Trends in Developer Relations with Mary Thengvall ![rw-book-cover](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FOsv6sSD8OI/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEjCNACELwBSFryq4qpAxUIARUAAAAAGAElAADIQj0AgKJDeAE=&rs=AOn4CLDXRBuqI0mJbWZ8FPNudhqz_T_gug) ## Metadata - Author: [[Certified Fresh Events]] - Full Title: Trends in Developer Relations with Mary Thengvall - Category: #articles - Document Note: Mary Thengvall, an active member in the DevRel community space joins Brian and Aaron on the DevRelish podcast. She talks about how her journalism background led to her exploring a community management and developer relations space without even realising it. She found herself building a community just by asking questions and understanding what the readers and conference attendees want. Her journey led her to work for different companies to help them with their software and was answering the same questions repeatedly, so she founded her own consulting firm as she wanted to produce content to help people answer those questions. Over time, a gap was identified in the lack of books on DevRel, which led to a call to action at a big dinner event. Four of them, including Mary, volunteered to work on it together, but as time passed, Mary found herself taking the lead on it. This led to her writing her own book on DevRel, which is a lessons-learned from the struggles and experiences that she and her team had. The aim is to provide a valuable resource to active practitioners, individual contributors, and their managers who can benefit from learning more about DevRel. ###Bullet Points: - Mary Thengvall joins Brian and Aaron on the DevRelish podcast to discuss her background and community management and developer relations. - Her journalism background led her to engage with readers and conference attendees. - Over time, a gap was identified in the lack of books on DevRel, which led to a call to action at a big dinner event. - Mary and her team wrote the book as a lessons-learned from the struggles and experiences they went through. - The book aim to provide a valuable resource to those in DevRel. ###Paraphrase 1 Mary's journey in DevRel started by accident when she found herself building a community just by asking questions and understanding what readers and conference attendees want. Having a journalism background, she was passionate about ensuring that she did not write about anything she did not know. This led her to ask a lot of questions to people she met at conferences and listen to what they had to say. Mary's perseverance to get answers is appreciated as it forms the foundation for her consultancy work and the book she wrote on DevRel, which is a guide for active practitioners and their managers. ###Paraphrase 2 Mary joined Brian and Aaron on the DevRelish podcast to discuss her journey into DevRel and her book on DevRel. Mary identified the gap in the lack of books on DevRel, and she joined forces with three colleagues to write a book on it. At the beginning of a brainstorming session, everyone had filled a page of questions, and it was useful in structuring the book. Mary became the lead author as everyone had personal commitments. Mary's book is a valuable resource for active practitioners, individual contributors, and their managers who are interested in DevRel. - Summary: The episode of DevRelish discusses the umbrella of developer relations and covers various jobs that are devrel related. The episode is joined by Mary Thengvall, who has been active in the devrel community and founded the DevRel Collective Slack channel. Thengvall explains that she stumbled into the devrel space with her journalism background and worked with various companies to create a community around their developer audiences. She also founded her own consulting firm and wrote a book on devrel, which was not originally intended to be a solo effort. One of the common questions in devrel is how to measure success. - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOsv6sSD8OI&ab_channel=CertifiedFreshEvents foreignthank you for joining us for anotherepisode of devrelish uh for those of youwho haven't watched this show before isobviously it's about developer relationsbut also the issue is like all thosejobs that are devrel related but may nothave a deferral title so we kind of wantto cover that whole devrel umbrellahowever you want to Define it um so I'm Brian uh my co-host is Aaronhereuh and we're we're joined by Marythangball uh who I'm really excited tohave because Mary I mean has I meanyou've been kind of the most activeperson in the devrel like communityspace you know like you you wrote a bookyou do the newsletter and and I thinkyou started that the devrel collectivedidn't you or you were part of the group yeah yeah there were a few of us hangingout at a conference who went okay hangon there's like five of us that alwaysgravitate toward each other atconferencescan we talk outside of conferencesbecause we need that support more oftenyes yes I totally understand that soum and and for those for those listeningwho might not know about that slack soit's the devro collective slack which isbasically you have to be a devilprofessional already um not like uh I'm seeking a job asdevrel you have to be actively workingas a devrelum to be able to join the slack and it'sit's a very active like it's very activevery supportive also like it's got thebest jobs board for different folks I'mreally active recruiting Channel yeahabsolutely absolutely yeahsomeone who pivoted in to devrel aftervarious things on Ax and it accidentally developed it was a great place for me tobe like Oh I'm not losing it this is howit is when you're when it's more likethis is an ish do I is this part of myjob I don't know what I'm doingum it's like wow this is a collectivesentiment here I feel not I feel heardinvalidated yes yes well and one of myfavorite people in the the developercommunity space is Amy Hermes andshe loves to tell the story of how wemet because I was literally listening to a podcast episode that she was a gueston with some good friends of mine goinghang on she does what I do but she doesexactly what I do wait I've never heardanyone else say exactly what I do and Ireached out to her via Twitter DM andbasically said thatand so when you can find those peoplewhere you're like wait wait hang on youget this you understand like this issolidly in the ish category but it'swhat we do and everybody else is doing it too like it's it's the best feelingit's so goodsuper yeah so thank you so much for allthe work that you do putting into thatin moderation