# Episode 220: FOSSY 2023 with Angie Byron  ## Episode metadata - Episode title: Episode 220: FOSSY 2023 with Angie Byron - Show: Sustain - Owner / Host: SustainOSS - Guests: [Angie Byron](https://share.snipd.com/person/998e01e1-7ba7-4036-8a28-8a0c95a57a15) - Episode publish date: 2024-02-16 - Episode AI description: Angie Byron, Director of Community at Aiven, discusses overseeing 11 open source projects, prioritizing tasks by impact, and using a 'start at the end' goal-setting exercise. She highlights challenges of transparency in open source projects and the importance of involving community members. The podcast also delves into strategies for corporate involvement in open source, decision-making processes, and promoting meetups for learning about technologies like Kafka and Postgres. - Duration: 13:31 - Episode URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/episode/7f01c18f-38ca-4afb-8df9-fa8eb5797223) - Show URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/show/0692a062-4bc7-4dce-9318-0f57031ff1d4) - Export date: 2026-02-17T23:29:48 ## Snips ### [Prioritize Impact in Community Management](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c3794cb5-30a1-4734-a1d7-685e77da3b3f) 🎧 02:37 - 05:27 (02:50) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/9a1bc77c-55b9-4870-ae1e-cf9515237395" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Prioritize community work by potential impact to use your time effectively. - Focus on initiatives that expand global reach and community ownership, not just centralized control. #### 💬 Quote > I think one important way is to sort of prioritize what you're doing by the impact that it can have. > — Angie Byron Angie Byron on prioritizing community management tasks #### 📚 Transcript all the time forever? It's a good question. I think one important way is to sort of prioritize what you're doing by the impact that it can have. Okay. And so one of the ways that we look at that is, you know, we look at some of the goals is around building your growing the community. Their goal is around giving the community ownership in the community itself. We're not doing everything. We're allowing other people to do things. So we try to look for initiatives that sort of help drive those things forward. So one example is, for example, building a meetups program, right? There's a way to build a meetups program where you are hosting them only at your own offices and people come to you. What we want to try to do is expand that out so that we can both expand the reach globally to where our customers are, but also expand the ownership so that different customers are able to create meetups in their own area and talk about things that are of interest to them. And so we're not driving the script all the time. When you're sitting at your whiteboard meeting, like you're quarterly annual, whatever, and you have a Sharpie out and you're saying, okay, here's where impact is. And here's where we're going to focus. What does that whiteboard even look like? How do you decide? Yeah. So the first thing I did when I got on this team is I held what's called a start at the end exercise. And this was looking at our overarching marketing goals because we sit under marketing, although community can sit pretty much anywhere. They want to drive people to the Ivan platform to be using it, which is a reasonable goal to do, right? So we look at that as the top line goal that we need to do. And then we start kind of straplating from there and they use something called the Open Practice Library, which is a dude, you know, Red Hat to kind of come up with this framework, but you kind of asked two very different questions. You asked, what would it look like if we were awesome at everything that we did in 12 months from now, we fast forward the clock. We look back and we're like, this was amazing. What would be what would have changed? What would have been how would we know this? And we sort of brainstorm around that for a while. And then we do the opposite and we say, what if things don't go so well and, you know, like there's obstacles and move, what's that look like? And then from that, you sort of triangulate and you sort of get a feel for, okay, well, if these are the success metrics that we want, then these are the things that we have to hit. And so I kind of try to lead it in kind of a bottom up approach so that the team itself feels ownership in this and not just coming up from down top and saying, here's your goals, go get it done. Because I feel like idea of ownership is really central to any good community, but it's also central to building a good team, especially when, to your point, we're meta community managers, the folks doing this work every day are going to have much more knowledge on the ground of these different communities that they interact with every day. So getting their thoughts and input into the goals is very important. So when you and your family meet up for Canadian Thanksgiving, are you the person with the Excel spread sheet? That person? I make a spreadsheet for everything. Yes. I knew it. Oh, I give off the vibe. Yeah. When you talked about your team, was it just a three of you in this room or was it the entire Ospo? It's the three of us. And then we run it past a cross