BigCommerce Employee Spotlight: Heather Barr

Welcome to the BigCommerce Employee Spotlight. Each month, we’ll chat with an employee who works on the BigCommerce product. These are the folks behind the scenes who are crafting the BigCommerce developer experience, from SDKs and APIs to themes and documentation. Discover what they’re building, their tools of the trade, and learn about the technologies they’re passionate about.

Hi Heather, Tell me about your path to BigCommerce.

My journey started in small-town East Texas. Becoming a young adult and wanting to take advantage of new and different opportunities to grow is ultimately what led me to Austin.

My first job in the tech industry was selling Google AdWords and marketing solutions to blue and white-collar professionals all around the US. Being exposed to this industry was one of the most crucial events in my career, as I was able to meet extraordinary people who inspired me to go back to school to learn how to code.

After learning the skills I needed to take on development in the real world, I landed a developer position with a small Austin-based e-commerce company. During my time in that role, I discovered a natural interest in creating developer support and recognition for others. I wanted to help set future developers up for success by creating content, structuring documentation, improving discoverability of current internal resources, and starting recognition programs. Although this was what I was truly interested in to help my company succeed, none of that was necessarily my role to play as a developer. I started looking for opportunities where I could focus that energy in a space that encourages this desire to help other developers succeed.

This desire is what ultimately led me to my current position as the Developer Community Moderator at BigCommerce. I found this role to be exactly what I wanted when I was searching for my next career move, and I’m thankful that I get the opportunity to help all of the developers in the BigCommerce ecosystem accomplish their goals.

What team are you working on?

I am right in the middle of the Community & DevRel (Developer Relations) teams. If you’re familiar with any of our community spaces, both merchant and developer-facing, you likely know my teammates, Lauren Clevenger, Marissa Caputo, Jacinda Espinosa, and Rachael Thompson.

Although our combined team is small, we are mighty! And we are all passionate about nurturing our community spaces and building meaningful relationships with BigCommerce merchants, partners, and developers.

What’s a problem that you enjoy solving at BigCommerce?

There are a few “problems” that I really enjoy solving at BigCommerce. The main area of opportunity, that I’m extremely thankful to be a direct tie to, is enhancing our developer experience by utilizing the community. This is a rather large umbrella that encompasses everything from improving our current developer documentation, building positive relationships with partners and developers in the BigCommerce ecosystem, and building out new processes to grow our community’s reach and value.

What projects are you most passionate about building at BigCommerce?

To elaborate on what I mentioned above, I am most passionate about improving the developer experience within our community spaces. My team and I are actively working on various projects to support this goal now, so I won’t gush too much about it to spoil our surprises. 😉

However, I will let you all know that our focus is on fostering the positive and helpful atmosphere of our current community while we introduce and fine-tune new processes, structures, organization, and exciting new benefits for all community members.

There is one project in particular that I’m extremely proud of and excited to grow! This is our new, “What’s the Word” webinar that I’ve been given the opportunity to host. What’s the Word is a new webinar series that we developed as a direct response to feedback we’ve received from community members using the BC4WP plugin. We held our first event on May 19th, 2021, and plan to continue hosting these every quarter. I hope to see you all at the next one! 🙌

What is your favorite BigCommerce core value? What resonates the most with you?

Make a Difference Every day is my all-time favorite BigCommerce core value. I take this to heart and try to live by it daily in my professional and personal life. I truly believe that holding positive intentions and acting on these intentions makes an incredible difference towards a specific cause or person. This helps us all become better people to not only each other but to our Earth.

What projects at BigCommerce are you most proud of?

During my time at BigCommerce (< 1yr) I’ve already had the opportunity to contribute to my team’s goals — which I’ll add is very cool. 😉

To stay on topic here, a project that I’ve really enjoyed contributing to has been creating new opportunities to recognize the developers in our ecosystem. As I mentioned above, we are in a position where we are able to actively work towards growing the community, specifically the Developer Community. One of the ways we want to drive participation and collaboration in our community is by recognizing those individuals in our community who contribute heavily. So we’ve started a new program called “BigContributor” to recognize and shout out developers on a monthly basis. This was just the tip of the iceberg, as we have so many more plans and ideas to improve our developer recognition over the next year. To be honest, we’ll likely always be working on ways to improve the value of our community to our members. So keep an eye out for new things to come, and let us know if you have ideas or feedback.

Share your viewpoint on your team.

My team is incredible. I am so grateful to have the opportunity to work alongside everyone on my team. One of my favorite things about my direct team is that it is full of inspirational women. Everyone on my team holds such a crucial role in supporting and growing the BigCommerce Community, for both merchants and developers. Which is huge! We’re collaborative, inclusive, and complement each other in every way — we’re literally a dream team.

Share something we’d be surprised to learn about you.

Something surprising?? Hmm... I’m not sure how surprising it would be, but for those of you who don’t know me too well personally. I am a hiking enthusiast. I found this hobby after my second year in Austin, and since then I’ve enjoyed taking many hikes throughout central Texas and Utah. Later this year I will be hiking the French, Italian & Swiss Alps, and I aspire to travel and hike everywhere that I can in the US over the next few years, with my two cats. We’ll see how that goes with the kitties, though!

Have a question for me? Feel free to reach out to me in any of our Developer Community Spaces, as in Twitter @bigcommercedevs, or send me a DM in the BigCommerceDevs Slack Workspace! You can also leave a comment below! 😊