I know that's a lot ofwork oh God yeah that Community is hugenow like it's like but it's a fewthousand people or something it'sridiculous like it legit started withfive of us and these days someone saidthe other day it was at like2500 almost 2700 like it's it'sludicrous and luckily like I'm I'mactually a little bit removed from the admin side of things there these days wehave a fantastic group of uh what wecall benevolent dictatorsum and so great group of people who arereally running the show over there andI'm I'm kind of there as aadvisor and hanging out in thebackground here and thereum but yeah it's it's grown into areally great Community which isfantasticyeah it is it is a great community andum the number you like saying there'slike 2 500 people and they're just shocking to me as as somebody who's beendoing devrel for likeI've started with like 12 13 years ago Iguess it is now I'm losing track andlike I mean I could I could practicallyname everybody who was doing devrel backthen it wasn't yeahyeahso yeah yeah exactlywhich actually kind of brings gets us toa little bit of where we want to go withthe conversation but before we before wetalk about like you know kind of Trends you've seen in devrel have given all ofyour involvement and I want a littletalk a little bit about like how how didyou get into Devon like what Drew you todevrel like what was your career pathinto thisI said cool go do this and I went uhoh okay I guess I'm doing that nowum so I actually have a journalismbackground and when I graduated from University was the same like six monthperiod that all of the newspapers werelaying off all of it writing staffbecause everyone was turning to Newsonlineum and so I wound up in the publicrelations department at O'Reilly mediawriting press releases because it wassimilar enough to the journalism skillsthat I had that I kind of went okaythat'll that'll work for now it's a joblet the economy settle out and let's seewhat happens and and what comes fromthatand having that journalism background I was very passionate about like I don'twant to write about thingsthat I don't know so I need to goresearch these things which waseverything from likeI don't know uh what is Hadoop and whyare these animals on the book covers andwhat are these different programlanguages and how do I understand whatI'm writing a press release about andwhy do people care about these thingsand all of that and in the midst oflearning all of those things I got toknow a lot of the people who were reading the books and attending theconferences and started asking a lot ofquestions about like hey how how are wedefining what books we're writing nextwhat topics are at the conferences whatconferences we hostand the more that I ask those questionsthe more people internally kind of wentwell we've got you know the the editorswho are out in the communities and theconference chairs who are out in thecommunities I'm like great but do wehave people who arewho have that holistic picture ratherthan it just being well I focus on this you know little niche of of thisindustry and I focus over here and thosetypes of things and I I like to say Ibasically asked enough questions andannoyed enough people as the like 25year old on staff that someone finallywent fine go go do that thingand so I wound up finding myselfreporting to our CEO who is LauraBaldwin and she was like here's yourbudget for the year you report to mewhat title do you want figure out whatyou want to do go get the answers to those questions and then we'll evaluateit at the end of the year and see ifthis is something we should actually doand I was like cool thanksum whatso I I called up the like three otherpeople that I knew who kind of didsimilar things and went I don't knowwhat the hell I'm doinghelpum and so I legit like hit the road andtraveled and talked to people and would spend like a week in New York and thengo spend three days in Boston and thengo spend a couple days in Philly andlikego through our database of reviewers andConference speakers and authors and belike hi I'm going to be here can I treatyou to coffee can I treat you to lunchcan we go out for drinks and would justsit down with my little notebook andliterally just sit there and like listenand take notes on everythingand then on my flights home I'd go okay hang on this person yeahyou said that yes yes I'm like laughingbecause this is my current desktopbecause I there was an engineering demoat all hams today so yep yep that's myyep conference stickers on the back yesyes yes and I still have that pile ofnotebooks at home because I can't getmyself oh no those are those are gold solike that's like you're never Pride Ihave I never go back to them but but I'malso not ever getting rid of themum but then I would click my CD collectionexactlyyeahthe box of wires that is also just softoh yeah that I don't know where half ofthem go to but I have no idea whatyou're talking about yeah whateveryeah yeahum but yeah so I take that that feedbackand that information about hey you knowwhere are you getting information whatwhat blogs are you looking at whattrends do you see and write up a report and send that around to the relevanteditors and Conference chairs and thatwould then at times be used to definelike what topics are we doing next andwhat are we looking at and who are wegetting to speak at conferences andthings like that and so that kind of gotme into this whole like oh we're kind ofbuilding a community around this but I'mlistening to them I'm getting feedbackfrom them and other people are nowunderstanding that that feedback isincredibly helpful and so that's kind of how I stumbledinto the whole like Community Managementdeveloper relations spaceWithout Really knowing that it was aspace or that a thing was building outof thatum and then since then I've worked for ahandful of different companies uhworking with their developeruh audiencespeople why did I lose what the word wasthere communities people who use theirsoftwarebut then also I I took a couple years offuh2017 to 2019um and ran my own consulting companybecause as I was working for thesedifferent companiesI was answering the same exact questionsthat I've been answering for years myfriends were all answering the samequestions they had all been answeringfor yearsteams were getting laid off with nonotice because they couldn't answer someof those questions or weren't given theopportunity to answer those questionsright and honestly I just got tired of constantly fighting for like this is whywe should existand so instead of continuing to fightthat on a one-on-one basis I went noscrew it