The Community Roundtable

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Developing Developer Relations: A CircleCI DevRel Case Study

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The Problem

Jeremy Meiss, Director of DevRel and Community, joined CircleCI in February 2020. But while Jeremy’s role was new, CircleCI always understood that Developer Relations was necessary.

“Developers are at the core of what we’re building,” says Jeremy. “They’re the ones using our platform.” But when he joined, they only had a team of two and needed to develop a new strategy. “We’re in a competitive space, and community is a differentiator for us. It’s through building relationships that we’re going to continue to grow. We know we’ve got a fantastic product, and that word of mouth is there, and community is an important part of that.”

The Solution

Jeremy began to put a new strategy in place, focusing on education and inspiration through scalable programs rather than just hitting conferences. “Orbit has informed everything we’ve done since,” says Jeremy.

Identifying KPIs to Drive Community Growth

“We started by raising awareness of what we were doing,” and that started with defining KPIs. At that time, “we only knew stats like the number of events attended and blog posts published, nothing about how our reach was growing, or whether we were getting better at activating developers and nurturing advocates.” 

Orbit supported their KPI definition by bringing visibility into their community across platforms. By integrating their Discourse support forum, GitHub, Twitter, and other channels, they could pipe their data into Orbit. “Orbit provides us with a single pane of glass to visualize our community. This means we can better understand our community, see growth opportunities, and where we can focus on building a vibrant community.”

They were soon getting insights. “Originally, we thought our community was just our Discourse forum of folks adding questions. Orbit has helped us see into areas we weren’t tapping – areas we didn’t know we had people doing all these valuable things. We now know that GitHub is our most active source, and that’s where we’ve found the most opportunities to build relationships and help developers on their path, too.”

Data-led Iterative Program Improvement

Based on these insights, they started to create specific programs to drive community health metrics, like “active users, and returning users versus new users, which forms part of our OKRs around growing the community. Before Orbit, we couldn’t tell whom we needed to focus on. We had multiple different tools telling us bits, and we thought we’d need to build out our own thing, in an Excel spreadsheet, Airtable, or whatever, to bring all that information together. That would have been time-consuming and error-prone. With Orbit, we didn’t need to do that.”

“We can now see whether those we connect with at conferences or workshops are moving through the engagement levels. We use the Orbit Model to gauge that. So we know if we need to go do something more to help them take that next step”. Over time, they’ve been able to use the reporting in Orbit to “refine what activities we do. It tells us where we can do better. Have live streams worked for us? Is that activity adding new members or engaging existing ones more? With that knowledge, we know the activities we should focus on.”

“We automate key actions too. So we can reach out to contributors and thank them publicly or identify potential ambassadors. Orbit puts a face to the community member so that we can build that relationship.”

Creating Custom Reporting with the Orbit API

Beyond the built-in reports and automation, CircleCI has made extensive use of the Orbit API. “We’ve built out our own integrations around it, and the open API piece has helped a lot with that. We have internal dashboards that we present on slides each week to other teams. We use the reporting API to get the raw data we need into our internal reporting to be consumed by other areas of the company, including marketing and at the executive level. We can see where we are and if we’re meeting different goals.”

The Result

Guided by Orbit, Jeremy and his team have built out programs that engage, educate, and excite their user base and help build relationships with their developer community.

From one developer advocate and one community manager, they’ve been able to grow their team, forming regionally focused sub-teams. They now have 16 team members across the company who are in their Orbit workspace. “Everyone is in Orbit for one thing or another at different levels – talking and learning, building programs, and establishing processes around what we do. Orbit informs what they’re doing and helps them keep track of the relationships they’re building”.

“With these metrics and reporting, we’ve been able to prove our strategy and ensure investment to keep growing our impact. We’ve shown how more and more people are talking about us and how the community is rallying around us. So now we’re continuing to grow the team, our impact and maximize the opportunities we’re seeing”.

Their usage of Orbit is spreading within CircleCI, too, helping them collaborate closely with other teams. “It’s now used by folks from our product and customer engineering teams who work with Orb contributors and Partners. They keep notes and get a feel for what’s happening and who is doing what. We built out a feedback integration with Orbit so product can see who is providing valuable feedback, which informs who we provide with beta access. Now we’re in the process of sending Orbit data into our data warehouse so we can understand how the community fits within our customer base and how DevRel activities feature in a typical customer journey. It has made getting that process up and running a whole lot easier”.

