Issue 49

Welcome! 👋

The term "community manager" is a confusing one these days. I held that title for almost a decade at various companies, learning to hide my badge at conferences, waiting to give a contact my business card until we had established a good rapport.

Why, you might ask? Because there's an odd belief that Community Managers don't actually know what they're talking about. "Nice to meet you... but I have a question. Can you find someone else who will actually know how to answer it?" was a refrain that I grew to dread. So I learned to challenge their misconceptions, asking them to pose the question to me first, proving that I knew more than enough about the inner workings of our technical product to help ~90% of the time. And the other 10%? I wasn't afraid to say I didn't know the answer... just like our engineers didn't have all the answers.

This week's issue of DevRel Weekly is surprisingly heavy on the Technical Community Manager side of things -- delving into the core of community building, the various skills that Community Managers bring to the table, what to do with community data after it's been gathered, the importance of creating a mission and vision statement for your team, and more.

As you dive into these articles, remember that we're all here for the betterment and enablement of the community. We all bring different skills to the table, each one unique and particularly effective in one way or another. Let's figure out how to work as a cohesive team in 2019 -- finding others whose strengths fill in for our weaknesses, working together for a better environment for our technical communities, and building a stronger DevRel industry as a result.

-Mary (@mary_grace)

Tidbits 🕔

The Core of Community Building

Community building, at its core, is about people and relationship building. Online or in person, this is the core skill, everything else about managing a community is learnable.

-Adrian Speyer

How do you Define Community in a Business Context?

Last week, David Spinks asked folks to define community in the context of business. He got a lot of great responses and has turned it into a thread for people to contribute to. Here's one of my favorite definitions from the thread:

All business IS community. Your customers are your first members and how you treat/grow with them can build your community and your business. Many people make a distinction but your earliest customers are your first believers and your latest customers are pulled in by community.

-Ketan Anjaria

Rehearsal Tips

DevRel and speaker top tip - always take an HDMI cable with you when traveling for a conference so you can rehearse in full speaker mode using the hotel TV!

-Jim Bennett

What Problem are you Trying to Solve with your Community?

Here's one of the most useful things we do in consultancy community surveys.

We ask: "what is the one problem you would like the community to address which it doesn't already?"

We then segment the answers by newcomers, intermediate members, and veterans.

It's incredibly tedious to go through and classify hundreds (or thousands) of responses, but by the end you have an exact feel for what the community wants and THE EXACT WORDS THEY USE TO DESCRIBE THEIR PROBLEMS.

Knowing the exact words is incredibly useful

Quick tip from experience. Don't do this entire process at once. Just do one member segment at a time (SurveyMonkey makes this pretty easy).

Better yet, do it with colleagues and compare the results. Then you won't be alone in knowing exactly what members want.

-Richard Millington

Minimum Lovable Product

Software Engineers set the bar at MVP (minimum viable product) while Developer Advocates have it at MLP (minimum lovable product)

-Doran Sherman

Forget the Details and Go For Relatable

When I give a talk, I assume the audience does not know a lot about the subject. I try to frame the problem in a context that is relatable, instead of focusing on details. Storytelling rather than a technical narrative gives me a better chance of getting buy-in from the audience!

-Natalie Panek

Define Your Purpose & Desired Outcomes

Don't build to build. Define the purpose and desired outcomes aka business or organization outcomes that will keep your program healthy aka resources such as money.

Otherwise you end up w/white noise that doesn't help you OR your members.

-Shannon Emery

Digging into "The Essential Guide to Developer Marketing"

I finally started reading The Essential Guide to Developer Marketing over the weekend. It's a collection of essays edited by the fine folks over at SlashData and edited by Nicolas Sauvage and Andreas Constantinou. I’m interested to see the overlap between the principles in this book and those in DevRel as well as any common ground with The Business Value of Developer Relations.

I've started a thread to make observations and share thoughts about the content. Feel free to follow along!

DevRel Advice Column

Question for my #DevRel(ish) friends who are in large R&D orgs - what's a good process for conference attendance that's transparent & scalable, equal opportunity with some governance?

-Sharone Zitzman

Pinning Inspiration Daily

If you're anything like me, looking at Twitter or checking my email first thing in the morning can get the day started off on a bad foot. But this recent tweet from Gather Community Consulting piqued my interest:

Want a steady flow of inspiring content about community building, strategy, leadership, research, and design? We're now pinning inspiration daily.

That's something I can get onboard with on a daily basis!

Tangibles 🤓

Kicking the Hornets’ Nest (and other recent DevRel talks)

Don Goodman-Wilson gave a talk at the recent DevRelCon London which had more than a few of us squirming in our seats. He covered everything from #devrellife (and the impact that it has on us as well as those around us) to gray areas in ethics and closed by talking about keeping our motives straight when we're serving two masters -- our community and our company. If you only have time to watch one conference talk, watch this one.

Craving more information after watching Don's talk? As more talks from Fall 2018's conferences are released, I'll continue to post them to this Toby collection.

Ecosystem of a Community Manager

The next time someone questions the difficulty of a Community Manager role or asks just what skills are necessary, point them to this inforgraphic. This is an English translation of the original infographic, translated with permission from Alfredo Vela. It's a fascinating mix of skills and concepts, all of which are used by Community Managers and other DevRel Professionals on a daily basis.

