In our latest installment of interview series with the leaders in developer marketing and developer relations, we talked to Grace Francisco, VP of Developer Relations at Roblox.  Grace shared with us her experiences building developer relations programs, the challenges her team encounters and how they measure success. Grace is VP of Developer Relations at Roblox. She is responsible for leading developer and educational programs and engaging with a growing community of 3+ million developers to empower them across multiple platforms. A seasoned developer relations leader with over 12 years of experience, she has co-authored three patents and led worldwide developer initiatives at Microsoft, Intuit, and Atlassian. Prior to joining Roblox, she established Atlassian’s Global Developer Relations organization to nurture and expand their rapidly growing developer community. She is also a celebrated diversity advocate, establishing and driving diversity programs, including mentoring rings, at Microsoft and Atlassian. Grace graduated cum laude and holds a BBA in Business Management from Golden Gate University. How long have you been in the role? I have been in this current role for a year and it has been a fantastic adventure so far. This is my first foray into a consumer-facing service as all my other roles have been enterprise focused, so this has been a refreshing change. The other aspect of my job that makes this experience special is the developers we get to work with that are a vital part of the Roblox community. Specifically, I am referring to what we call emerging developers – first-time developers – creating their first ever experiences on the Roblox platform. What was your journey to Developer Relations? I left home at 17 and worked my way through college for nearly 10 years. I was fortunate to find my way into tech during this time. I did development work without a degree for some time and earned a couple of patents along the way while I was an engineer at Lotus/IBM. I eventually wanted a change and went into technical marketing and then pre-sales engineering at Borland. After that, I went to Microsoft to be a developer evangelist on their first enterprise developer suite which was called Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) at the time. I thought I had reached the pinnacle of my career while at Microsoft, but actually, it was just the start! I was at Microsoft for eight years in a variety of developer relations roles from VSTS to leading the planning of channel9.msdn.com (a developer focused transparency channel) to driving web and open source initiatives. I have since led and built teams at Intuit, Yodlee, Atlassian, and now Roblox. So in your evangelism role were you on the road, developing content, etc? At Microsoft, I enabled the worldwide field evangelists who were the employees on the road in their local markets. I built out a lot of content – samples, demos, decks, and train the trainer materials. I also met with strategic customers and partners. Some of the partners I worked with in my VSTS days were “frenemies” – they were competitors in the space we had just entered but our joint customers wanted a seamless experience from their tools to ours. I really enjoyed looking for win/win situations that served the best interests of both companies. Back to your current Roblox role, how are you organized? The developer relations organization is its own organization, reporting to the Chief Business Officer. Marketing, engineering, and product are all peer teams to our organization. I have four core groups reporting to me in our developer relations organization – Top Dev Programs, Developer Community, Information Experience and Education, and DevRel Operations. What are your team’s responsibilities? We focus primarily on providing resources that are designed to accelerate the success of developers on the Roblox platform. We have a rapidly growing audience of over three million developers who have largely grown out of our player community. We are focused on creating great self-serve content and education, as well as building a self-nurturing community whose goals is to provide our creator community the resources they need to build imaginative, immersive experiences on our platform. We also provide our education partners with core content which they extend and deliver in summer camps and after-school programs or build into their existing class curriculums. We accelerate the success of our top developers via two highly competitive, onsite internship programs called Accelerator and Incubator. These two programs are either three months or five months long and take place twice a year (Spring and Summer). The programs are designed to bring young developers into Roblox to learn best practices in game design, marketing, and monetisation and have direct lines of communication with our engineering teams as they work to either create a new experience on Roblox or update a current one. The interns provide valuable, ongoing feedback about the tools and resources available on the Roblox platform that helps us continue to evolve and improve Roblox both for the developer community as well as the community at-large. Do you recruit from these programs? We don’t actively recruit permanent employees from our Accelerator and Incubator programs. The intent of both programs is to help developers either build new, successful games or improve existing ones. Our top developers are also now forming their own design and development studios where they collaborate with others in the community to build and monetise their experiences on Roblox. Others decide that they really like the idea of working in a bigger company that includes benefits and other employee perks, have had a good intern experience, and therefore pursue opportunities at Roblox. Given the success of top developers on the Roblox platform (over $30M paid out in 2017 with top devs earning over $250,000 per month with their games), it’s easy to see why. You have a very different audience to the typical developer program! Our core player audience is 9 to 13 years old. Our top developers are in their late teens to early twenties and many started on Roblox as 8, 9 or 10 year old members of the community. This emerging developer audience has the ability to build content that resonates in a special way with our core audience. They build unique experiences like “Work at a Pizza Place” – one of our top games – where players simulate working life in a pizza parlor. These are highly imaginative experiences that are less likely to come from an adult developer. We find that many young people have this “a-ha” moment between the ages of 10 and 12 when they self-determine that they want to build something themselves on Roblox. Our developer tools and hosting platform are free which lowers the barrier to entry, and many developers are making really good money from their games. As their games grow and become more popular Roblox provides the backend support to ensure a quality of play that our community expects. How do you approach the ethical side of marketing to children? We’re COPPA compliant and follow industry guidelines and policies related to marketing to children. We are also implementing GDPR by the May 2018 compliance deadline. Do you describe your work as DevRel or Developer Marketing, or something else? I think of these areas as distinctly separate. Credible developer relations is about the technical conversation, enablement, and relationships whereas marketing tends