DEV Community: Jamie Langskov

Tactics for Building Developer Awareness: Part Two

Jamie Langskov — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 06:13:00 +0000

II. What tactics can we use to influence awareness with developers when launching a new product or service change to an existing product or service?

This is tactically quite a bit simpler because, in theory, you're not trying to convince developers to try something new. Instead, this can be an exercise in "winning the hearts and minds" of developers who already are committed to your product.

If they are current users of your product, they have already opted in to be contacted by you, which means that a targeted campaign of educational resources and consistent communication should suffice.

What about data privacy?

Firstly, I am not a lawyer.

Okay, now that we got that out of the way...

I worked with our development, legal, compliance, and marketing teams at SAP to implement GDPR compliance measures at SAP for our community of about 3 million members, so I have a good deal of experience with this.

But again, I am not a lawyer, so take this as practical commentary and not legal guidance.

Under GDPR, you do not need additional consent to send operational emails to individuals that you have a current business relationship with. This means that people who are using your service or product have, by virtue of signing up and agreeing to the Terms of Use, given consent for you to contact them about that product or service. This does not give you carte blanche to email them promotional garbage, but it is a general umbrella under which most product-focused communications to your existing user base are covered.

Consult your legal team if you have any questions on this one.

Back to Tactics...

Remember those questions we asked in Part One of Awareness? Here's a refresher:

Who does this change impact?
What is the change?
When is this change occurring?
Where is the change reflected?
Why is the change required?

These are the questions that we need to answer for our developers. So, let's tackle those in a sample Awareness campaign.

Based on a true story
In this simplified scenario, the product team is rolling out an update to the navigation menu, which will change where many of the commonly used features reside in interface. They have documented the changes, including a mapping from the old menu locations to the new ones, in their lengthy product documentation. However, we both know that your developers are not religiously reading the documentation or checking in for changes proactively, so it's on you as the developer advocate to influence adoption of these changes.

Note: In this example, the change only impacts the developers and not any end users who the developers will also need to support through the change. That scenario would be more complex and require you to build more enablement tools and resources, but let's stick to a simpler example for now.

Step One: Information Gathering

In this first stage, you need to get your bearings. You'll need to do some investigating and gather information from a few different stakeholders.

The Product Team
This team is responsible for the change. But, you are now responsible for carrying the torch forward, so it's best to know as much as you can about the terrain you're walking into. This is the team to ask about any potential landmines (things they know are going to piss off the developers). They are also the ones who should provide all the answers to the above W questions. Make sure you fully understand the answers to those questions before you set out to educate others, including who your escalation contact will be if things go horribly awry. Hopefully, this team is also able to provide you with a list of impacted users to contact. If not, see stakeholder group 2.
Product Marketing, Developer Marketing, Developer Community, Developer Experience, Customer Communications, Customer Support, Customer Success, Account Management
Your stakeholder list may contain one or more of these departments, depending on the size and complexity of your organization. Connect with anyone who is responsible for communicating with your developers on a regular basis on behalf of the company. Hopefully, you are regularly in touch with these folks any way to ensure that you are communicating in a unified voice and a well-orchestrated cadence. This group will help you determine what channels, formats, and timing work best in the context of other planned communications to ensure the proper amount of attention is paid to your announcements. They can also, likely, provide you with a contact list if your product team does not have that information.
Influential Voices
Whether it's your CTO or a particularly vocal village elder in your community, there is someone (or several someones) that generally leads the sentiment of the developer community. This person is respected and trusted for their authenticity, their experience and expertise, and their impartiality when it comes to good or bad news. Hopefully, as a developer advocate or community manager, the group of people who fall into this category also includes you. But, it doesn't hurt to bring in the big hitters when the going looks rough. If the information you've gathered tells you that this change is going to meet some resistance, get some powerful allies in your corner before you head out into the field.

Step Two: Make a Plan by Working Backwards

Now that you know the answers to the 5 Ws, you can start to map out what the next couple of months looks like -- because, yes, this is going to be at least two months for a major change. Start with the launch date - in this case, we'll use a single launch date, but in some cases, there are progressive or phased rollouts. Work backwards depending on how much time it's going to take for you to create various assets (videos, tutorials, blogs, etc.) and schedule a regular cadence of communications.

Studies show that humans generally need to receive a message approximately seven times before they retain it.