I'm gonna found my ownconsulting firmI'm gonna produce content that's goingto help other peopleanswer the questions that I wish I hadhad resources around when I was gettingstarted I'm going to talk to a varietyof companies I'm going to build up this portfolio of people that I've workedwith and in doing so really try to helpnot only myself for future jobs but alsoeveryone else have more of thatFoundation to lean on to say no no hangonhere's the things that we do here's whywe exist here's how we can make yourcompany your product whatever it isdifferent from others here's thedistinguishing factors here's the thevalue that we really bring to the tableand so I think to this day I still struggle with peoplebeing like Oh but you're you're theexpert and I'm like no no no no no Ijust learned from all of the mistakesthat we all made and that I mademultiple times and I was determinedenough to get the answers out there sothat other people don't have to so likeI'm still learning every daybut it's just you know there's a few ofus like you were saying Brian who havebeen involved with this for long enoughto go Oh Hang on we're all doing thisand we really shouldn't be can we fix that somehow yeah so that we can breakthat that cycleI know some of those common questionslike how do you measure devrel right ohmy God I can I if I had a if I had adollar for every time that was broughtup on the slide you could retireexactly I mean yeah yeahI was just laughing because like thewhole thing is like that was literallywhen I you were creating your content or consultancy when I entered into it sothank you because you're so nice toGoogle that I came up and I was likeyeah what do what is my job title whatdo I do but I mean the whole questionstill answered that was literally what Ihad a given presentation today on AllHands was yeah why why is Aaron going toall these conferences yes so yes rightyeah so yeah which brings me to you youthen wrote the book that answers thatquestion yeah it tell us tell us alittle bit about your book sure so uh Insider story on writing thatbook it was not supposed to be just mewriting itum we actually started with four of usand it started as a conversation at aconference rightum so there was a an editor there Louisewho's brilliant and fantastic and nowactually works for O'Reilly who hadpulled aside a few people in a like bigdinner we had all pulled together waslike hey what what topic should we beshould we be writing about next and Julie Gunderson was like Deborah there'snothing on devrel we need something ondevrel like their stuff on community butwe need we need to fill this Gapand Sir Louise was like great you'llwrite it and Julie was likeno but I'll write it with other peopleand so she pulled in uh Jason Yee andthen Nathan Harvey and then I rememberwhich one of the three of them said ohand Mary could do this too and Louise was like great the four of you willwrite this book let's get a proposaltogetherand Nathan Harvey literally walkedbehind me Pats me on the shoulder andgoes I'm so excited to work on this withyou and walks away and I was likewhat are we working on togetherI have no idea what you're talking aboutbut the awesome thing was that betweenthe four of us we kind of sat down anddid a big brainstorming session aroundwhat topics do we need to cover whatquestions do we know we have to answer um what are the common things that therearen't scads of blog posts about alreadyright and by the time we did that breakdump and then kind of went through andwent okay these kind of go into thiscategory and this goes herethat was the point at which everyoneelse kind of started going oh hang on Ihave this going on in my personal life Ihave this going on with work I don'tactually think I have the time to dothis and I went okay well I have theoutlineI have at that time the company that I was working for had had given me theirblessing to take one day a week to writeso I was likemaybe I can figure this out like as longas I can rely on the three of you for alot of you knowfeedback and questions along the way andam I going about this in the right wayand all of that and they agreed andsupported me wholeheartedly the entireway which was fantastic I could not havedone it without themum but yeah so little Insider scoop onhow that book came to be um but it was really aLessons Learned and things that that weall had struggled with a lot when wewere getting started and again reallywanted to get out there in a way thatwas understandable not only for peoplewho were active practitioners and andindividual contributors doing this jobon a day-to-day basis but also somethingthat they could hand to their managersand be like lookI know you don't understand what I'mdoing I know you don't necessarily want to sit and get a lecture from me on aweekly basisdo you like to read you can read thisinstead like here's here's third partyinformation right whichfor whatever reason leaders tend tolisten to people outside of the companymoreso like it gives you not only somethingthat you can use to to back up whatyou're doing but also some a resourcethat you can give to to management tohopefully read through and and betterunderstand what's going on so that youaren't having to answer those questions yourself day after day week after weekum and I it'sincredibly uhoverwhelming at times but also I'm sograteful that we accomplished that goalbecause I still you know it's five yearslater almost five years later and Istill have people coming up to me beinglike okay I read this again and this allstill fits and it works really well andthis is what I learned this time when Iread it I'm like okay good because Ivery much wrote it with the the hope that selfishly I wouldn't have to writeit again in two yearsum and so like didn't mention a lot oftools didn't specifically you know namedrop things but it was a lot of thetheory and practice andhere's the questions to askum which makes me laugh because apressreached outearlier this week and they were like heyyou want to write a second edition and Iwas like nopethanks for askingcool I know that feeling I I every the first time I wrote a book I was like I'mnever gonna do this again and then I gotconvinced to do it a second one and I'mlike I'm absolutely never gonna do itagain[Laughter]so yeahyeahit's not a money maker that's for sureI had someone one time tell me like ifif you have to write a book do it ifit's a like oh it sounds like that mightbe fun it might be something I want to do someday like nobut it's it's definitely it'senjoyable at times it's a lot of hardwork at times it requires a lot ofsupport and encouragement for