to be about higher level messaging and broadcast to create leads and new customers. You have to be able to initiate and carry on a very authentic conversion with engineers, so I know many organisations are careful about separating Developer Marketing & Developer Relations. Do you share/discuss best practice with other practitioners? Yes, I attend and speak at different developer relations conferences and meetups. We have similar challenges – How do you do things at scale? What are the right platforms and technologies to create great content and API docs? How do you identify best practices to nurture those developers? At Roblox, we just use the extra lens that our audience is particularly young. Is your program International? Our platform is being used globally, so for us, it’s about how we support language-specific ecosystems. We recently released a localisation tool and we are building out data centers in key markets around the world to ensure the best experience for our player and developer communities. Now we are looking at how we incentivise developers to be first movers within non-English-speaking markets, to build native experiences that will appeal to local markets and help Roblox gain market share. We have to keep in mind that developers in these new markets are typically very young so the opportunity may not be apparent for them. How do you measure the success of your program? We keep track of the number of developers on the platform, metrics around game quality, play time, engagement and retention metrics. We also invest in helping our developers understand why these are important. What has been your biggest challenge? Over the past year, a big focus has been hiring and building up the organization and putting processes in place to help us scale the business as we grow. The developer relations team has grown from two to 20 people really quickly, so we are expecting to get a lot done over the next year. We take cultural fit really seriously. What stands out here is the level of collaboration between teams and a genuine sense of wanting to help each other out to get work done. We have a collegial atmosphere and this is the most polite engineering organization I have worked with to date! What are you most proud of? A lot of people burn out in this line of work. I have been doing it since 2004 and I’m really proud that I have been able to navigate the waters in various roles at multiple companies and continue growing in this boutique field. I’m one of a few long-standing developer relations experts in the field and have often been consulted for my expertise. I’m proud of the teams I’ve built over the years and our achievements. I have always sought more knowledge and information and I am convinced that if you want to continue to push the boundaries and continue learning new technologies, best practices, and new information, these are the best roles you could wish for. What’s next? I believe we are creating a new category of entertainment, but it didn’t start out that way. The original vision was an educational tool to help teach physics but quickly morphed into content and games as students began working with the physics engine to create their own experiences. Only now are we beginning to fulfill the original vision around education and as we have grown, we are seeing the type of engagement on the Roblox platform that is reserved for some of the largest entertainment platforms (ie. YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, etc.). Given this popularity and our focus on education, we are now getting into educational curriculums and building relationships with large educational institutions who will be integrating Roblox into their various programs, which our founder is really happy about. We aspire to have school programs in the future which is no easy feat given the understandably high bar set by formal educational institutions. However, we’ve made great progress so far with nationwide organisations to run summer camps and after-school programs and there is clear interest from the education community in the Roblox platform. We’re continuing to scale up what we’re doing with our top developers to ensure the same level of support and services are available to the masses of developers we have on the platform. We’re building the next waves of top developers in much larger cohorts and doing so for a global market. Liked this article? Read also our interviews with Intel’s Scott Apeland and Amazon’s Adam Fitzgerald to learn more about Developer Marketing best practices. SlashData measures developer satisfaction twice per year, across the industry’s 20+ leading developer programs. Want to find out more about our Developer Program Benchmarking research? Contact Chris at chris@slashdata.co #developermarketing #developerrelations #Roblox

Developer Marketing – what is it, why is it important, how to develop it successfully? We’ve interviewed Scott Apeland who leads the Developer Program at Intel to share with us what it takes to succeed in this rapidly expanding field. This interview is part of our Under the Hood of Developer Marketing series where we ask leading practitioners what Developer Marketing and Developer relations mean to them, what they do to make it happen, and how they measure success. Scott Apeland leads the Intel Developer Program and is responsible for defining and delivering programs for software developers worldwide.  This includes the Intel Developer Zone and the recently launched Intel AI Academy. His responsibilities include developer engagement, technical support, community building and university programs. The Intel Developer Zone is a global program where developers engage with Intel for all things software. Scott joined Intel in 1991 and prior to his current role was responsible for managing new product development, roadmap strategies and partner initiatives in the Video Conferencing Division, Internet Media Streaming Division, and Embedded Controller Division. Scott holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a Masters of Business Administration from Brigham Young University. Scott Apeland, leader of Intel Developer Program How long have you been in the role? I have been with Intel for 25 years now and in this particular role for 7 years. I started out in electrical engineering and then got an MBA. At Intel, I started in the embedded controller division in a product management role. That gave me good exposure to what is best for customers in both hardware and software. I then moved into product management in software and video streaming. How did you move in Developer Marketing? Intel asked me to get their developer programs going. To answer how can we engage the developer community in a broad way. As software becomes more important to Intel, I organised the Intel Developer Zone. Over time we have grown the number of technologies supported in the Developer Zone and have grown the number of developers engaged in the program. What is your current focus? We have one of the broadest developer programs out there at the moment. We support everything Intel does from high-end servers and high-performance computing (HPC) developers, through to cloud services, and new capabilities around network virtualization and software-defined networks. Then in the client space, we support laptops app development – for example encouraging game developers to take full advantage of the latest processors and GPU’s, to exploring new areas like VR – just seeing what developers can create with it. Then we have the Internet of Things (IoT) developers – we help them use Intel technologies to advance capabilities from the gateway to the edge in that space. