Leveraging DevRel to Build a Bottoms-Up Motion
SourceCode Session_04 // Summary Blog
Dear readers,
Welcome to another edition of our newsletter. This time we bring you an excerpt from our session with Waqas Makhdum, which Shuveb Hussain moderated. We discussed how developer relations have evolved and how understanding your developers and their pain points and helping them build a career in data is paving the way for a better ecosystem and eventually better companies.
As promised, here are the learnings and key takeaways for our readers from the session.
But before we begin…
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👋 Introducing the panel: Waqas and Shuveb
For our fourth session, we spoke to Waqas Makhdum, who leads community and developer relations at Snowflake. His team’s focus is the bottom-up GTM by winning the hearts and minds of app developers, data scientists, data engineers, and other practitioners. Previously, he has built and scaled developer marketing and programs at teams at Dropbox, AWS, and other platform companies. He has primarily been at B2B enterprise software companies.
The session was moderated by Shuveb Hussain, co-founder of the DevOps platform Zipstack. In his previous role, he was VP of Engineering of Platforms at Freshworks. He has co-founded startups before and has worked with companies that handle petabytes of data.
In case you want to, you can watch the entire session here. However, we’ve got you covered with the summary right below.
👥 DevRel and Community-Led Growth
Developer relations is a relatively new job role. There isn’t an overarching, but broad ideas explain what DevRel does. Like this piece, where Matthew Broberg, who built the DevRel Collective, says, "DevRel, in theory, is the intersection of three disciplines: engineering, marketing, and community management. DevRel applies to a wildly popular set of job titles with wildly different expectations across different organizations."
The Snowflake Community enables data practitioners to learn, share, and connect with each other while building the future in the cloud. The mandate for DevRel is much broader than making them paying customers. In the last few years, there has been a growing interest in DevRel because the conversations in these data communities is helping drive best practices.
For Waqas, building the community is not just limited to app developers. He prefers to divide the community served by DevRel into Builders and Non-Builders. Between these two categories, he covers everyone involved in the data ecosystem.
Builders
App developers
Data scientists
Startup Founders
DevOps
Architects
Non-Builders
Admins: IT/DBAs
Analysts: BI, LOB users
🎯 Setting the right goals
For DevRel to work, getting the foundation of what you’re doing right is essential. Some core questions to ask to get that right are:
Do you want all the people in your community to be paying from day one or wait for them to become influencers?
Word of mouth and strategic value builders create way more MRR (monthly recurring revenue).
Community champions help you scale, but letting go of control is key
Community discussions on platforms such as Reddit and Stack Overflow work very well.
Do you help them build better products or GTM or both?
How do you inspire and educate them?
Instead of forcing builders to fill out forms where they will never give you their correct contact details, Snowflake built a Champions Programme where building a community for the community is vital from day one.
Waqas recommends his belief in Goodheart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
The way ahead
Think non-incrementally to go from 100 to 500 meetings
How to organize not just one Build, but many, all year through
Focus on overall developer success. Move away from top-of-the-funnel metrics such as engagement in a session
How to take community feedback to the next level?
❓Moderator discussion & Audience Q&A
There is, understandably, a lot of interest and, to some degree, intrigue about DevRel. The Q&A covered some exciting topics.
What Waqas had to say about engaging the community
Word of mouth and great discussions speak for themselves. When people within a community like something, it inevitably spreads within the community.
It is also important to make different teams, especially folks like support, speak to users and with other teams to understand how the data ecosystem works. The other hook for the community is the user groups. People like learning about data and the modern analytics stack. A lot of people came to Snowflake, not just because they were considering Snowflake as a place to work at or with, but also because many were thinking about building their careers in data. People started writing interesting Medium blogs about what they had learned, and more and more people got interested. The content created by the community is, therefore, equally important.
The metrics they track are:
Awareness
Builder Education
Builder Success
Community and brand
How does one hire a DevRel team?
This is not an easy one, says Waqas. There are different kinds of DevRel, and it is always better to hire people with the right attitude and train them. There are so-called “prima donnas” who don’t want to do the hands-on work, especially at conferences and events. You don’t want to hire the prima donnas- the folks who want to do the talent. Having empathy for how developers feel and usually comes from having been in those shoes at some point. So someone with experience of building is a positive too.
Is DevRel important for a company with a product aimed at developers but the GTM is an enterprise? Do the developers become influencers for Snowflake?
The initial idea was that developers would come somewhere in the buying equation with a customer. At some stage of deciding to buy, some leaders will ask a developer, and they would recommend Snowflake. But things are fast changing on the buyer side. Principal engineers or architects in new-age firms increasingly have more buying power. So the concept of developers-as-influencers doesn’t always work.
However, one thing Snowflake doesn’t do is try to monetize all its audience. For instance, students are an essential part of the community, but there is an understanding that they won’t become paying customers in the short term. As they go out and about, they become influencers within their spheres.
What would you do differently building the next Snowflake?
Some of the developer tooling would have come sooner. From a DevRel perspective, Waqas says Snowflake took time to go bigger on some programmes, and double down on them. Shuveb pointed out the need for the engineering team to back up the DevRel team with things such as good documentation. This would enable self-serve capabilities, among other things. Snowflake’s current model on feedback is very collaborative, but not documentation heavy.
What is the right time to bring in DevRel?
Without going into your business model, the general answer Waqas has is that DevRel is optimized for people who can compound their impact. They should not be the sole warrior writing a few documents, blogs, or conferences but be the person that compounds the impact of team 10X. They'll bring in external folks and engineers to create things and usually take a backseat themselves.
Shuveb followed up with a question on whether technical writers fit into this kind of role. In Waqas’s experience, they don’t. Mainly because writers tend to focus on the quality or accuracy of the content but do not empathize with the developers or the way they work.
How is DevRel different for an application developer versus a data scientist?
Significantly, as it turns out, Snowflake has a different set of developer advocates who were earlier practicing data scientists and ML engineers. They cover two extreme ends of the spectrum- building and training on stuff like Tensorflow and Pytorch on one end, and those working on the data engineering side of like data, doing things like cleansing data and making sure that the models get built. The same roles aren’t required for app developers. There are no separate programs for data scientists and app developers, but there are meetups on specific subjects like TensorFlow or Python.
How important are partnerships for a product like Snowflake, and how does DevRel enable them?
DevRel is essential for partnerships by enabling mindshare and community activation. Within Snowflake, DevRel drove an initiative to bring on what is called developer-oriented partners. DevRel brought on partners such as Confluent and Airflow, which have many bottoms presence.
The other place DevRel is important is developer experience. From developer experience, builder mindshare, presence, and education perspectives, partnerships are critical for Snowflake.
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