Use What You Know About Your Developers

Each developer community is slightly different. As their advocate, it's a crucial part of your role to know what works for them, what their preferences are, and how they like to engage with you and with the rest of the community. Things you will need to know:

How do they prefer to learn
What channels do they prefer to use for communication
When are they most active and ready to engage with your community
What makes their jobs easier or harder
How complex is the ecosystem that they are working in
How hard will it be for them to implement this change

The answers to these questions will help you to determine:

How far in advance do you need to first communicate this change to them
Which channels (i.e. email, Slack, social media, forums, support portal, developer hub, etc.) will reach the majority of your audience
What supporting resources you'll need to create

Here's an example schedule:

Timing	Channel	Topic
T-60 days	Forum Post	FAQs and answers
T-60 days	Initial Email Notice	5 Ws answers, link to FAQ
T-45 days	Forum Post	5 Ws answers, screenshots of new vs. old interface, link to FAQ
T-30 days	Email Reminder	5 Ws answers, link to FAQ
T-30 days	Developer Hub	Demo video walkthrough, comparing old and new UI, highlighting common tasks
T-21 days	Email Reminder	5 Ws answers, invite to informational webinar, link to FAQ
T-14 days	Email Reminder	Upcoming virtual event, 5 Ws answers, link to FAQs
T-10 days	Live virtual event	Demo of new UI, live Q&A
T-7 days	Email Reminder	5 Ws answers, link to event recording, link to FAQ
T-2 days	Email Reminder	5 Ws answers, link to FAQ
T-1 day	Email Reminder	5 Ws answers, link to FAQ
T-0 days	Email Reminder	5 Ws answers, link to FAQ

This is a high-touch change management plan for high impact, major changes. Not every feature or change requires this level of engagement.

Next time, on ADKAR for DevRel...

How do you get developers to want to make a change? What if it's not up to them, or worse, it's an unpopular change? How do we get them to do it any way?

Tactics for Building Developer Awareness: Part One

Jamie Langskov — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 23:15:00 +0000

What is Awareness in the ADKAR change management framework?

As the first stage in a person's experience of change, awareness simply means that they know the 5 Ws about the change:

Who does this change impact?
What is the change?
When is this change occurring?
Where is the change reflected?
Why is the change required?

How does this apply to developer relations?

The translation into the DevRel world is much easier when we are implementing a change to an existing tool. These will be the first questions that a developer will ask when you tell them a change is coming.

However, I would encourage you to consider that launching a new product, service, tool, language, or process is also a change management opportunity. Humans operate on a continuum of behavioral patterns and adding something new is no different than changing something that currently exists when it comes to our response to change. Ultimately, we are trying to influence behaviors that we consider desirable.

I. What tactics can we use to influence awareness with developers when launching a new product or service?

This is a great opportunity to partner with other parties at your company who also talk with developers, e.g. your developer marketing, community, education, and product organizations. Using digital marketing tactics like strategic paid advertising, can reach a new audience of developers. Community tactics, like partnering with existing developer communities (e.g. those built around programming languages) to cohost content, events, and other value-add activities and resources, can help you build loyalty and affinity for your brand, while also raising awareness of your offering. Educational content that, again, provides value without asking anything in return, can help your developers learn and grow in their own careers, while also getting them familiar with and loyal to your ecosystem. This could be videos, live streams, tutorials, podcasts, or blog posts.

Working with visible people (call them thought leaders, influencers, or whatever yucky corporate word you want...) in the industry you are targeting is one of the most powerful ways to gain awareness amongst your target developers by power of peer advocacy. Be cautious though - developers have a well-developed bullshit detector and will not follow the lead of someone who is thought to have "sold out" to a brand. Give those visible people free access to your product and if they are happy, ask them to share with their friends. Don't pay them. (Sorry, not sorry, "professional influencers.") The minute money changes hands, they lose their credibility.

The community approach to working with developers

Developers can tell when they are being sold to and most of them strongly dislike it. To take advantage of many of the more "traditional" digital marketing tactics, you'll need to be very careful about your messaging and delivery.

Go to where your audience is. When you are looking to get the attention of developers, you need to go where they are already motivated to hang out. Places like here on dev.to, HackerNews, Reddit, and StackOverflow are common haunts for many developers. BUT, each of those communities has their own set of cultural standards. Use vendor or advertising spaces for advertising. Don't encroach on other spaces with pure ad content. You will only breed bad feelings towards you and your company.
Be authentic. When you enter spaces that belong to developers, you must respect the culture that already exists there. Don't create a new account and immediately start spamming the channel with links to your site. Don't show up to a meetup and start hyping your company when you promised to do an educational talk.
Give freely and selflessly. The best way to win devs to your side is to be a real human, contribute meaningfully and selflessly, and build partnerships. (This is why community-building is a long-game, but that's another post...) Remember, this is the population who embraces free open source software. Devs deeply believe in the power of the community tide to lift all boats.
Speak in their language. In addition to adapting cultural norms within developer communities, you'll need to use the right language to ensure that you connect with your audience in a way that feels natural to them. This likely means working with your marketing team to do some user research to understand the persona you are trying to attract, what their daily life is like, what is important to them, and what problems in their lives cause the most pain. Ideally, you will be sharing a solution with them that will help them to reduce or eliminate that pain.
Lay the foundation. Hopefully, your product is something that you feel passionate about - it makes community work so much easier. By joining groups where people are talking about the problem that your product solves, you can organically enter the conversations happening there and start to lay the foundation for introducing the community to your product. Once you become a recognized presence in the community, you can start to introduce the idea behind your product.