peoplearound youum but I wouldn't I wouldn't havechanged that I'm glad that it's outthere I'm glad that it's been so helpfulit'sso incredibly rewarding to hear thatpeople use it and continue to use it andthat it's it's helped make a differenceand that wasthat was the sole goal that I had so I'm glad that it's doing thatyeahand sorry you were gonna say somethingAaron good oh no I was just like that'sgreat because like I barely making I dothe nanowrimo and like I think I'vecompleted it twice and like it's it'shard it's like it's like and yeah it'snot quality content like coming from ajournalism background oil I'm going ohthis one there was some I just have tohit the damn 50 000 words limit names100 100 now you can just like uh you know like use chat to your teethit's perfect I mean you're playing withGoogle bard yesterday and it didn't knowthere was an e in ketchup so there'syour fun factyeah there you go yeahyeah I have questions yeah if you ask itjust catch up haven't eaten it it didnot pick it up so there you gorightthere's examples of it thinking two plustwo is five and making an argument that two plus two is five not barred all ofthem yeah so yeah come on come on notnot perfect you're just buried from therobe I'm like honestly can you guys likemy taxes mess you know so claiming doingInsurance calling my health careprovider can like we train robots forthat stuff train it for the executivefunction things that if you can take allof that off my plate yeah cool remindersfollows up please just handle it pleaseyes yes absolutely absolutely make dinner do my laundryyeah unfolding oh my God the folding yesplease can we get robots to do the Foleyyeah come on robots faster nowumbut I think in theand where do you see as like it's gonethrough a couple waves because you'vebeen in it you've seen a couple wavesyou've written a book on it how what isthe biggest thing that you're like wow Idid not see that one coming or somethingthat you did expectthat was like we really missed the markthere that is different throughout the years that's a great questionumI think one of the most interestingthings that I saw was you know aroundthe time that I wrote the book was waswhen everyone was starting to say oh weneed a developer Advocate and you'd belike great why and they'd go wellbecausebecause we need a developer Advocateyou're like cool what are they gonna dobe a developerative advocate you're like okay you don't understandwhat you're asking for you don'tunderstand why you need it right none ofthat is is represented in this desireand so that was not unexpected but Ithink we started to get more of thatinformation out thereand thenlike midpandemic slash post pandemic like middleof like 2021 and then into 2022there were so many jobs available like yeah I the newsletter that I do I have arolling job board that we keep and Iwant to say we had upwards of like 3 000jobs on there or something stupid at onepoint and it was like hang on how longare we keeping these on here for it itwas like three months at a time and likeokay no this is this is ridiculous likeit just absolutely exploded and youstill had some of them that were like weneed a Dev Advocate to write content and answer support for questions and takecare of our forum and build a communityand speak at all the conferences and getus to be known in the entire industryand you're like okay you still don'tcompletely understand what you're askingfor but there were also a lot ofcompanies that reallyknew like there were solid jobdescriptions out thereand it was an overwhelming number of ofcompanies looking for developerrelations professionalsum obviously we've seen that go down since the the economy changedum there's still I think more thanI would have expected previouslyum but it's alsoit's been a fascinatingI think turnas we've seen some of theTrends around when companies areintegrating developer relations um where so many of them now arestarting to say you know look we haveeight people at the company and we wantto officially launch our projects orproducts in six months we need a devrelperson here now it's like okaycool like you might not know exactly whyand you might not have a fully definedwhat their day-to-day role is going tolook like but companies are reallystarting to understand we need someone in here early to make sure that thedeveloper experience is good to makesure that we've got a strongrelationship with the with the companiesthat are trying this out with our earlyusersand to see thatstarting so early in the startup processnow I think has been really rewardingbecause I think a lot of companies arefinally starting to seelike this is this is how wedifferentiate ourselves this is how wemake sure that the community sees that we're serious about getting feedbackthat we're serious about listening tothemum and it doesn't always work rightthere's there's trial and error likethere always has been but I think that'sbeen one of the most interesting thingsthat I've seen is that change from likeoh no we can't do community stuff untilwe've got you know 100 people in thecompany or until the community is bigenough that we need someone managing itor things like that to like no no weneed you here to actually work on thatand and start to build that which hasbeen I think really really good yeah I've seen that too like in fact Ijoined a couple of companies for overthe pandemic that were I was the firstseveralum you know and and they were supersmall in fact that right now I'd saywhen I see when I see the stuff comethrough you know what jobs are open andkind of you knowum and it seems like those are thepeople actually right now everybodywho's big is shrinking and if they'reand they're shrinking their devrel teamsbut it's this the small companies that have their seed money or or series a andthey're like they really need to growfast and they they're like those are theones that are hiring right now yeah yeahyeah absolutely absolutely the otherthing I've noticed at least in my timedoing it and coming like the five or sixyears part like the adoption andintegration of product on teams is onlymore and more happening because like Icame through it through the route ofbeing a product manager and thought Iwas like I was gonna I'm a media productmanager that's what I went to gradschool for just kidding sure did not do that um butlike now I joke that part of my mostvaluable part of my job at the last tworoles that I've held has been breakingthe product like I'm the first person tobreak it yes yes which is great forproduct and I don't think like companiessee more receptive to that ever beforelike I think