The DevRel Playbook for Web3 Companies in 20 Minutes | Ben Greenberg - Fuel Network

[Music] hello everyone how you doing it's eve Denver it's awesome I'm here I think for a very interesting conversation to be had in the next 20 minutes which will provide you all with a bit of a foundation to create a framework for a devr playbook in the web 3 context before we get going my name is Ben I the head of devil at a place called fuel I'm also a longtime rubyist maybe like Ruby you know blockchain on Rails one day not really sure and uh I do happen to love a lot of dad jokes so if I do throw one in there please forgive me in advance if you don't find it too funny you can find me on all social at humus on Rails the rails part because of Ruby and the humus part because you know who doesn't like a good humos for breakfast lunch or dinner let's be honest uh so let's get going the first thing that we need to understand is it seems like more and more increasingly every single day if you are building a developer facing company if you are a large company a small company a brand new startup there will be some investor in the room some VC somebody's going to say to you what about devl your your deck looks great your product Market fit is really awesome but you know there's this thing called devil and you should have it everyone wants devil it's like the thing everyone thinks they need to have in a developer facing context but not everyone actually knows I would say very few people have a good articulation of the understanding of what the discipline of developer relations is in an organization which leads to a lot of frustration frustration on behalf of the practitioners working in those devil contexts and frustration from the business side trying to understand what exactly do these people do that are working in this company that I have and that kind of frustration can really lead to some churn and unpleasant outcomes for everyone so in our time for the sake of this conversation we're going to propose a three-prong definition of what the purpose of devil is this is not an all-encompassing definition it is not meant to provide you with the one and only answer for all of developer relations but for our conversation today it will ground the next few minutes we have together so a clear definition of devil may be something along the lines of enhancing product quality uh nurturing authentic community and driving developer adoption those three things those three prongs together work in tandem so when devell is centered on product devil can exist in many different functions in an organization it can be in engineering can be in product can be in marketing but when devl is centered on product it is at and in its root at its core at that point is building authentic Community developers who are trying to enhance that product whether it's sdks tooling blockchain it doesn't matter what it is they're trying to enhance the product quality uh in the open source community and and as a result of that it is by nature of doing those activities driving exponentially hopefully developer adoption of those tools so that sounds like a lot that's a lot of activity to do enhance product Quality Drive adoption build genuine Community that's a lot for a team of 30 it's definitely a lot if you're a solo Devall member in your organization how do you even begin to approach that problem so in our time together we're going to talk about four different Frameworks four different aspects of our framework that may be helpful for you as you are building out your devil strategy first we're going to talk about the importance of an origin story then measurements that are impactful what is the web three difference in this whole conversation and lastly we're going to look at what we call what is called in the business world and can be adopted here a beab who's heard of beag before anyone amazing there's something you're going to learn from this talk at least one thing you're going to get and you'll be like Ben what's a beag you're going to find out in about 10 to 12 minutes okay ready let's dive in so first of all your origin story is absolutely integral why is it absolutely integral because you are a team that crosses so many different functions in any organization you are developers who are friendly sometimes you are developers who like to talk to people sometimes you're developers that can write not only code but maybe English as well your developers that can work with grantees so who wants to work with you BD marketing product engineering everyone wants to touch upon you and be involved in your work which means you need to show value across the entire organization not only because it's beneficial but if you want your devil organization in the company to have long-term viability and long-term viability is a politically correct term for what to not be let go of you need to be able to show value across and up how do you show that value you show that value the same way that Spider-Man shows that value Spider-Man knows exactly where he came from he knows his origin story his origin story helps direct what he gets involved in and what he doesn't get involved in it helps Drive who he is every single day and the same is true with every single superhero whether it's Marvel or DC or any new one it doesn't really matter they all have an origin story and that becomes the grounding by which they can build and move forward from there your team also needs an origin story so let's dive into what an origin story may be for your devil team whether you are the only devil person or you're a team of 10 or a team of 30 it doesn't matter what is your origin story it sometimes goes along something like this deal started here because ellipses well what is the ellipses devil started here because developers didn't know we existed we had built this great thing and no one's used using it and no one's involved Devil's here because our tooling is super super complicated that never happens in blockchain right tooling is never complicated at all totally intuitive totally easy but it's really complicated and we got no Dev tooling we're an anti-dev tool Dev tools club we got no Dev tooling to help our developers or our docks are always not current with our versions they never up to date a new method's been added and it's not in the docks for like two months a method's been deprecated and people are still trying to invoke it because the API reference still talks about it so whether your team was created for one of those reasons two of those reasons all of those reasons or something entirely different you understand where you come from because probably the truth is since you have joined as a devell person in your organization or your team was created you probably have been doing a lot of things that don't directly relate to the work of Devo because you are those kind of friendly developers that can interact with people and you have had a lot of doors open that you have walked through I would say if you're not doing so already now is precisely the time to return to the thing that is your highest impact in the organization and that has to be rooted in your origin story okay now that you understand where you come from you come from because your developer tooling doesn't exist or your doc story is out of date what do you do with that well you have to start building impact how do you do that so it starts with that origin story so taking that one example our product is really really complicated okay what do we build what kind of initiatives directly answer that question that we can draw a very clear line from here to whatever is going to be over there that's what you have to do as a devil team so one great example of course is time to hello world can you create measurements that show over time the the amount of time it takes for a new developer in your ecosystem to commit their first meaningful lines of code in your community and is that line trending down as your initiatives and activities Trend up that's a great impactful m measurement what's another one time to resolve issues how long does it take and how complicated is it to answer a question on your discourse Forum or in a GitHub issue that's raised or in Discord how many processes