R3’s 2020 Developer Relations Plan

As a member of the open source community, R3 are familiar with being transparent. But we realize that we can embrace openness further, by openly sharing our developer relations plans. My hope is this helps shapes the best plan to serve our audience — developers. I welcome feedback or questions on the plan to better serve you. I’ve left this as close to our original internal communication as possible, which starts below. Send any feedback or questions to devrel at r3.com or me (mike.ward at r3.com).

This plan is a revised version of the plan communicated internally at the end of 2019. The requirement for many of us to work from home has caused a dramatic shift in how we go about our job. Considering we are unsure how long we will be required to avoid large gatherings of people at public events, our 2020 plan is now 100% online. This revised plan reflects our new reality.

Embracing might be a better term than reflecting, however. This presents an opportunity for the developer relations team. In the original 2019 and 2020 plans I had called out the need to move more of our activity online to reach a much larger audience. We now have our full focus in an area that helps us reach more developers, and gives us strong metrics to know how well we are succeeding.

Metrics are key to us — if we can’t measure it, we don’t do it. We also are structuring our activities to think of them in a progression of our relationship with developers. I use the terminology from AIDA, which is a classic marketing framework that helps us understand where we are in our relationship with the broader community.

Developer Relations Objective

A reminder on why we exist as a team. The developer relations teams purpose is driving adoption of Corda by developers.

• We represent a single audience — developers. We target this audience because they represent a critical audience for the adoption of Corda.
• Developers are our customers. Our focus is on making them successful in solving complex problems, not selling them products.
• First, we must make developers aware of our solution and how it solves problems they may have.
• Next, we lead them to a deeper interest through content that will make them productive.
• We are part of the marketing effort and must ensure developers are led from awareness to action in a well formed nurturing program.
• We recognize we are part of the overall sales process and ensure developers in key accounts are shepherded toward teams that can help them further.

2020 Activities

The remainder of this plan details the activities we will drive in 2020, and how we will structure ourselves to achieve this. We have divided our team into two main areas: evangelism and experience. Our program is built around the AIDA stages.

• Awareness. The awareness activities are the domain of our evangelists. The responsibility of the evangelist teams is to make a broader target developer community aware of Corda, and how it easily solves difficult problem for them. The end result of these activities should be bringing developers back to the website.
• Interest. Interest occurs after developers are aware of Corda, and is how we take them on the nurturing journey. This nurture path takes developers who have landed on website and moves them to become deeply engaged, and productive, developers.
• Experience. Experience captures the tools and process that a developer encounters working with Corda. This includes the experience from landing on corda.net, to training and development of a CorDapp (including IDEs, SDKs and other elements that impact the developer).

Awareness

Much of our effort in 2019 was satisfying demand for Corda knowledge rather than creating it. Developers are the top of the funnel for R3s go-to-market strategy. Building awareness is difficult, but without it we fail.

Reaching developers who are not yet aware of Corda, and how it benefits them, will require us to drive activities in areas that are not owned by R3. Our focus will be on engaging developers in other communities. Our specific activities are listed in Airtable or are tracked in the metrics workbook. Many of our original activities for awareness are designed for in-person events. Considering the current environment this is our most challenging area but also the largest opportunity to drive impact. Our activities include:

• YouTube. Youtube is one of the most widely used channels for developers to learn about new technologies. We can do demos, tutorials etc but we will also strive to learn from more social channels like Microsoft’s Channel9 in creating a social atmosphere. We will aim to be a part of other technology channels to get new visibility.
• Twitter. We’ll be active in the Corda Twitter account to build out a larger audience of followers by following others and joining in on their conversations. Don’t just tweet marketing copy, say something meaningful and be a part of conversations.
• Online communities. Online communities are the primary way developers interact and discover new technologies. We’ll focus our effort in being a part of the online communities to drive awareness. We will identify and target online communities that are key to Corda adoption. For example, we should be active in Java groups on Gitter, or other areas where they convene.
• Guest blogging. We’ll continue to have regular blog postings on our Medium blog from our community, but we should focus on blogging in other communities to draw in new developers. We’ll develop a list of blogs we can partner with.
• Hackathons. We will participate in hackathons as a way to drive more awareness around Corda. We will not run our own events as this will not help us reach a new audience. Rather, we will participate in existing hackathons by sponsoring the event to ensure Corda is a platform that can be selected by developers. We will then support teams who select Corda with direct help during the event.

Interest

Interest takes place after a developer is aware of Corda, and has some idea of how they will benefit from using it. Included in this category are the efforts we make with developers to make them successful while learning.

• Stack Overflow. We’ll continue to maintain regular support for the community on these key channels. Stack Overflow is the #1 most visited website by developers. While it is not a community website, developers go here with issues allowing us to form a public Q&A that is readily discovered in Google searches. It is important to be quick to respond to give a feeling developers are supported, and a part of a community.
• Slack. Slack is our main tool for conversational engagement with our community. We will monitor the general channel as well as the developer relations channel on a daily basis. However, for anything that a broader community can benefit from post the answer on SO and put a link back in Slack. Slack content is lost to the scroll. 90%+ of the Slack conversations are private. Let’s get people to converse in the open and foster shared knowledge.
• Boot Camps. While we are suspending roadshows, we have successfully converted our boot camps to be delivered online in a shorter format. We’ll continue to deliver these on a regular basis in each region while we see sufficient demand. We’ll run one per month in Asia, India, EMEA and the US on YouTube live. We’ll promote these as local boot camps to prevent overly large sessions to keep the quality up.
• Topical webinars. We’ll add further webinars for specific topics targeting both more advanced Corda developers (e.g. Tokens) and more general appeal sessions (e.g. Corda for Java developers and Corda Blockchain Introduction for Developers).
• Office hours. Specific times when developers can ask questions of somebody live. We’ve experimented with us over the years and believe the most effective way to run it is on Slack. Let’s give times where we can help with challenging questions.