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a focus most recently, and AI cuts across everything – from training neural networks in the data center to computer vision at the edge. Wow, which such a large surface area, I assume complexity and breadth of coverage must be your biggest challenges? Yes, it is. We conduct a lot of market research to fully understand all the different market segments and developer personas we need to address. How to reach them, where they hang out online, what their challenges and needs are and of course sizing the individual segments. Another challenge is making sure we have the skills to support all the different communities. We had been in the High-Performance Computing space for a while, but then we shifted focus to AI where we need to address data scientists and understand how to help them. We had to acquire new technical skills in our tech evangelist team to achieve that. How are you organized? We are part of the product organisation at Intel, separate to the sales & marketing group. We are set up as a horizontal capability in software and services, supporting all the product lines.  The Developer Relations division is all about enabling the developer community. In this group, we have a high touch focus – matching app engineers and accounts execs with strategic accounts like ISV’s and a low touch model for engaging the broader community via the web presence and broad outreach. How mature would you say Developer Marketing is as a craft? The role itself as I describe it is well defined – pairing marketing & technical people together is a model that works really well for us. A lot of companies just starting up may not understand the finer detail. They have to understand the industry is changing rapidly – every year there are pretty significant breakthroughs. Ideally, you would find a developer type that is good at and likes marketing, but that’s really hard to find. We favour the approach of paring a great marketer with a great technical person. It is true marketing to developers is very different to marketing B2C or B2B. You are not trying to convince them to purchase something. Developers want to solve a problem and you need to show them you can help them solve that. It does entail some traditional methodologies, but you have to speak their language. We will put a developer marketing person together with a tech evangelist so the message is right for the developers, the call to actions make sense to them, and the tone is appropriate. For example, developers like competitions, and occasionally we will do them. We will work with a marketing to raise awareness and encourage people to enter, but what they have to do in the contest is technical, so you have to have a technical partner to pull it together – we mix a strong technical call to action and messaging with broad awareness driving. Who are the internal stakeholders of your programme? We have many due to the breadth of the program – for example the client computing group, data centre group, IOT group, etc. Each is set up as P&L’s and are driven by a business strategy, and they look to us to support that strategy. We sit down together to plan for the year ahead –  figure out how that translates into developer program objectives and resourcing and nail down a set of objectives. They then fund the program. That is really interesting, and the first time I have seen that kind of internal cross-divisional funding. We have to report back on the pre-agreed KPI’s and have regular checkpoint meetings. We make adjustments along the way, and ensure they feel they are getting a return on their investment. We also have an obligation to educate internally on working with developers. So with so many internal stakeholders and the fact they are funding your activities, how much time do you devote to stakeholder management? A lot of time. They are funding the program so I need to ensure we are well aligned and the ROI on their investment is clear. Over half my time is spent on stakeholders. With such a large surface area to cover, how does hiring work? Things do change. AI has been a huge focus, and we have ramped up a program. A couple of years ago a focus was perceptual computing and 3D, but that the usages evolved so we shifted and needed new skills. We purposely hire people with a broad skills sets and have a flexible attitude, and are open to change, because we change a lot! They must have the aptitude to learn new technologies, our core team can code in multiple languages, and they understand both client and server applications. We move them around, and occasionally we may need to bring in an expert in a new area. How do you handle international? We have local teams located in each geo who understand the local community and are good at reaching developers in their country. For example, in China, we have a local team on developer events and marketing and we will provide a global framework and program with content and target personas which they then execute locally. This is a really important area, as 75% of our developer base comes from outside the US. How do you measure the success of your program? When you are doing developer programs sometimes there isn’t a direct connection to revenue. You have to find other ways to demonstrate value. We do a couple of things. At the top level, we ask if our market segments are adopting our specific technologies e.g. in the game development space we will ask – what is a total number of game developers, and what percentage are adopting our SDK’s? We also look at other measures like the number of downloads, the number of developers trained on a technology, and the number of people using online resources and forums. We are looking for measures of momentum and accelerating adoption. Secondly, when we can, we look at a number of applications that get enabled and then what is the market share of those apps. Then have many tactical metrics looking at users, downloads, repeat users, event attendance, etc Do you see other developer relations practitioners or do you share/discuss best practice? It is a small community of folks running developer programs, but there are only a couple of conferences for networking and sharing. Intel hosted the first SlashData Future Developer Summit  at our campus in Santa Clara – it’s a really good opportunity to network and learn. The second one this year was even better – there was a real high quality of attendees and presentations. The other is Evans Data’s EDC Developer Conference. It’s been going for a few years and is a good place to hear what people are doing. If you are new to the field it’s probably a good place to start, as its more geared more towards getting started. What has been your biggest challenge? Managing all the stakeholders because our program is so broad – keeping the expectations and strategies well aligned is crucial for our program. That takes a tremendous amount of effort but is important. What are you most proud of? The growth of the program overall. Growth in terms of sheer numbers of developers we reach but also in terms of connecting with the top developers in the community. Through the Innovator Program, we are now scaling our efforts broadly through a set of advocates who are passionate about Intel technology. We came up with the Innovator program as we look for ways on how we could