there's definitely beentimes in the past where I've been likemaybe we should think about this productI'm like no no you're you're incommunity you're Deborah you don't youdon't get to give feedback on productsand now it's likecan you please come to our productmeetings can you talk more about ourproducts can you yeah yeah help us figure out what the next product is andI think that's a very welcome things butagain for many it requires a differentskill set and yeah Community or productFocus several is different than like sayyeah an education focused Deborah attimes sure sure or an awareness focusedseveral right yeah and I think that'shaving that seat at the table issomething that I've seen a lot morewhere you know the first coupleorganizations that I was with likeO'Reilly I think was a different Beast because I was defining the role as I didit which felt like you're building a caras you're driving which is not a goodthingum but the couple companies after thatit was difficult because I was you knowan individual contributor reporting to amanager who reported to a director whoreported to a VP who reported to ac-suite person and so it was like by thetime I gave feedback about what I washearing it had to go through five otherpeople before someone was like oh hang onyeah maybe we should do that thingwhich barely happened right where nowpeople like oh hang on okay what are youhearing from communitywhat are you being in the force whatpattern are you noticing but whatadditional items are you interested inand so I feel like we're given thatability to or given the space and thethe time to give more of that feedback and when when we are giving thatfeedback then it's better received thanit has been in the pastum and you still might have to strugglewith theumlike how do I get thisprioritized properly or things like thatbut it's at leastheard and and received a little bit morewhich is good yeah I still don't know Inever there's enough time in the daysI was I brought upum Roselle's comment about she doesn't knowwhich what her focus is because I don'tthink I've ever really had a focus I'vealways said like my feeling and havingbeen a lot of different places is whenwhen it's done right it's a two-waystreet it's not just yes like when whenfolks want devrel just to be like outthere blasting their message it's likeit's just it doesn't work right I meanyou're not you gotta do for thecommunity to get from the community andit's like you know soum you know and and also because the devil is often like in their Terencepoint the first person to break stuffbut also like the one who's talking topeople who are like having thoseproblems they're talking to developerswho are using the product and you cancome back and you're like hey I'vethey're telling me this and they'retelling me that and so yeah thecompanies that aren't as receptive tothat inbound stuff from Deborah I thinkare losing a lot of the value of it yeahwhat what should our split between you know engaging with people internally andengaging with users externally be and Iwas like 50 50. people are like no butno but I can't I can't do that I'm notdoing my job effectively and I'm likecool but if you're not engaging withpeople internally as much as you areyour community members your users yourcustomers externally how do thoseinternal people know what you're doinghow do you show them that that'svaluable how do you communicate to themwhat you're hearing from peopleexternally right and so I still maintain that needs to be 50 50. you have to berepresenting the company you have to berepresenting the communitybut you need to be able to do both ofthose and I agree Brian with what youwere saying around like I don't know ifI've ever had a very specificthis is the only thing that I'm I'mresponsible forum I have akind of triangle view of things that Iput out a couple years ago where youknow the the three primary things that I see that we're focused on are awarenessenablement and engagement so do peopleknow that we exist that our product canbe out there and and help and that we'rehere and can helpum are people able to use the productare they enabled to to get started arethey enabled to contribute are theyenabled to be a part of the communityall of that and then are people actuallyengaging with not only the product butthe community as well and I think whenyou're a small teamyou're doing bits and pieces from allthree of those right there is no distinguishing between them there's nosaying oh I'm only focused on awarenessand it's interesting because asAaron as you said in chat theorganization grows but then also as theprogram matures I think that Focus cancan shift and changeum at a really interesting experiencelast year with the team that I'm incharge of at kamunda now where you knowwe hit a point where our community isincredibly strong which is somethingthat I never take for granted um but we have a really strong Communitybut we're needing to you know expandinto other communities expand to othertopics within Tech and so figuring outhow much of my team's time should befocused on that expansion versus makingsure that the onboarding experience isgood versus contributor experience beinggood versus engaging with the people whoare most engaged with us like we had ateam of 13 and even with that many people wewere constantly going okay hang on wheredo we spend most of our time how do wedo all of these things we're being askedto dowe post generically about processautomation do we post specific you knowdeep dives into this part of thecomponent for this particular you knowgroup of people who are using this thisthing on a day-to-day basisand we wound up splitting the the teamupand it was like that was something thatI asked for I asked for additional Focus I asked for you know hey do we need tobe working on all of these differentthings or like we've got a really strongproduct marketing team that is fairlytechnical compared to most productmarketers that I've known can we movethe awareness Branch over to them andmaybe take one of the dev Advocates andmove them over there they're moreinterested in that high level technicalside of things that might bring peoplein and get them more interested in theproduct in the future but it's not theDeep dive here's how you do x with kamunda kind of a dealwe moved developer experience over tothe the engineering team because theywere far more focused on the workingwith those engineering teams ondocumentation and the onboardingexperience and things like that and sothe team now is six of usbut we are far more focused on the likehow can we make things better for thepeople who intend to use