Day Job
Prioritization of Objectives with Leadership
Sometimes leaders speak in different languages. This was the case for me. I understood the business impact that could be made, but I was using "apples and oranges" to explain our strategy and they were using "peas and green beans" to reply. Completely different language, same exact end results. If you haven't read the book Rise by Patty Azzarello, I strongly recommend picking it up for this exact reason. It has helped me understand how to break down unintentional miscommunications to squeeze the information out you truly need to drive success.
Long story short, we're on the same page, with a slight adjustment, and that adjustment will make my 2024 even more impactful. All I asked was this one question to kick it off: "in your opinion, how can my team drive the biggest impact this year?" They shared 3 primary "buckets" they saw. I asked "if you had to guess, what percentage of time should we be spending in each?" I had a good guess, but I was actually off on my guess. Which gave me the impact win I needed. Turns our nurturing our current users is a higher priority than I expected, and hearing that helped me ask the right questions to understand why. As for why, well that's a secret tip for another day. 😉
MIT Reality Hack Event Planning
This is the work that's keeping me away from writing lately. It's all good though. It's an event that aligns perfectly with our target audience and allows for stronger relationship building. It's a no brainer that we should be involved. Not only is our target audience there, but many of our peers in AR will be there, and it will be a great opportunity to consider DevRel partnerships and other ways that our products can work together. Partnerships with other products like yours, or that partner nice with yours, is a really great way to scale the impact of your efforts. It's double the outreach channels & audience!
In thanks to this project, I am drafting a few DevRel templates to publish here; an event project plan, budget request, know-before-you-go guide, and a playbook for gold star attendance. Those will launch in early February, after I get through back-to-back event attendance.
Developer Journey Discovery
This project keeps getting back-burnered but it needs to get done now. I've already drafted journey maps for our product, our current experience while in a beta phase, and a future dream experience for when we reach general access. My next step is to map all possible communications back to the journey stages and touch points. Alongside of visually understanding the developer journey, I'm capturing the entire experience word-for-word.
This exercise is useful for a number of reasons, but our primary reason is to clearly understand the full picture of what a developer will experience when they come in contact with our product and be able to drive small improvements immediately and draft action plans for bigger improvements (example: a fundamental change to the developer product experience is not a quick fix, it requires advocating for your end users with product and engineering and getting improvements prioritized on a product roadmap).
Thought Leadership
Decoding DevX — Scaling Community
Coaching
Provided some advice in a coaching session on where to take their developer-focused landing page. We discussed speaking to their strengths as a product offering, clearly displaying how they solve developers problems, leveraging known peers to share stories of how the product solved their problems, showcasing those stories and solved problems through code & demos, providing proof of their resources like docs & a place to ask questions, and last, but not least, clear pricing that ideally offers a free tier with usage limits or a lengthy trial with some usage limitations.
