How to Drive User Community without Community Manager #DevRelCon #DevRel

Taiji Eddie Hagino @taiponrock Please follow me! Lecturer, University of Tsukuba Lecturer, Meijo University Senior Technical Advocate My books for low-code programming: “Hajimete-no Node-RED”, “Node-RED Katsuyo Manual” (Kogakusha) “Practical Node-RED Programming” (Packt Publishing), etc. My books for developer relations: “Developer Marketing DevRel Q&A”, “Developerʼs Career with English” (Impress R&D), etc. My books for OutSystems: “Rapid Application Development with OutSystems” (Packt Publishing) * Foreword Hairdresser Musician Software Engineer Web Designer Product Developer R&D Developer IT Architect Tech Evangelist Dev Advocate Lead Dev Community Advocate 1997 GLUONS Inc. CEO Accurate Systems SOS Factory Udagawa Office Beaux Cheveux

Agenda 1. What is a user community? 2. User communities of different natures 3. The role that vendors should play 4. What is the motivation of the participants? 5. Who and what should we do?

What is a user community?

No content

Imagine

Several User Communities

User communities of different natures

Developer(Engineer) Community • Open Community • Closed Community Enterprise Community • No licence needed • Exisiting Customer Only Community Types X X

For who? By who? Why do? The Community is…

DevRel 8 Steps Potential Prospect New Repeater Customer Member Follower Influencer ■Developer Relations 1.Awareness 2.Prospect reach 3.Trial 4.Great Experience 5.Make trust with Developers 6.Churn Prevention 7.Fun/Follower 8.Support Infuluencers

If get misunderstanding…

The role that vendors should play

Sell to the Community Sell through the Community Vendors want to… Support developers(users) Get feedback Make opportunities to collaborate Increase Advocates / Evangelists as influencer

Business Perspective Community Vendor-driven promotion Participants are mainly user companies of the products Discussions are held on issues related to business using the target products Activities are relatively closed, and many are private. Provide feedback to vendors on feature improvement requests from a business perspective Participants' goals are to make requests to vendors and to create business opportunities with participating companies

User-oriented Community Users take the initiative and vendors provide logistical support Participants are mainly individual product users (including students) and developers, and are not dependent on a company or organization We do not hold events for commercial or business purposes. We will be open about our activities and actively publish our contents on SNS, blogs, videos, etc. with hashtags. We will provide feedback to vendors on feature improvement requests from a developerʼs(or user's) perspective. The purpose of participants is to exchange information on development methods and tips using the target products, and to increase the number of friends with the same motivation

Developers are the main players in the community as DevRel

What is the motivation of the participants?

Knowledge Communication Improving Skills Connect to Vendor Business Opportunities Becoming Heroes

If Community Leader doesn't understand it...

A strong focus on the future beyond community growth

Who and what should we do?

DevRel Team has... Developer Advocate / Technical Evangelist Community Manager Program Manager Technical Contents Creator

Community managers are NOT always present DevRel Team Technical Evangelist Developer Advocate Community Manager They can drive Community instead of Community Manager Best role to drive Community Cannot be in charge of leading the community, but can provide backup and support

Awareness Trial user(developer) Active user(developer) Trust between vendor and user Fan / Follower Community is a means to an end

Anti-patterns

Marketers take charge Rampant lead acquisition events Sales is in charge Tends to call only on assigned accounts, resulting in a biased group CSMs are in charge So-called enterprise community for existing customers Anti-patterns

If tech evangelist/advocate do it…

Although affiliated with a vendor, they can see things from a flat perspective with developers and engineers No sales responsibility, so it is easy to gain the trust of users without being positionality They are technically familiar with the target products and services, so they have a high affinity with the developer community If tech evangelist/advocate do it…

Get the other departments on board!

Conclusions

Community drives are just a part of DevRel (farming) process DevRel is a seed sowing. The field may not even be plowed yet. It would be troubling to sow seeds wildly in such a situation and expect them to sprout in a short period of time. Plow the field (market development) Sow the seeds in the right places (reaching potential users) Nurture them in the right steps (event implementation, community development) Until they finally sprout (interest in the product or service) Lead the flow of events until the seed blossoms (becoming a user) Take care of it so that it does not wither (preventing churn) The DevRel job is to lead them with Tech Skills

Datadog

34 Single platform for all your observability needs

The Datadog platform 35 Containers Serverless Network Performance Monitoring Network Device Monitoring Cloud Cost Management Distributed Tracing Error Tracking Continuous Profiler Database Monitoring Universal Service Monitoring Synthetics Real User Monitoring Session Replay UNIFIED METRICS, LOGS, TRACES Observability Pipelines Sensitive Data Scanner Audit Trails Log Forwarding Cloud Security Management Application Security Management Cloud SIEM Infrastructure Monitoring Application Performance Monitoring Digital Experience Monitoring Log Management Security Watchdog AI Shared Platform Services Collaboration ● Dashboards ● Mobile ● Agents ● Notebook ● Workflows ● Open Telemetry ● Service Catalog Insights ● Impact Analysis ● Root Cause Analysis ● Anomaly Detection ● Alerts ● Correlation ● Optimizations CI Visibility Continuous Testing Software Delivery 600+ INTEGRATIONS

https://www.datadoghq.com/free-datadog-trial/

Q&A

Thank you!