Looking for more information about what makes a good Community Manager? Check out this post from Nurhidayah Ekbal about the importance of community management, as well as what makes a good community manager.

Thanks to my amazing Content & Sponsor Strategy Manager for creating this translation!

Stop Wasting Your Community Data, It’s Your Most Powerful Tool

If you don’t know what you will do differently because of the data, it really doesn’t matter what data you collect.

Bold statements from Feverbee this week, but they're not wrong!

Collecting the data isn't enough. It's what you do with the data that matters.

Data analysis should be the most powerful tool in your community professional toolkit.

Follow The North Star: Creating a Community Team Mission Statement

If you're having trouble convincing stakeholders of the value that you and your team provide, perhaps it's because you haven't taken the time to figure out what makes you unique. In this guest post for CMX Hub, I talk about the importance of creating mission and vision statements for your team. These two small statements become your measuring stick, ensuring that all of your goals, projects, and day-to-day activities create value for your company.

10 ways you could derail your community

Talking through our mistakes is just as important to talk about as our strategy and "best practices." How else do we learn from each other?

Jono Bacon has two decades of experience to pull from and he's noticed patterns among community managers and companies. In this video he addresses 10 of those common mistakes and how to avoid them.

Developer Advocate, What is Your Status?

It's easy to lose ourselves in to-do lists, simply moving to the next thing rather than evaluating what the next thing should be. With Jeff Carpenter's Learn, Build, Share framework, we can more easily balance our time between learning new concepts, building helpful tools for our community, and sharing that knowledge via conferences or written content.

He's taken it one step further with this week's post, applying this concept to status updates. By organizing his team's status updates into these four questions, he's made their status updates more effective and productive, ensuring that his team is focused on the right tasks at the right moments.

Are you building your community with the most valuable people in mind?

Adrian Speyer, Head of Community at Vanilla, encourages us to build our communities around the most valuable people. While I imagine most of us agree with this statement in principle, how many of us actually understand what this means and more importantly, how to figure out who these MVPs are? He walks you through these questions and more in this recent post.

Tangents 🐰

How open source software took over the world

Many of us are familiar with the phrase software is eating the world but so often when articles address how software is making a difference in our world, they skip over the community aspect. As a result, when I read this Techcrunch article I was happy to see the community credited with the success of open source software.

Much like how a good blog post or a tweet spreads virally, great open-source software leverages network effects. It is the community that is the source of promotion for that virality.

The article also talks about how the community winds up being a product manager as well as QA department:

It asks for enhancements and improvements; it points out the shortcomings of the software.
It will identify bugs and shortcomings in the software; test 0.x versions diligently; and give the companies feedback on what is working or what is not. The community will also reward great software with positive feedback, which will encourage broader use.

This is one of the primary reasons why I advocate for Community and DevRel teams to be positioned under Product if they can't be an independent entity. But no matter what department you report into, be sure to take these points to heart. It's not just the software that's taking over the world, it's the communities that are flocking to that software, which means it's up to you to take care of those communities so that they can continue to prove just how valuable they are.

Storytime 📚

DevRel Podcasts

As the year gets rolling, the tape recorders are rolling again as well, which means I've got a few more DevRel-related podcasts for you today.

Star Wars Fan Club - The Get Together. Meet Dan Madsen who grew the Star Wars Fan Club to 180,000 members, the magazine to more than 500,000 subscribers, and hosted Celebration I, bringing tens of thousands of Star Wars fans from around the world together for the first time.
Developer Advocacy Roundtable - Command Line Heroes. Developer advocates play important roles in open source communities. We brought a few of them together to explain how and why they do what they do.
Mary Thengvall on the Business Value of Developer Relations - DevRel Radio. Yours truly talks with the hosts of DevRel Radio about the recent release of my book as well as what it's like to be a DevRel consultant.

Events 📆

Developer Relations Events

New year, new events! Check out our list of upcoming events to start your year off right. Know of an upcoming event that other DevRel Professionals would be interested in? Let me know!

Interested in speaking at a DevRel event? Jono Bacon is once again running the Open Collaboration Conference at Open Source Summit North America, and the CFP is open!

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Advocate

JFrog is looking for a technical advocate to join the growing JFrog Japan KK team and help us grow the JFrog DevOps community in Japan.

In this role, you will act as the voice of our R&D team, connecting JFrog’s innovation with the development community in Japan. You will also act as the liaison for our community to effectively deliver feedback to the JFrog technical and business teams.

Take center stage and act as the voice of JFrog in Japan! You are about to become a rockstar and an influencer, online and in real life. People in the development community in Japan will want to hear what you have to share and people at JFrog will take your feedback to heart.

Jobs 👩‍💻

Developer Relations Jobs

The most annoying part of looking for a new job is simply finding the right ones to apply to while slogging through all the false leads and click bait. Well anguish no more my friend, we’ve done all that annoying work for you and have a list of over 140 jobs for you to apply to!

Developer Avocados 🥑

Avocado Community Guidelines

I did a quick search for "avocado community" on Google yesterday... looking to see if I could find a relevant article for this week's issue. Imagine my surprise when an open source project popped up, highlighting their Contribution & Community Guidelines page. Disclaimer: I have no idea the quality or continued maintenance of this project, but if you're looking for a set of tools and libraries to help with automated testing, go check out Avocado!