kumunda inproductionor are using camunda in production so that's the you know enablement side ofthings so a lot of that feedback a lotof the you know hey we're we're stillsponsoring events but we tend to sponsorevents where people already know usrather than focusing more on the top offunnel awareness side of things and thenengaging with and keeping those thosemost engaged community membersinterested in giving back interested inour products interested in learning moreand that reduced Focus has been huge for the team as far as like we know whatwe're working on we know what our goalsare we know where we're focused and sobeing able to have that even though it'sa smaller team has been fascinating tome because I think so often we go ohwell but we need more people we need abigger team we need to be able to youknow serve more people and help morepeople with a bigger team and it's likewellyes that can be helpful but if we aren'treducing that that Focus if we're continuing with the huge amount ofthings that we're doingdoesn't matter how big your team isthere's always going to be things thatwe're dropping because there's alwaysmore that you could doabsolutely the triangle I think issomething I've definitely relied on alot and that's actually how like a lotof our tasks are structured that youread about it's like you think about itand but it does like it provides ahierarchy ofyou know I know on our teamwork team oftwo I refer directly to the head ofcommunity and then we work very like cross-functionally so we're technicallyinto marketing but work with engineeringa lot so like my day is very muchI before this I was messaging some ofour front-end Engineers being like letme people are struggling with our frontend let's figure it out yeah like Ithink that'sthe context switching is so importantbut having at that in a that Focusallows me to know okay if I don't getsomething done because it feels likethere's always something I'm not gettingdone at the end of the week I have noidea where the date is yep what gets droppedyeah yeahit's it's funny the meeting that I wasin immediately before this we were justtalking through that of like okay ourcommunity Summit was last week and theentire team this week is like who am Iwhat am I doing what are my prioritiesthis quarter how are we halfway donewith the quarter like what is happeningand so taking that beat to go okay stopfor a second what did I initially say I wanted to getdone this quarteris that still realistic based on all ofthe interrupt driven tasks that happenin the weeks leading up to Summitand if it's not realistic anymore that'sfine but let's redefine what that lookslike for this second half of the quarterso that we don't have that pile of 20different things staring Us in the faceevery morning and keeping us from beingable to focus because we're sointimidated by those 20 things right sotaking that time to reevaluate and and re be more realistic rather than thewell I got I gotta get all 20 of thesethings done in the next six weeks so I'mgoing to work 60 hour weeks to make thathappen like no yeah we had toreprioritize to make the other thingshappen before Summit that means we needto re-prioritize what's happening now inorder to be able to focus on what arethe most important things to hit ouractual goals well and I think totallyfeeling that because I've went throughthe same thing I was out last week at a big and now I'm like okay what was Iwork why did I need to get down on thatright yeah yeahum and I love this question that Juliauh saidman seedman put up in the chatapologies if I pronounced that wrong butone of the things that I absolutely loveand like she writes about do you thinkthat metrics can help Isis in thatregard and like yes but also in mythoughts like in I worked at a communityanalytics company previously so I weactually were rethinking okay Twitter isdown we were using what is the metrics that are important to us if this ismoved and so we've been thinking a lotabout that and actually having a lot ofconversations with that internally andespecially with all these like socialplatforms are changing like uh Mastodonit was actually huge for us when we wentto pycon and Pi data like everybody wason Mastodon which is awesome butthat's a very different tracking so westarted to think about it in terms ofcollaborations and so yeahif you're thinking about devrel in termsof collaboration it also means that one of the things that I've had to learn andlike I'm very fortunate to have amanager who has kind of told me likedon't try to don't kill yourself don'tburn yourself out stop good and so thankyou thanks Chrisum for doing all this but one of thethings that is really helpful is likeremembering that that means thinking onyour feet and spontaneityhow do you get the time like what areyour tips to like managing when you'recontext switching or even taking thattime off because if I'm not free to dropand go to a thing at times I've now lost an opportunity that could have been areally big one for us sure sureso one of the things that I do with myteam we actually just rolled this outum a couple weeks ago and we'restill figuring out some of the nuancesbut that's beside the point but uhI did this both because my team neededhelp with that prioritization processand also because I wanted to dig intoour product more so kamunda is a processautomation process orchestration toolum but it also has uh decision tables that you can put in there and so Icreated a decision table and then aprocess model that kind of walks throughlike okay we get a request from somebodyhow do we evaluate that request likedoes it directly impact one of ourprimary goals for this quarter this yearyes or no if no that automatically putsit into a like well should I actually bedoing this thing right like if it can'tfurther one of those major goals ittakes a back seat usually if it does hit one of those goals but it's you knowuh this has to be done this week nextweek this month kind of a deal again itgoes into that like okay is thisactually a higher priority than theother things that I've alreadyestablished are high priorities rightnow yes or no and sometimes the answeris going to be yes and then you have todrop one of those higher priority itemsbut it's helped us think through thatlike interrupt driven work a little bit more in the sense of you know everythingthat pops up within the two weeks beforethe conferenceobviously unless it's a really out therelike we should do this completely newthing let's implement it nowis gonna need to get done because theconference is happening in two weeksbut other stuff you know you canactually