings The connector templates, frameworks, tools, and test services are packaged into standard partner and developer external offerings. This permits the expansion of the partner network through new commercial paths. Packaging the internal development and efficiency tools Integrating packages as new developer onboarding paths The packages, onboarding guidance, deployment, and verification mechanisms are released as new onboarding paths through the developer portal.
25. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 25 25 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 25 © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 25 Final note: Phases of program development • Research: Understand your industry segment, customer needs, and business requirements. Define program / product requirements based on those needs and the north star end-state. • MVP: Define the minimum viable product that allows you to pressure test and obtain feedback. • Refine: Adjust based on feedback, usage, metrics, and company needs. • Build efficiencies: Define repeatable / manual processes and look at ways to reduce time investment / cost / etc. This may be through tool development or purchase, operational processes, etc. • Scale: Expand the program through scaled offerings. This may be through self-serve tooling, partners, etc.
26. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. 26 26 © 2023 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. © 2024 TraceLink, Inc. All rights reserved. Thank You! Jonathan LeBlanc VP, Platform Product & Services, TraceLink linkedin.com/in/jcleblanc/