Ready to launch

When you are ready to ask for the community that you've built to help with launching your product, they will be more ready to partner with you. The interaction will feel more like a partnership and less like a transaction and you both will be enriched by it. In the earliest stages of launching your product, you can even tap them to help you build to their needs through early feedback (at Unusual, we call these Design Partners). When it's ready for a broader audience, ask these early adopters to be active advocates by sharing their experiences with their own networks.

You can also ask partner communities to feature your product in their newsletters and spotlight articles by creating ready-to-go content (again, focused on education) and events. Even though you're technically promoting your product at this point, you are still delivering value for free. The main difference is that now you are asking them to get hands on and try the product out.

And lastly, request that tech publications like TechCrunch feature your company by building a strong narrative on how your company is different from others in the space and what makes it newsworthy.

Well, wait a minute. How do I grow adoption on a change or new feature to an existing product?

Ah, yes. I may have gotten a bit derailed there, reader. Forgive me. But now you know how to launch a net new product the community way, so...you're welcome!

Back to business...

Next time, on ADKAR for DevRel...

How do I make my current developer users aware of impending changes to my existing product or service?

Tactics for Building Developer Awareness: Part Two

Jamie Langskov ・ Aug 17 '22 ・ 6 min read

#community #devrel #dx

The ADKAR Framework for Developer Experience

Jamie Langskov — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 22:18:00 +0000

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague this week in one of those only-happens-in-person-serendipitous-conversations as I visited our Menlo Park office for the first time. She asked me about my background and how I got into community work. After I gave the standard resume rundown, we started talking philosophically about how I think about building developer experiences - especially in relation to my change management background. Here's the net of that conversation, which I hope will help as many of you step into developer communities, developer relations, and developer experience for the first time.

What is ADKAR?

The Prosci change management framework is called ADKAR, which is an acronym for the different stages of need a person experiences when navigating a change in their lives. This change could be work or life-related. This change could be mandated or discretionary. One thing I learned as I went through the Prosci certification course was that regardless of the change, everyone goes through every stage of this process, but the point of greatest resistance to the change is different for every person and every scenario. Here are the stages:

(A)wareness - Does this person know about the change? Do they know what is changing and when? Do they know what they need to do to make the change and how it's going to impact them?

(D)esire - Does this person want to make this change? Will this make their lives easier or harder? Do they understand why the change is necessary or beneficial?

(K)nowledge - Does this person have the knowledge of how to make this change? Do they have the information they need to successfully complete the change?

(A)bility - Is this person actively enabled to make this change? Do they have the autonomy to do so on their own or do they need permissions, tools, access, or something else to enable them to make this change? Do they know how to get those things? Are they accessible?

(R)einforcement - What is going to help this change stick? How can we help them stick with this new habit, tool, process, etc.? There is both positive (rewards) and negative (consequences) reinforcement and it can come from many places. The sources will vary depending on the situation (could be your boss, your peers, your family, the government, etc.).

So, how do we apply this framework to building a holistic developer experience?

Well, first let's start with the goal. For most DX teams, the goal is to grow adoption of your tool or product. For developers, this means creating the lowest friction experience at each of these journey points. If we reposition the framework around product adoption, the phases break down more like this:

(A)wareness - Do they know this thing exists?

(D)esire to use it - How does this make their lives easier? Why would they want to use this thing? Who do they trust to make recommendations on tools

(K)nowledge - How do they use this thing? What skills and background knowledge do they need to have to be successful at implementing this? How steep is the learning curve and are you going to help them along the way?

(A)bility - Is there a safe, low-friction way to test this tool? What access do they need to their company's systems to get a real test? Do they have to use production data or is there a full sandbox that they can use to see this tool in action? What kind of infrastructure is required to support this? Who will they need to get approvals from?

(R)einforcement - How do you ensure that this tool becomes a critical component of this developer's every day routine?

In most companies, the responsibility for addressing the needs of the developer at each of these stages of adoption lie across multiple teams, including developer or product marketing (awareness, desire), developer education or advocacy (knowledge, ability), and customer success, community, and even product (reinforcement).

In the next few posts, I'll cover some common tactics for addressing each of these questions for achieving product adoption with developers.

DEV Community: Jamie Langskov

Tactics for Building Developer Awareness: Part Two

II. What tactics can we use to influence awareness with developers when launching a new product or service change to an existing product or service?

Step One: Information Gathering

Step Two: Make a Plan by Working Backwards

Next time, on ADKAR for DevRel...

Tactics for Building Developer Awareness: Part One

What is Awareness in the ADKAR change management framework?

How does this apply to developer relations?

I. What tactics can we use to influence awareness with developers when launching a new product or service?

The community approach to working with developers

Ready to launch

Next time, on ADKAR for DevRel...

Tactics for Building Developer Awareness: Part Two

Jamie Langskov ・ Aug 17 '22 ・ 6 min read

The ADKAR Framework for Developer Experience

What is ADKAR?

So, how do we apply this framework to building a holistic developer experience?

Tactics for Building Developer Awareness: Part One

Jamie Langskov ・ Aug 16 '22 ・ 5 min read

Tactics for Building Developer Awareness: Part Two

Jamie Langskov ・ Aug 17 '22 ・ 6 min read