Developer Advocacy at MongoDB

Recently I gave a talk at Influitive’s Advocamp on my transition from a System Administrator and DevOps professional to a Developer Advocate. A large portion of the talk focused on how the transition was mostly a shift in mindset. In this post I’ll go through a few of my slides and highlight my thoughts.

I opened my talk by explaining what I had done for years prior to moving into a new career. I was a system administrator which meant my days were spent keeping the sites and apps people expect to work, online. I described many of these instances as “lumps” which provided me with a certain amount of perspective. Some people in our industry like to call these “war stories” but I am trying to stay peaceful in my advanced age, so I tend to think of it more like collecting a few bumps and bruises rather than open wounds. Regardless of the language we use, these lumps provide me with perspective.

This perspective helped me move careers and start considering a new way to help others learn about utilizing the best practices and features in MongoDB. I started to think about next steps.. Support was something I had done for quite some time and I was never too concerned about having a customer facing role. The deep troubleshooting did appeal to me, but I felt that I could add more creativity to what I was doing. I considered the aspects of sales, and potentially moving into a role where I could use my skillsets to help others throughout the sales process.

Many peers of mine “aged out” of being on call and moved into roles in sales which gave them greater flexibility for their day to day life. This resulted in less pain and suffering due to late nights over the problems of technology by not having to be quite as responsible for things such as uptime or systems deployments.

As the road to a new role continued I began looking around the company to expand what I was exposed to day to day. I felt like getting out of the office and meeting people would be a huge part of this next step, so I started taking part becoming more involved in events and learned how much I enjoyed talking to people. At one point I was asked to work the MongoDB booth at a “big data” conference and realized how much more I enjoyed people than systems and software.

Meeting people and explaining how to make MongoDB part of their development stack or application became something I found more and more fulfillment in. I began telling stories of database implementation, the ease of use of MongoDB, and how one crazy night with a dress really taught me even more about MongoDB and its use cases. I began speaking and taking part in more and more outward facing events and even got a chance to speak at MongoDB World and AWS re:Invent. This was a huge change from managing outages, deploying apps, and scaling out systems. It was while I was balancing the work I was doing to help launch our Atlas project with our cloud team with these outward evangelism events that I learned a “Cloud Developer Advocate” role opened on the marketing team.

These were some of the big ideas I wanted to hit when discussing the reasons why I wanted to change roles. I wanted to help share the big ideas I learned about MongoDB implementation and discuss with people how they could best help the MongoDB community. This was an incredible opportunity that took a lot of work to transition into, hanks to the people team at MongoDB, I was able to make the change and begin learning something completely different.

Taking on this role was a ton of work. It required taking the “Yoda” route of unlearning some of my concepts on how people communicate in development and systems teams and learned how people work in marketing organizations. Marketing teams have different concepts around how they are culturally built While you may have been used to teams doing work that was based on an Agile sprint, you may be more beholden to releases and fiscal years.

I had to start learning new concepts and ideas about the work I was now doing as a Developer Advocate. I leveraged some of my pre-existing concepts from software development for how I handled this new role by using some existing skills I’d learned over the years.

• Talk to your team (Silo’s are not helpful)
• Understand your “Technical Debt” (if you’re using a feature for now to cover up a missing one, you might need to correct it)
• Document everything possible (you aren’t the only person who will do this job)
• Build trust with other teams (the more you know, the more you can help)

Along with these key points, I started learning more core concepts related to marketing, such as why our team wanted to help fill “top of funnel” as well as nurture those who are already in the funnel to have a great experience. I had to understand community priorities and the information they required rather than considering what their problem was. MongoDB engineering and support teams were there to “fix” things, while I was there to explain things. It’s tough to change your mindset to no longer feel responsible for fixing things, and this became an issue for me. I felt the problems that I was presented with with were always mine to fix. With this I learned sometimes it’s not about fixing the problem, it’s about driving people in the right direction so they can get to a place where the fix is obvious to them. It is about taking them down the right road so that when they finally find where they initially turned wrong, they know how to avoid making the same mistaken in the future.

I’m about a year in and I can honestly say it was the right move. he challenge was something I truly felt I was up for and have since used a few tactics to help developers become as interested in MongoDB as I am, Whether it’s discussing awesome demo applications or showing people the simplicity of cloud products, it helped me recognize that people in the technology industry have the ability to be a part of the company story without having to commit code or reboot a server. Without the work myself and the other MongoDB Developer Advocates do, we’d simply be looking at text files in a git repository waiting to be seen.

For a full look at my slides from my Advocamp talk, visit SlideShare.

Want to be part of the story at MongoDB? Check out our careers site or community slack.