bring in the best developers we engage with to make them successful and turn them into advocates. They are out there doing events, workshops, hackathons, and using our technologies already. Through the program, they become representatives of Intel. We fly them to events to present what they have created, effectively training other developers. It’s been phenomenal, and we have seen a huge impact. Now our Innovators are training 10 – 15,000 developers a month. We invest time into our relationship with the Innovators and gather feedback, it’s a real win/win. Building on the success of the Innovator program, we have now just launched the Intel AI Academy to address Universities and the next generation of developers. We provide teaching kits to help integrate AI into data science classes, provide online courses, and enroll the best students into our student ambassador program. The students get extra training, support, early access to new technologies, and of course the Intel brand to use on their resumes. The program is off to a fast start – we have 160 student ambassadors around the world, and we went from 0 to 400 universities in a year! Liked this article? Read also our interview with Adam Fitzgerald and learn about Developer Marketing at Amazon Web Services. SlashData measures developer satisfaction twice per year, across the industry’s 20+ leading developer programs. Want to find out more about our Developer Program Benchmarking research? Contact Chris at chris@slashdata.co #developermarketing #developerrelations #intel

The absolute leader in developer satisfaction is Unity; according to SlashData’s recently released Developer Program Benchmarking report. This proves that not only the companies with the most traction and the biggest budgets can create excellent developer support programs. Every six months SlashData benchmarks the top developer programs against each other, in the largest study of its kind. Last week we released the Developer Program Benchmarking report where over 21,000 respondents from 150 countries across mobile, desktop, IoT, cloud, web, games, AR/VR and machine learning and data science were asked which development resources they use and how satisfied they are with them. Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are not only among the largest developer programs; they lead the pack in terms of developer satisfaction and engagement. Other major developer companies like Amazon, Facebook, Oracle, and Apple follow at some distance. Unity and Unreal, unlike Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others, cater to the specific niche of game developers. Unity has the highest developer satisfaction of all programs in our list; Unreal is number three in the list. Tencent, the producer of WeChat who mostly addresses a geographical developer segment in China, has a level of engagement that’s on par with giants like Facebook and Amazon (its Western counterparts in some sense), despite being one of the smallest programs in our survey. Other companies like NVIDIA and Cisco may have moderate overall performances, but lead the way in important attributes such as training or access to devices. To reach these results, first we measure what developers value in resources and activities, in all its diversity across several segments of the developer population. Second, by measuring each program’s impact in terms of adoption, engagement (frequency of use), and developer satisfaction. Third, by highlighting the best practice leaders: those vendors that are doing an excellent job in specific aspects of developer programs, to whom you can look for inspiration and insights on how to improve. There is no single leader across all of the 20 activities we measure – everyone can improve somewhere. “In this third edition of Developer Program Benchmarking, we matched for the first time how budget allocation in major programs aligns with the expectations of developers. We now have the data to back up our long-time suspicion that events and conferences may not be the best value for money. Also for the first time, we show how expectations are shifting, i.e. which activities are becoming more important to developers over time. We now have a more complete picture of how to get the best return on investment for developer-facing activities.” notes Stijn Schuermans, Senior Business Analyst at SlashData. To access the full study drop us a note at sales@slashdata.co or download the brochure. #developerprograms #developersatisfaction #developersupport #softwaredevelopers

We launch this series on Under the Hood of Developer Marketing with an interview with Adam Fitzgerald, who’s responsible for Developer Marketing at Amazon Web Services . In this series we interview leading practitioners in the Developer Marketing and Developer Relations field to find what this relatively new discipline means to them, how they execute, and how they measure success. At Amazon, Adam oversees global technology evangelism, developer engagement programs, and community building. His technical interests include fault tolerant composable service architectures, infrastructure automation and data science. Prior to joining Amazon, Adam ran Developer Relations for Pivotal, VMware, SpringSource, and BEA Systems. He is a recovering mathematician (over 13 years since his last formal proof), regular swimmer, and aging gamer. Originally from England, he is now a Bay Area resident and proud geek parent How long have you been in the role? I have been with Amazon Web Services as the Head of Worldwide Developer Relations for four years. Tell me about your path to Developer Relations? I used to be a mathematician researching at the University of North Carolina. By the late 90’s I was getting less interested in academic work, and I had started writing my own software for fun, including a fantasy football app. A friend of mine had a start up, teaching software development, he invited me to join and so I went to work with him. Between accepting the role and joining the company was acquired by BEA Systems, and I taught Java development for a few years. I did some public talks that went really well, and I became an evangelist and “the demo guy” for Weblogic Server for a couple of years. Eventually I took over BEA’s developer program called “Dev2Dev”. This was the early 2000’s, and outside of companies like Microsoft and Apple there were not many developer programmes around. I left in 2007 to join SpringSource an open source Java company created by Rod Johnson (the creator of the Spring framework). It was a really exciting time, and we built up a really successful business with a commercial version of Tomcat. We were acquired in 2009 by VMware and I took on developer relations for their Layer 2 business, which ultimately became Cloud Foundry. The group was later spun out into Pivotal I have been at AWS since 2013. I went there as I had worked with some of the people before and I admired the way AWS was disrupting the tech industry. It was a great opportunity to join a company that viewed developers as a key audience, primarily because AWS is an engineering led company. I joined to make sure AWS did developer marketing in a deliberate way. Now I run the global developer marketing team, and the start up marketing team. How are you organized at AWS? Over my career, I have run developer relations teams in both engineering and marketing teams – it tends to flip flop between both at different companies. At AWS developer marketing is part of the marketing