how many steps is it take for a developer to go from help me I don't know what to do it's broken to be able to answer and resolve that problem how much friction do they have to go through these are two classic examples of direct line from origin story to activity but how do you measure those things it's sometimes it's obvious other times it's not so obvious I chose those examples precisely because I think they articulate a very clear uh framework for how one measures these things and it's coming from the smart measurements smart goal setting but not all smart just the key ones in my mind which are specific achievable and realistic I want goals for a devil team that are as specific as they possibly can be I want somebody higher up than me in the org chart to able to look at that goal and get it on first read because they typically don't have the time to dive into it in all the nuances I want that goal to be able to be achieved and be realistic within the time frame that it's allotted for it because I want our team to have success and I want our developers to continue to move forward because if we build incremental progress step by step whether it's you measuring time in quarters or half year or weeks or whatever your Sprints are if you can measure incrementally improving with these specific achievable realistic goals that tie right back to your origin story you're doing something right but that's only a part of the puzzle there is a critical piece that needs to also be employed and I think it's part of an age-old question a philosophical conundrum that has boggled the minds of philosophers for Millennia if a tree falls in the forest does anyone know this you may know this more than beags right if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there doesn't make a sound let me offer you the devil version if a devil person does work but no one knows about it did it matter did it even happen the sad truth of the matter is if you don't communicate all the time you can do the best things the best programs the most amazing work but it'll be all for nothing because if no one knew about it it didn't happen which means we all collectively need to start flexing that muscle of not bragging because society's taught us that bragging is bad but being good communicators of our achievements and accomplishments we need to shout these things up and across we did this and we achieved this and this how many people went to this and it was great if you're a manager of a devil team do this for your people a lot if you are an individual contributor on a devil team do this and teach your manager to do this for you too if you are communicating all the time and following the metrics and achievable impactful you know all the good things then you are actually working towards creating a sustainable and viable devil organization which is all great but what's the web three Factor because everything we said thus far kind of pertains to all Dev companies Dev first Dev 2 Dev whatever Dev Dev third Dev tangential Dev lovers all the dev companies it all applies to them but the web 3 Nuance adds a different dimension to this which I think is really important and there's many ways we can tackle this we're going to tackle it by talking about socks and t-shirts anyone ever heard of hober Fest anyone participate in hober Fest anyone uh you got a shirt you have the shirt still H sometimes it depends if it's clean right shirts and socks is how we've class classically incentivized people laboring for hours and hours on open source problems and building open- Source communities this is the way we've addressed the problem of we want to build a sustainable and dynamic open- Source Community which is part of creating an authentic developer community and we do that with shirts and socks this quote from a maintainer from a couple years ago I think is so poignant I in the past few years have maintained a couple relatively popular open source repos in a web 2 context and I had the great distinction of having to do that during a hober Fest I very much empathe with this Octoberfest can feel like a distributed denial of service attack on your repositories everyone trying to get something in to qualify for a t-shirt it's overwhelming now let you say ha that's just been a web 2 problem that's not our issue we've got it solved we know Financial incentivization we understand self-interest we build we help people build my friends only two words for you that tell us this is also a web 3 problem if you have ever been in the context of an emerging layer emerging project where airdrop campaigns may be starting to manifest and you've had to deal with the manifold PRS of adding a comma or adding an extra or putting two spaces between each sentence or other you know nonsensical pull requests to qualify for those airdrops it's the exact same problem so how how do we address that I think we address that in the web 3 context by looking back on sociological research on why people join communities to begin with why do they take part in human communities because whether it's a technical community or a non-technical community it is all the same a human community and there are basically reasons there is tons of research on this why people join these communities and it boils down to Intrinsic and extrinsic reasons intrinsic reasons are things like a sense of belonging and fulfillment and purpose it's getting to say I'm part of something bigger than me and I matter extrinsic reasons are networking getting get paid getting rewarded getting recognized for your accomplishments and I would say that in the web 2 model it has for all too long over indexed on that belonging and passion and through socks at the problem of the extrinsic issue literally through socks at the problem while at the same time we in the web 3 Community often over index on airdrops and for get that people also want to feel like they matter they want to feel like they're being there makes a difference in that space a sense of belonging of passion and fillment so what is the answer well the answer might be a synthesis in our web 3 devell context of merging the intrinsic and the extrinsic bringing them both together together with bounties with airdrops with rewards with great swag but at the same time recognizing that people want to feel like they matter that their presence there makes a difference this brings us to our last point which to remember your beag because that will be the thing that drives you forward in all of this a beag is essentially a big hairy audacious goal it's a way to stimulate progress it is to be simultaneously uh long-term thinking but driven with like a mon monomaniacal sense of like relentlessness and passion it is not a vision statement you hang up in a hallway it is driving you every single day so a beehag for a devr team might be around creating a community of developer Advocates cuz you can only hire so many people on your team but you can build your team exponentially by P pointing your North store your North Star towards this big hairy audacious goal at all times so to recap you start with your origin story which informs your beag which then builds your okrs which leads to initiatives that feed and answer those okrs which you measure impactfully which then feeds back into iterations on your beehag that I think it's a lot to do it's easy to say a lot to do but that's what sums up a successful playbook for devil in a web 3 or really any but specifically a web 3 context and of course don't forget to talk about it all of the time I do want to mention that we have launched a program at fuel trying to balance between the intrinsic and the extrinsic offering bounties and rewards and also building purpose and fulfillment I think we're doing something unique in this developer Champions program and I do have some extrinsic reasons I have really cool hats so the first not socks not t-shirts hats right that's the difference H first five people that complete the small challenge will get a hat if you come and see me after just show me you've completed it uh and you can watch this if you don't want to join you can watch it and get a sense of how we're trying to blend the intrinsic along with the extrinsic thank you very much