Experience

Corda is a straight razor. There are too many ways to hurt yourself, and it requires too much skill to learn how to use it effectively. We need to move to the era of the safety razor.

The developer experience team has this mission: make the Corda developer experience best of class. While the other teams are responsible for making developers aware of Corda, this team is responsible for creating a glide path for their success. The evangelist will land the developers on Corda.net and this team will take them on the rest of the journey.

The team’s remit is to take developers from aware to interest with Corda, purely online. This includes:

• Strategy and Requirements. A document located in the product strategy that details the current state and desired state for a developer. It will detail a roadmap for functionality related to developers. It will detail the requirements and eventual features that will go through our standard delivery process.
• Corda.net. The most important part of a developers experience with Corda is the landing page, and journey through, corda.net. We’ll partner with marketing to refine this page, targeting a lower drop-off rate as well as conversion to the next stage.
• Training & Certification. Our goal with training is to get as many developers as possible skilled up. As such, we are investing in world class online training. Additionally, we are building a formal certification program. The goal of certification is to ensure our customers are able to trust that the developer they hire with our certification is truly skilled and productive. Our new training went live today!
• Online tooling. We will ensure the developers experience is as productive as possible through an online developer environment. Our remit as developers is limited to the Visual Studio Code hosted IDE environment which is critical to our success in online activities.
• Samples and Tutorials. DevEx own the samples currently in the Corda repository, and future samples. These samples and tutorials will be kept up-to-date. We will create new samples and tutorials as new developer oriented features are released each quarter. We will revise these samples to be sure they are simple and are structured against a standard learning path.

Metrics

If we can’t measure it, we don’t do it. Our execution metrics are tracked in our internal spreadsheet, but our main metric is the rich set of data provided by Google Analytics for Corda.net (including training and docs).

Awareness

• Corda.net visitors. New visitors as the single metric that is a proxy of awareness growth.
• Value Proposition. Website bounce rate as a measure of how well our message resonates with developers.
• Local city reports on key markets as discussed below.

Interest

• Corda.net return visitors. How engaged are developers. Note we consider docs.corda.net as a part of our metric and anticipate developers return there, not the general website.
• Stack Overflow questions. Execution metric to show how quickly we respond to issues. Interest metric on how we see growth in questions indicating growth is use.
• Youtube views. YouTube channel subscribers + views. This also gives us a chance to benchmark against related, or competitive, products using public metrics.
• Trained & certified developers. Count of individuals who have completed our online training showing deep engagement and interest. Certified developers should not be a metric we try to push as that drives the wrong behavior. R3’s belief in the ability of the developers who have this certification is our goal.
• Activated developers. Count of Maven Central downloads as an indication of a developer having commenced work with Corda by compiling a CorDapp.

Target audience

The developer universe is large (25m+) and we need to stay focused on those that will make the most impact for R3. This is a narrower audience for us to ensure we are focused on reaching the right developers with our limited resources.

• Professional developers. Where possible, we will target developers who work in ISVs and SIs.

This means that specific audiences are out of scope for focused activities beyond broad awareness. Of course, we will support all developers but we’ll not target these audiences:

• Startups — we’ve got a whole team for this now who we will partner with to support startups.
• Students or hobbyist developers — are out of scope as we have limited time to help grow the next generation when we haven’t secured the current one.
• Desktop or mobile developers — we target developers that work in the server part of the application stack layer as is natural for Corda.

Team structure

DevRel is split into three teams. We are currently a team of 8, with open headcount.

1. Evangelists — America’s and Asia
2. Evangelists — EMEA
3. Developer Experience (DevEx)

The America’s team is based out of San Francisco, closer to Asia time zones. As discussed below, ‘Silicon Valley’ is one of the most important areas for us to build awareness. We also have a presence in Hong Kong, targeting China reporting into this location.

The EMEA team is based in London near the engineering team and cover Europe, the Middle East and Africa. India is one of our most important regions and we have a Mumbai based team there.

The DevEx team is London based team to be near the development team. This team is responsible for a developers experience after landing on Corda.net discussed below.

Geographical focus

Globally developers are highly concentrated in three key locations: the US, India and China. The EU comes next with Germany and the UK. The recent Github report provides more evidence of this.

We need to win these locations before we spread ourselves thinly in other, far less impactful, locations. We’ll make very few exceptions for activity outside limited key locations.

• India (Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune)
• USA (New York and SF Bay Area)
• China (Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing)
• Europe (London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris)

2020 is set to be an amazing year for us as a team to capture the awareness and interest of developers for Corda. We have an amazing solution to help them build distributed applications that connect organizations. I’m looking forward to working with you and our community. See you online.