functional group of people. Right. So we start with the people doing the work. They have the most insight into the day to day functioning, but then the rest of the organization is going to be able to cross check --- ### [Start with the End in Mind](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ce11e5d8-c324-49a9-aa7b-42e1492cb06b) 🎧 03:36 - 06:08 (02:32) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/c5dc6b20-ba32-471c-9fce-ed020cdf5d39" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Use the "start at the end" exercise to set clear, collective goals. - Involve your team early to ensure ownership and alignment on success metrics. #### 💬 Quote > The first thing I did when I got on this team is I held what's called a start at the end exercise. > — Angie Byron Angie Byron on goal setting exercises #### 📚 Transcript How do you decide? Yeah. So the first thing I did when I got on this team is I held what's called a start at the end exercise. And this was looking at our overarching marketing goals because we sit under marketing, although community can sit pretty much anywhere. They want to drive people to the Ivan platform to be using it, which is a reasonable goal to do, right? So we look at that as the top line goal that we need to do. And then we start kind of straplating from there and they use something called the Open Practice Library, which is a dude, you know, Red Hat to kind of come up with this framework, but you kind of asked two very different questions. You asked, what would it look like if we were awesome at everything that we did in 12 months from now, we fast forward the clock. We look back and we're like, this was amazing. What would be what would have changed? What would have been how would we know this? And we sort of brainstorm around that for a while. And then we do the opposite and we say, what if things don't go so well and, you know, like there's obstacles and move, what's that look like? And then from that, you sort of triangulate and you sort of get a feel for, okay, well, if these are the success metrics that we want, then these are the things that we have to hit. And so I kind of try to lead it in kind of a bottom up approach so that the team itself feels ownership in this and not just coming up from down top and saying, here's your goals, go get it done. Because I feel like idea of ownership is really central to any good community, but it's also central to building a good team, especially when, to your point, we're meta community managers, the folks doing this work every day are going to have much more knowledge on the ground of these different communities that they interact with every day. So getting their thoughts and input into the goals is very important. So when you and your family meet up for Canadian Thanksgiving, are you the person with the Excel spread sheet? That person? I make a spreadsheet for everything. Yes. I knew it. Oh, I give off the vibe. Yeah. When you talked about your team, was it just a three of you in this room or was it the entire Ospo? It's the three of us. And then we run it past a cross functional group of people. Right. So we start with the people doing the work. They have the most insight into the day to day functioning, but then the rest of the organization is going to be able to cross check that with what they know, which is more than what you know. So we're getting a broader picture. And so through that, it's sort of a two way conversation because we'll come up with things like community ownership. We want to make sure the rest of the organization knows what we do and the value of it to make sure we can measure whatever it is that we're doing in a way that makes sense to the rest of the organization. And then they'll come up with things like, well, we also want to be the trusted open source data platform for everybody. So how does what we're doing built trust? Right. And so that becomes part of the factors as well. And then once you get your factors together, what you essentially do, because if you work on a team like this or any kind of service oriented community, you're just going to get requests all the time from everywhere. Yeah. So you can go all bananas if you really like spreadsheets and do like a whole six sigma thing where you're scoring on math and all this. But we just --- ### [Score Initiatives to Maintain Focus](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cf8a348d-326d-4338-8e1c-ea23fdcee612) 🎧 06:43 - 07:02 (00:19) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/18a5d4c8-1d46-410e-a539-fb9b13b4839c" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Score potential initiatives against multiple strategic criteria to decide priorities. - Pass on tasks not fitting your goals to appropriate teams to maintain focus. #### 💬 Quote > If it checks off many of the criteria, we're probably going to do that. > — Angie Byron Angie Byron on how to prioritize community initiatives #### 📚 Transcript And we ensure that we're focused on those initiatives that move as many needles as possible. And then the one was it don't move as many needles. We try to figure out, can we act in more and a facilitator role for this initiative? Or could we pass that on to a team that does, for example, if we wanted to do influencer