sit down and think like oh wellis this going to help benefit thesethree goals that we're working towardyes or no and then use that to evaluate what should I actually be dropping and Ithink Julie with regard to your questionaround metrics isit's thefor me with metrics there are so manydifferent things that you can collectrightwith with the uh Community metricsplatforms Community engagement platformsthat are out there these days one of thethings that me and my team have beenstruggling with lately is like okay hangon there's so much datahow do we actually parse this data what do we do with it to make it useful to usand help us understand it more and sothere's a lot of things that we'retrackingbut I'm often not reporting on thosenumber metrics I'm using those to sitthere and go okay hang on last week wehad this percentage of people reach thisstage of onboarding on our product thisweek we had double that like that'sgreat but why like I care far more aboutthe the what happened what impacted that than I do that actual number like thatactual number is fantastic but also ifthat actual number is only going to lastin that higher range for two weeks likecool that's a great anomaly andsomething that I want to referencebut I want to know why that happenedbecause if we can duplicate that that'swhat really matters and if it's you knowhey that spiked because of the minorlaunch or minor release that we had mid-april like okay we're not going tobe duplicating that every week let'smove on to other thingsand so I tend to focus not just on thethe numbers but for far more of thewhat is happening why is it happening isthat something that we can replicate inthe futureyes or no and then I do the the strictnumbers and graphs and things like thatI think that all of this is superimportant because it's always been ahard thing to measure number one I think that some of the tools that are out nowgive that you knowa little bitum help a little bit to do that but butalso I findin in the many years I've been doingthis that at times when when times aregood nobody cares about like it doesn'tmatter that you can't measure it thatwell all of a sudden it's like we justneed you know oh we all your Outreach isjust like oh it's all we care like youknow and you can come to them withum you know we did this many blog posts this many conferences and everybody'slike great that's awesome you're alldoing great work and also when thingsstart getting tough like now it's likeif you come to them with those metricsthey're like that's all great but why doI care like right what does that meanfor us yeah yeahand that's part of the reasontry to not make our goals based on workoutput because if the goal is hey youknow you've spoken at five conferencesquarter it's like well what's the quality of the talk are thosethe right conferences that I shouldactually be atwhat happens if I send out 10 cfps andnone of them get accepted for somereason like is my goal totally screwedlike I'm not I'm not in control ofwhether or not that actually happens andthe same with blog posts like if thegoal is every Friday there's a technicalblog on the or technical blog post onthe blog likecool uh what's the quality have to be what are we looking at as far as topicsgo uh is the topic actually one that'sgoing to resonate with the audience orif we don't have one that fits thatcriteria is it better to just skip likeare there people actually hitting theblog post at 9am every Fridayexpecting a technical blog to be upthereif they're not then let's go for qualityover quantity let's go for quality overa set schedule dang it Mario you just like it ruined my plan to chat GPT allthe names look at my contentand here's the thing if chat GPT ishelping and getting that like blank pagesyndrome out of the way fantasticbut I think there's a huge piece of itthat we still have to make sure thatwe're putting out content that peopleactually want right uh Julie I think youmentioned that earlier too right thatyou have to be aware of what are people looking for what are people actuallyengaged with what's actually going to behelpful or else you start creatingcontent that no one needs no one reallycares about and then Brian to your pointyou can still get that praise for likeoh great you did six blog posts thismonthwho who cares right what did they dowhat did they actually accomplishversus hey here's the patterns thatwe're seeing in our Forum everybody'sasking these questionscan we fix the documentation in this way let me submit a PR to see if that'llhelpum can we write a blog post or record avideo that shows how to do this a littlebit better like that might be the onlypiece of content that we get out thismonthbut if that makes a difference andsolves that onboarding issuefantasticthat's that's great because then we canshow well more people either either morepeople are successfully onboarding tothe product or that question isn'tcoming up as often yep great I think I think that's athat's an excellent point because it'ssomething I've I've discussed many timesin the past it's just like okay but youknow I can write I can write let'simagine I write a blog post it's a veryit's it's kind of Niche topic but it'san important topic that matters a lot tosome very valuable potential customersor existing customers yeah that thatpost is not going to get a lot oftraffic end of story like there's justno way I mean it's not it's not what'sdesigned for but it still doesn't mean it's not a highly valuable thingsometimes that's more valuable than thepost got a ton of traffic because youknow if it landed us a couple customersor it kept some customers from cheeringyes you know huge wins there as opposedto like if I got 10 000 people to comesee my post that like we get um no noleads out of kind of thing so yeah yeahwhich is why it's so hard to measureright like because there's so many ofthese things and it's like welldepending on what the activity is andwhat the what the goal of that even that I can write a blog post and my goals isawareness or I write a blog post and mygoal is is to help like existingcustomers or whatever like did yeah themetrics change and that's why I think itbecomes becomes so hard to to measure ona consistent basis yeahit also like creates like being againself-taught near the field like I candistinctly and you're saying that I waslike oh my goodness this is I'm so gladthis is like therapy for though becauselike there was a tutorial that we weresupposed to get out and we are behind on it and I was like and it was like wefound internal bugs our product changeit was like one of the most askedCommunity questions and it was