organisation. We work in partnership with the engineering teams, and I firmly believe you can be successful wherever you report in, as long as you have the right charter and relationships. We have over 90 services now at AWS from Compute, Storage, Networking, Databases, AI, ML, and IoT – that’s a lot of internal people to work with. Amazon and AWS are focused on getting product teams engaged with customers, and that feedback drives over 90% of the product features. The product leaders are in regular touch with their customers via executive briefings and customer advisory boards – it really is part of the company DNA. Developer Marketing is a fairly new discipline, what is your perspective on the craft, and where do you think we currently are in its evolution? It is still very much evolving, but, for me specifically, sometimes it is hard to remember what it is like to not think developers are not really important to businesses. I’m too long in the tooth to think in a non developer way. I’ve been very fortunate to work kind of inside a bubble with great people that have always understood that developers are important. When I meet other people in Developer Relations, it is a reminder that they are fighting with really basic issues like convincing their internal stakeholders why developers matter. There is some straight forward methodology and thinking that could be built into a common framework. The last couple of years I have spoken in public about a few of those ideas like marginal value and multi-touch attribution. I think there is a movement towards a standard view of how we define what developer marketing does, or what it means to people. But developer relations is still far from seeing the clear structure and discipline you see in product management and product marketing. That said the explosion in the number of people working in developer relations has been amazing. Do you see other developer relations practitioners sharing best practice? Definitely! It’s hard for good developer relations work to stay a secret as it’s all taking place in the public eye. Successful developer marketing is very evident. The table stakes are well understood – great doc’s, which are well organised for inbound SEO traffic; digital and in person engagement with the community (Stackoverflow, Reddit, Hackdays, 3rd party events); you want to build community and celebrate people that are successful on your platform – developers want to hear from each other – independent voices endorsing your product. The stuff that isn’t easy to spot is what goes on under the hood – how do you make decisions, secure funding, resource planning. I’ve shared more of that over the last couple of years. How do you measure the success of your program? The way I think about it is developer relations is divided into two halves from the customer perspective: What is the universe of developers that aren’t yet using your product or technology? There are some great metrics to understand here like addressable market, your SEO rank, consideration & preference, inbound web traffic, etc. But ultimately you are trying to work out how to turn non-users into users. You have to have a clear understanding of the paths they take to become a user of your product. It’s becoming more and more straightforward to map the triggers for this conversion. What is the universe of developers that are already using your product or technology? – What are they doing with your product? How often are they active? What tier of usage are they on? How deeply engaged are they (e.g. the number of products they use)? What is their financial contribution to the business? At AWS, we look at all this data to make determinations about the success of our developer programs. Do you differentiate your GTM tactics for start-up developers and enterprise developers? Developers have more in common with each other than differences, regardless of their employer. They want to learn new things, solve challenging problems, they don’t want to waste their time going down dead ends – they are very busy, and they will have to stop something they are currently doing to try something new. They also get pitched to and promised the moon and the stars all the time. Developers also change jobs over their careers, so it is important to engage with them as a person rather than as a cog in a larger entity. For example, Capital One has made a massive transition from legacy technology to modern infrastructure on AWS and some of their development team have come from startups and non-profits. Think of developers as connoisseurs of technology, so you need to build trust over time vs. treating them as a number on a spreadsheet to be converted. Once you help them become successful they can take those skills to any employer. Describe the skills you look for in your team? I’d like to think that I’m blind to people’s personal characteristics, I try to focus entirely on their technical credibility. Are they someone that understands developers? Are they someone our audience wants to listen to? Are developers going to believe what they are saying? I look for depth of knowledge about the technology – that doesn’t mean you have to be old like me, you can get that deep understanding early in your career if you have specialised. What has been your biggest challenge? Again, I’m lucky to work at AWS where the organization understands the value of developers. But I have seen at lots of organisations that see developers as a vehicle to achieve some other need or goal like market share, or revenue, or partner enablement. A developer that is on the end of that kind of treatment is going to see through that very quickly. It’s important to realise developers are investing their intellectual capacity into the technology you are promoting – you are trying to convince people to do something in a different, better, way so you too have to completely believe in that technology. I think that’s probably the biggest challenge – representing that need for authenticity back to your internal stakeholders in the business. More specifically, at AWS, our biggest challenge is our rate of growth – we launched over a 1,000 new features this year alone! That is a lot of technical ground to cover and it is only accelerating. Our team is growing quickly but it is hard to find technically credible people in all of these areas where AWS has products. We are always looking for talented technologists to join our team, and that’s going to continue. What are you most proud of? I would say there are two things. I’m really proud of my time working with the Spring community and working with Rod Johnson. A lot of the things I learned came from that environment and it formed my foundational thinking around developer marketing. Spring still continues to be really relevant today. Probably the most impactful thing I’ve done is building a proper programme of developer engagement at AWS. We have such an incredibly passionate collection of customers, it’s phenomenal. While AWS will run re:Invent this month, which will attract about 40,000 people, our AWS community is self-organizing their own developer conferences in the US, Japan, and Europe with thousands of attendees. They also run hundreds of meetups globally and the community has also created amazing open source projects, like the Open Guide to AWS hosted on Github, where users share best practices on AWS with each other. SlashData measures developer satisfaction twice per year, across the industry’s 20+ leading developer programs. Want to find out more about our Developer Program Benchmarking research? Contact Chris at chris@slashdata.co #amazon #developermarketing #developerrelations