marketing, maybe that could be part of the demand gen team or something like that rather than the --- ### [Increasing Transparency and Explaining Why](https://share.snipd.com/snip/327ce208-ca23-4f4a-b336-0d707330685f) 🎧 07:23 - 08:01 (00:38) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/d1e805a5-e34a-47e8-af3c-99407dd7429f" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Develop a public-facing roadmap with an ideation system to increase transparency. - Always communicate the "why" behind decisions, even without all financial details. #### 💬 Quote > The thing we're working on is public facing version of a roadmap with like an ideation system so that we can start directing people with product requests. > — Angie Byron Angie Byron on balancing transparency and confidentiality #### 📚 Transcript not going to do that and we're not going to do that. But I can't tell you why. How do you manage those that like crux? The thing we're working on is public facing version of a roadmap with like an ideation system so that we can start directing people with product requests and things like that to a place where there's like dedicated space for that to have that conversations. That's one piece of it. I think another piece is like, I do explain the why. Even if you can't get into nitty gritty details about specific financial numbers or whatever that kind of thing, I think most people will understand like this becomes a not now because right now we have to focus on building this or we won't get the later --- ### [Three Goals of Community Work](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ed6747a5-954d-4928-9768-90afd3e4a9ce) 🎧 08:22 - 09:28 (01:06) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/69705853-9bb0-4938-ab0d-9a4bb5446896" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Community roles in open source can increase revenue, reduce costs, and mitigate risk. - Developer education and peer learning are central strategies to foster growth and trust. #### 💬 Quote > We're mitigating risk in that if people don't sign up for us and they sign up for a competitor... that's one aspect of it. > — Angie Byron Angie Byron on community goals in business context #### 📚 Transcript cost or mitigate risk. Which of the three are you covering and how do you signal those? Yeah, probably all three of them and we probably need to do a clear job of signaling those. So yeah, what we're trying to do is we're trying to, yeah, we're mitigating risk in that if people don't sign up for us and they sign up for a competitor or they sign up for not an open source thing at all, obviously that takes money away from the bottom line and things of this nature. So that's one aspect of it is mitigating risk. A big focus for us is on developer education because we're trying to, you don't market to developers, you help educate developers. We're trying to build programs for them that give them access to technical expertise, get them access to people at Ivan who are very smart and know how to do this peer to peer learning. So like I'm an SRE at a big company, let me learn from SREs that run a huge data platform for Ivan, this kind of thing. And then also community members talking to each other is another way of good. So of those three items, I would say let's focus on the growing revenue piece at least directly because we don't want to, it's kind of like we have folks who go out there and lasso the cows and bring them into the ranch. We want to make sure that cows once they get to the ranch are grass fed and they're like brushing nicely every day like that kind --- ### [Success Through Others' Growth](https://share.snipd.com/snip/75cf1085-99a2-4b82-9ab2-9d99d2f8a0ed) 🎧 09:57 - 10:44 (00:47) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/d05bf557-f528-43a2-9c36-fdc6cd2892cb" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Angie measures success through others’ achievements rather than her own direct actions. - Helping community members grow and connect creates deeper satisfaction for her role. #### 💬 Quote > I internalize achievement by watching other people's achievements. > — Angie Byron Angie Byron on how she internalizes achievement #### 📚 Transcript someone else often. So how do you sleep at night? What do you do to make yourself feel good with a role that you have? I'm not saying it's a bad role, but I'm just curious, how do you internalize achievement? I internalize achievement by watching other people's achievements. So in other words, like, and this came up a lot when I was in the Drupal community as well is it was less about me going out and giving every talk at every event, but I would instead be contacted for something and be like, oh, you know, who'd be great for that as this person? And then watching them build their developer profile as they got more and more speaking engagements apart from that. And at Ivan, I do that is very similar, hooking somebody up with a networking opportunity that leads to a job or connecting them with some key knowledge that they needed to make their project successful. So I view my success and my team's success through the success of others because I think that that really gets to the why we're --- Created with [Snipd](https://www.snipd.com) | Highlight & Take Notes from Podcasts