likegreat I'm gonna write this tutorial andnow and like I had to get help from mymanager to kind of help me just throw itacross the line and it was no otherreason but like none of the stuff wewere like oh we found problems in ourdocs we found like it was like how muchstuff did we finddoing this one product that like yes thecommunity needs and like yes we couldhave just shipped it and it was a terrible tutorial that doesn't actuallyhelp you and not fixing all the otherproblems that we found yes yes but forpart of that reason we're actuallythinking about we're having theconversation pretty actively right nowabout input output and impact metricslike yes when do we measure input whendo we measure output and then when do wemeasure impact and it's like breaking itdown in those three like yeah becauseit's been a really helpful framework forme and it's been like even just if it'slike in our notion task kanban boardit's just like okay what is the goal of this yes and that's been a good as an ICwho needs thatwell and as a manager who is asked heywhat was the impact of this thing likethat's helpful for me to have that tooright I was talking to uh one of myAdvocates a few weeks ago and we weretalking through you know how do werecord like hey I gave this feedback tothis team I filed a PR here for thedocumentation I did you know this filedan issue for this particular Community member in this place because it's notlike I don't want people to have to goin and create a task on the task boardand then say here's the link to this andfill out the whole description and thebusiness impact and everything like noit for a thing that took you two minutesto do why would you take 10 minutes tofill out the card and then link to itand then file the card as done likelet's not do that but on the other handme as the manager being able to go to asingle place and say look here's all of the feedback we've given the productteam recently here's all of the PRS thatwe followed recently here's all of theissues that we filed on behalf of thecommunity here's the impact that my teamis having as a result of thoseconversations that are happening on a adhoc basis with the community that's goldso like let's create a single card inTrello which is what we use for our taskboard that says this is the feed thecommunity feedback or the things thatwe're doing as a result of that feedbackright and then I just have a running list ofthings that I can reference and it's ayou know 30 seconds longer than it wouldhave taken you before because you'reposting a link to the pr in the Trellocardbut it's a resource that we canreference as a team for those impactmetrics directly to be able to say lookyou you don't have these connections orif you do have those connections maybethose people aren't reaching out to youas often or if those aren't theconversations that you're having and soanytime we get that feedback of like oh welltechnical marketing people could writethat content or product managers couldhave those conversations with customersor whatever it is you go coolbut they're notand here's what we're doing as a resultand here's the impact that we're havingand let's talk through you know therelationships that you would lose if wewere to leave or theprograms that simply wouldn't happenanymore because we don't have time forit and then the the customers that wewould lose or the sales opportunitiesthat wouldn't have happened because you weren't in that location right and sowhile we might not always have thosecausation metrics of we wrote this blogpost which got this many signups whichonboarded this many people as a directresult right we have a lot of thatcorrelation a lot of the impact a lot ofthe you know hey we know when we do thisthingit it can help in these ways which Ithink is incredibly helpful um yeah oh my God so I thinkwe could have you on here for like I wasgonna say I'm just like learning so muchseriously this is I think this is so isall this is so good um I'm already likeI don't know if my manager is watching Iknow he'd watch it sometimes I'm like ifhe didn't watch he's got to come backand watch because there's so many thingswe can take out of like so manytakeaways I feel likeyou know we're already running out oftime and and we we I feel like we havebarely scratched the surface I love having this conversation so we're we'regood I understand soum all right so I I unfortunately I willstart to wrap things up because we arerunning up to the hour and I need togive Aaron her time to give her picklefact yeah you may not know yeah yeahthis is like so because we're Dev relishand we have our little pickle there andeverythingum I love it I have a pickle fact on every episode so so go ahead Aaron giveus all right yeah this is the reallyhard research that I do every timebefore this talk so just letting youknow it's a lot of thingsum but in Russia pickles juice is acommon hangover cureum and so there you go all right andsome scientists have actually testedlike is this like legit like does thisactually helpsolve a hangover it is more effectivethan Gatorade when tested to be tohangover because it has more probiotics as well as large quantities of salt toreplace dehydration so there you go nexttime you're hungoverum what's the I'm like a I'm waiting thepickleback was always a big thing yesmaybe there was something to thatthere's somethingnot a scientist but not get hungover uhwe just you know you know the way werelate this to devrel is is actually we should just have conferences have picklejuice available after their pardonedright like yeah folks have to go to theyeahI like itpickle juice brought to you by differentyes yes please do that that's fantastic all right well Mary this was such agreat conversation and and like I feellikesome days one day soon we need to getyou back on and almost continue and keepgoing on this conversation so absolutelyum yeah really really grateful for youtaking the time out to chat with usum and yeah just love learning from youso thanks for having me this was a lotof fun appreciate it thank you so much all right so thanks everybody for tuninginum we will be back next month I we wealready kind of working on our nextguest so look for us be towards the endof June because June is a kind of crazymonth for me but um but we will be backuh so follow seafood at Dev for anyupdates on devrelish also we have lotsof really great virtual meetups comingupum it's just a lot of a lot of coolcontent so please check it out all rightwe'll see you all next time later bye, Trends in Developer Relations with Mary Thengvall, Certified Fresh Events, 01h30trerdmypbee1j5kcm04t4.