Today, Peter Levine is an influential venture capitalist; his opinions are closely listened to and he controls large pots of money. But his career didn’t start out this way. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, Levine worked as a software engineer. He describes the extent of his influence on tool purchasing decisions at the time as follows: “When I was a developer, I had no budget and I couldn’t buy a pencil, when pencils were popular. I couldn’t buy anything. Whatever central IT had ordered, that’s what showed up on my desk.” Oh, how the times have changed. Developers have become powerful influencers in their own right, and for the tool vendors of this era, they are a crucial target. Peter Levine himself describes the transition of developers from pretty powerless line employees to kingmakers as follows, based on his experience with tech startups. One of the most notable transformations over the past 5 years has been the pauper-to-prince of the developer as a buying center within a company. […] As software infiltrates every part of our economy, [developers are now] the lead innovators and they’re the lead buyers in companies. What we see are many of our startup companies now deliberately selling to developers as the first wedge point into an organisation. [Developers] all very much have opinions and buying potential. — Peter Levine on the a16z podcast (edited for clarity) As our surveys are designed to reflect the voice of the modern software developer, we thought we’d get some data on how influential they actually are. For this chapter, we only consider professional developers in organisations that buy tools or components (11% of these developers don’t). We also exclude lone wolves: developers who work on their own and where a purchase decision is purely personal. To some extent, the traditional purchasing structure that Levine referred to from his days as a developer is still alive: the higher up in the organisation, the higher the decision power on tool purchasing.  We consider 4 organisational roles of developers: front-line coders, team leads, product managers, and technology CxO’s. Front-line coders represent 47% of respondents in our survey, the others 36%. An additional 8% combine multiple roles. For the purpose of this analysis, they behave like a mix of the latter three roles. The control of company leaders over budgets and decisions is of course completely expected. Even in small organisations, decision power would rest with more senior staff, especially for making final decisions on team-wide tools and for budgeting. This said, the influence of developers on purchasing decisions is abundantly clear. Almost all developers with a leadership function no matter how small – between 87% and 96% of them – are somehow involved in purchase decisions. Even among front-line developers, the bottom rung in the developer organisation, this is still 65%. Between half and two thirds of developers are in a position to make recommendations or influence decisions. In particular, team leaders (i.e. senior developers) are big influencers (68%). More than a third of developers (incl 38% of front-line developers) acquire tools for their personal use. First, this means they have at least some decision power and at least a small budget to spend. In aggregate, this by itself is an important market. Second, this increases their influence in their organisations and allows them to act as a ‘wedge point’, as Levine calls it. They can introduce tools in an organisation for personal use or at small scale, and then have a proof point to demonstrate the tool’s value to others, based on actual experience and results. As such, they can evangelise tools in larger organisations. Targeting individual developers therefore becomes a viable strategy for enterprise sales. Up to a third of mid-level developer leaders (team leaders and product managers) hold the pen when writing specs for tools (32% and 31%, respectively), or even get the final word on which tool to adopt (30% and 27%). Again this indicates that catering to the needs of individual developers is becoming crucial. Even when in a majority of cases developers still need management to sign off on purchases, the days are over when an inadequate tool could be pushed from the top down because it appeared interesting to CFO’s or top brass. Only for budget and expense approvals, the power still lies elsewhere in the organisation. Even on the CTO/CIO level, only 34% and 38% have budget and expense control, respectively. This makes sense – budgets are never unlimited, and financial decisions rarely belong to function leaders. While this may affect pricing and positioning of developer tools, it will have limited impact on which tools (out of a set of competitors) get the most traction. The power for that decision is more and more found at lower organisational levels. In conclusion, developer experience matters – a lot! From our Developer Program Benchmarking research, we know that developer satisfaction is highly correlated with adoption. The world of developer tooling has indeed fundamentally shifted since the days of Peter Levine’s career start as a developer. It is no longer the purchasing department you need to woo, but the developer who will use your tools on the floor, and their direct team manager. As a research company entirely focused on developers, we will follow this evolution very closely. We’ll also gradually be introducing the level of developer influence as a filter in our Dashboard service. This article is part of the State of the Developer Nation Q3,2017 report. Download the full report! #developerinfluence #developers

We live in a platform world; But we ‘re still unlocking its secrets; how to design for, market to, and engage developers. In this nascent industry, we need to learn from each other. This is what we designed our Future Developer Summit 2017 to do, an invite-only conference where thought leaders and practitioners discuss the future of developer relations and marketing. Our second Future Developer Summit was held earlier in October.  We hand-picked 35 Director-level executives from 35 top technology platforms who came together for one day to learn from each other. All were leaders responsible for developer product, relations or marketing. Attendees came from the top platform companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla), hardware companies (ARM, Intel), enterprise companies (Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, VMWare, Adobe, Cisco, Atlassian, Slack, Mobile Iron), game companies (Unity, Epic Games), cloud software companies (MongoDB, RedHat, Heroku, Digital Ocean), car makers (Ford), handset makers (Sony), emerging platforms (Roblox, Twitch), finance companies (Stripe, Intuit), open source foundations (Linux Foundation), and recruiting companies (StackOverflow). The small audience was instrumental in keeping the Summit a trusted environment where information and experiences could be shared openly, under Chatham House rules. Having only one representative per company, allowed us to maximise the diversity of views and experiences that are shared, while keeping the audience small and tightly knit. The venue was beautiful – perched on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill road, surrounded with trees, drenched in light and decorated with modern