“The team has been able to take Orbit and run with it, see what’s happening, and better understand our community.”

Hear more of the CircleCI story on this episode of our podcast, Community Conversations.

5 Big Lessons in Community Building Based on a Decade of Experience

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Image via SmilingTreeToys at Etsy.com

I am lucky to have collaborated with hundreds of organizations on their community building initiatives. That experience gives me a breadth of visibility that very few have had, allowing me to see both the similarities and differences across contexts. Communities are very much like the Leo Tolstoy quote about families “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

And like all failures, we learn a lot more by those communities that are struggling than by looking at those that are thriving, where people happily putter on almost unaware that they are in the fortunate state of being surrounded by support and stimulation.

Here are five of the biggest lessons I have learned over the last decade

1. Communities generate compounding value by changing behaviors

Do you know what behaviors generate the value you are hoping to see? If not, you are likely overwhelmed and have a hard time prioritizing what engagement and community management activities are most valuable. If you don’t know, a good place to start is to understand and diagram out the workflows you hope to impact and how engaging in the community improves those workflows.

2. Communities need different approaches at different stages

New communities need a lot of hands-on, direct relationship building effort. As communities start to thrive and generate their own value, the task of community management changes to governance, infrastructure, and measurement efforts that enable others to engage easily. These two types of work are quite different and often need different resources.

3. Shared value is critical for a sustainable community

We talk about purpose a lot and shared purpose is needed to attract the right set of people to a community. However, if the community is not supporting the creation of value, people will not stick around. The only way to sustain engagement is to continually deliver value that cannot be generated as effectively anywhere else.

4. The risks of not having explicit community management are significant

If no one is responsible, no one is responsible and organizations leave themselves open to all sorts of risk, including communications crises, unacknowledged product and service issues, festering frustration, competitive threats, and more. Communities do not inevitably become toxic environments – they devolve because no one is responsible for ensuring they don’t.

5. Most community management activity is not visible

A misconception of community management is that community staff are responsible for engaging the community themselves. They are, of course, but not in the way many people assume. To be effective at letting the community do its own work, the community team necessarily has to enable people in it to engage each other and solve their own problems, rather than always stepping in themselves. In fact, communities don’t gain efficiency and effectiveness unless the community management team steps back from the limelight. Their primary role is to ensure others in the community are connecting, engaging, and leading rather than doing so themselves.

The Business Model of Engagement

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By Rachel Happe, Principal/Co-Founder, The Community Roundtable

Engagement is a hot topic. For those of you who have heard me speak, you know I don’t think all engagement is created equally and I think there is far too little focus put on the purpose behind the engagement. You can have high engagement and very little value – look no further than the comments on a general news site. The other common problem is you have no engagement at all, which happens far too frequently inside organizations where people feel like the only outcome of sticking their head up is becoming a good target.

engagementEditor’s Note: This post was originally published by Rachel on LinkedIn. Follow her there, too!

What’s interesting is that in most cases we diagnose the issue as a tactical one – we aren’t providing good enough tools or spaces for people to engage in a constructive way.

The more sophisticated organizations realize that tools alone won’t solve the problem and have started investing in the operational systems that include community managers to ensure that when people engage they get real value from it. This is where I spend a lot of my time – helping companies understand how to build systems of engagement. But it’s not a complete solution either.

Ultimately, to sustain engagement, the business model needs to generate more value for each one of its stakeholder groups than they contribute. People need to feel like investing and contributing to the ecosystem will return disproportionate rewards to them. If it does, they will return to engage again and again and again.

The implications to business models are quite radical, however, and in a way most organizations cannot accept community engagement given their current leadership. This type of business model requires the organizations themselves to recognize revenue and value only after it has ensured each stakeholder group has gotten more value than they have contributed. Typically, organizations work to recognize as much value as possible, as soon as possible; when’s the last time you heard a sales executive say ‘We don’t get paid until our customers feel like they have won’? This mentality leaves stakeholders feeling combative, not collaborative – whether they are customers or employees – and that does not lead to organic and frequent engagement because those stakeholders don’t see the organization’s success and their success as the same thing.

However, those organizations that do have the patience to be generative – making their stakeholders success a key part of their own business model – tend to reap far more in the end because every one of their stakeholder groups has a vested interest in their success. To me, that is a #winning strategy.

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