art paintings. The food was top-end and plentiful – with my highlight being the mash potato bar! The wine and beer were award-winning. And the jazz band for the networking drinks & buffet was one of the best in the area. We also took the opportunity to launch the first developer satisfaction awards at the event. Nine organisations from the software industry were unveiled as leaders for developer satisfaction. The Developer Satisfaction Awards recognise the software products and brands that developers are most satisfied with. Results are based on the independent and unbiased opinions of over 40,000 developers surveyed annually, from around the globe, combined with SlashData’s rigid research methodology. We also run a survey on Return on Developer Investment with the Summit attendees representing 28 diverse companies. The survey revealed some unique patterns on spend, team size and priorities for the developer relations industry- the first time dev relations trends data has been collected at this scale. We found that almost half of responding companies have 10-50 FTE staff in their dev relations, marketing or product activities, while just over a quarter have 10 people or under. Yet 40% of developer programs have a similar budget of $1M-$5M for developer marketing / relations / product investments. And how do do developer programs measure RoI? the indicator used by most programs is monthly active users, followed by unique visitors and SDK downloads. Thank you to the team that helped put together the event – Chris, Moschoula, Virve, Sofia, Christos, Christina and Mark – we clearly exceeded our expectations, as well as to the entire company that contributed with data and insights. Until the next Future Developer Summit – watch this space. If you want to be involved in the next event drop us a line. Andreas #developersatisfactionawards #developersummit #futuredeveloper

Menlo Park, 10 October 2017. SlashData is excited to announce that nine organisations from the software industry have been unveiled as leaders for developer satisfaction at the 2017 Future Developer Summit 2017 (futuredeveloper.io), an invite-only, Director-level event held at Menlo Park, California this week. Companies including Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Epic Games, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Oracle and Unity were awarded for striving to place developers at the heart of their business. The Developer Satisfaction Awards recognise the software products and brands that developers are most satisfied with. Results are based on the independent and unbiased opinions of over 40,000 developers surveyed annually, from around the globe, combined with SlashData’s rigid research methodology. SlashData (formerly known as VisionMobile) is an independent research firm helping the top-100 software companies measure how satisfied developers are with their products. Andreas Constantinou CEO of SlashData says “The software industry has lacked an objective metric for measuring developer satisfaction, engagement and awareness – until now. The Developer Satisfaction Awards reveal the real developer experience – not an analyst opinion – on how the leading software companies are performing in winning the hearts and minds of developers around the world.” The Developer Satisfaction Awards were presented in front of an impressive audience of 35 Director-level attendees representing 35 leading software companies, from Adobe to Salesforce. SlashData would like to thank Richard Hurring (Founder and CEO of Catchy Agency) and Bhavesh Patel (President & CEO of developerprogram.com) for presenting the Developer Satisfaction awards, respectively, at the Future Developer Summit this week. Full list of winners and runners-up 1.Developer Satisfaction with Database as a Service WINNER: Microsoft Azure SQL Database 1st RUNNER-UP: Amazon RDS 2ND RUNNER-UP: Amazon Aurora 2.Developer Satisfaction with Game engines WINNER: Unity 1st RUNNER-UP: Epic Games’ Unreal 2ND RUNNER-UP: Apple’s Spritekit /Scenekit 3.Developer satisfaction with developer programs WINNER: Unity 1st RUNNER-UP: Google 2ND RUNNER-UP: Epic Games’ Unreal 4.Developer satisfaction with training in developer programs WINNER: Cisco 1st RUNNER-UP: Microsoft 2ND RUNNER-UP: Oracle 5.Developer satisfaction with documentation in developer programs WINNER: Mozilla 1st RUNNER-UP: Unity 2ND RUNNER-UP: Google 6.Developer engagement with developer programs WINNER: Google 1st RUNNER-UP: Microsoft 2ND RUNNER-UP: Mozilla For a full list of the finalists for each category as well as more information about the awards you can visit the Developer Satisfaction Awards 2017 website. #developerawards #developerengagement #developerprograms #developersatisfaction

As software continues to eat the world (to paraphrase Marc Andreessen), software developers fulfill an ever more critical role in the progress of technology and, by extension, society. Supporting developer productivity is good for business. Those developers then become innovators – co-creators – that give a boost to your core business. It’s also challenging. Developer programs consist of a myriad of activities, ranging from simple providing sample code and developer education, to tooling, to in-person events and online communication. It’s hard to be great at everything, and it’s hard to allocate effort and money effectively for maximum impact. Every six months we benchmark top developer programs against each other. First, by measuring what developers value in those resources and activities, in all its diversity across several segments of the developer population. Second, by highlighting the best practice leaders: those vendors that are doing an excellent job in specific aspects of developer programs, to whom you can look for inspiration and insights on how to improve. There is no single leader across all of the 20 activities we measure – everyone can improve somewhere. The top spot in terms of developer satisfaction is taken by Unity, with an overall developer satisfaction score of 75 out of 100. Unity shows exceptional performance on several attributes: tutorials, how-to videos & webinars, and official forums. This may be skewed by the fact that their products cater to a specific subset of developers (game developers) who might score attributes differently than others. Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are not only among the largest developer programs; they lead the pack in terms of developer satisfaction and engagement. Other major developer companies like Amazon, Facebook, Oracle, and Apple follow at some distance. This doesn’t imply, however, that only the companies with the most traction and the biggest budgets can create excellent developer support programs. The living proof of that are Unity and Tencent. As we said, Unity has the highest developer satisfaction of all programs in our list. Tencent, the producer of WeChat who mostly addresses a geographical developer segment in China, has a developer satisfaction on par with Facebook and well beyond Twitter’s, and one of the highest levels of engagement in our survey. Other companies like Intel and Cisco may have moderate overall performances, but lead the way in important attributes such as training, technical support, or access to devices. The study above shows data from the 12th edition SlashData Developer Economics survey. Over 21,200 respondents were asked which developer programs they used and how satisfied they are with them. These respondents came from 162 countries around the world and span mobile, desktop, IoT, cloud, AR/VR and machine learning developers and data scientists. The results were collected by SlashData over a period of six weeks between November and December 2016. To access the full study drop us a note at sales@slashdata.co or download the brochure #unity #amazon #oracle #developerprograms #google #developersatisfaction #Apple #intel #facebook #twitter #microsoft #mozilla

We‘ve come a long way since VisionMobile was founded in 2005. I founded the company just after I had left Orange (the telco) as a means to build a strategy consultancy for the era of mobile. That was two years before Android and iOS were introduced to the world, and ended up impacting every single industry out there. We, much like the tech industry, have come a long way since then. We ‘ve expanded our research scope from mobile to almost everything touched by software – surveying 40,000 developers annually across mobile, IoT, cloud, desktop, web, games, ML and AR/VR. We pivoted from a strategy consultancy to an analyst firm helping top-100 tech platforms understand developers and measure developer satisfaction with their products. And it’s time to change our name to celebrate that change. But before we get there, some history. In our first five years we were the mobile strategists, advising mobile software companies on their positioning and strategy. We delivered open source training, measured openness , measured the performance of Symbian vs Android , tracked software players in the 100 Million Club , and mapped the hundreds of players making up the Mobile Industry Atlas . During our next five years (2010-2014) we were the mobile software analysts. Our team of 10 worked with the top telcos and handset makers to help them navigate the software disruption. We deciphered software business models , analysed the annual Mobile Megatrends , and launched the Developer Economics research series, measuring mobile developer attitudes, monetisation and mapping out enterprise dev tools . Our third and final phase started in 2015 when we evolved to an analyst firm, launching a set of subscription services. We’ve now found our purpose, earning the trust of Microsoft, Intel, Google, Amazon, Facebook and many more top-100 technology firms, who we help to understand developers and measure developer satisfaction with their products. Our Developer Economics research service now surveys 40,000 developers annually, across mobile, IoT, cloud, desktop, web, games, Machine Learning and AR/VR, from hobbyists to professionals and across 150 countries. It’s time to change our name to reflect that mission. SlashData ( slashdata.co ) reflects how deeply we understand developers with data, both of which are at the core of our business. “/” is a common symbol in software development, while “data” captures the DNA of our business, and the core competitive value we deliver to clients. As SlashData, we have an exciting roadmap ahead of us. Helping the world understand developers, from population sizing, to key developer metrics and where to reach devs; and helping the top-100 tech firms measure developer satisfaction, and competitive developer attitudes. You’ll see us launch a lot of new services and formats. Our second Future Developer Summit is being held on Oct 10 in Palo Alto, and watch this space for our developer satisfaction awards launching very soon! Andreas P.S. Even the re-branding project has been a major learning. We first asked the team to come up with a new name. We flooded a spreadsheet with funny-looking to boring sounding names. But we didn’t feel that, we, the management team had the expertise to ask the right questions – should we keep “Vision”? We imagined puzzled clients hearing a name they haven’t heard before. Should the name be serious or whimsical? Do we need to make the domain name availability a priority or a second thought? So we went to an external agency (who shall remain nameless) crying for help. A month later, we had some more names – but we simply felt they did not express our identity or sector well enough. And just as we were getting to a 404, Christos our designer, suggested /data. It was love at first sight for most of the team. So we went for a bold change – a name that does not carry a legacy to the past, but one that will carry us forward for the next 10 years. #rebranding #slashdata #visionmobile

Orange is one of the world’s leading operators with 265 million customers in 29 countries, offering fixed and mobile connectivity services. Orange launched its Orange Partner program for developers several years ago and now offers identity, payment, communication, cloud, IoT and proximity APIs. We spoke to Thierry Gaillet, developer advocate and API evangelist for Orange, who shared some of the practices that the telco used to double the size of its developer community in 18 months. In addition to marketing, community activities and events, Orange Partner runs two to three hackathons a year, each of which includes a meticulous developer recruitment, selection and preparation process, and a closely-monitored competition and follow-up phase. Orange’s network has grown to 3,000+ registered developers, while developers get the opportunity to create customer-tested solutions and take them to market. VisionMobile: You recently ran two large-scale hackathons in France. Could you share some of the best practices you followed? Thierry: What differentiates the hackathons we organize, is that we partner with industry partners to understand and address the challenges they face. We carefully plan and supervise every phase of the ‘hackathon cycle’, which aims to cultivate long-term relationships between developers and industry partners rather than to competition for competition’s sake. We give participants a lot of time to prepare and study the submitted themes, use-cases and challenges, we make sure our people are available to assist and listen to developers, and also invest in their future by mentoring winning teams. Initially, we promote the event to gather potential participants in our network. There are two types of teams we take on during the qualification process; one is high-potential, less experienced developers. The second type is more mature IT professionals, with a lot more experience under their belt, often in the form of ready-shaped teams working in enterprises. Once we have a shortlist of candidates, we organize a networking kick-off, mixing teams (including developers, designers and marketers) as well as experts from our partners and Orange and make relevant technical resources, documentation and supporting material available to them, in order to train them for the actual competition. I’ve been a participant in hackathons myself in the past and remember distinctly how difficult it is to be introduced to tools and hardware right when the clock starts ticking for you to build a prototype. We avoid this by investing in a long preparation process, making sure candidates – including developers and other professionals – can focus on what they are developing, during the competition. This is what we call the “animation” phase, which lasts from ten days to a month. We monitor discussion channels for Q&A regarding the hackathon, share video tutorials and host webinars about the IoT hardware and all the resources which will be available during the competition. This way, when developers come to compete, we know they will be comfortable taking the challenges based on detailed use-cases, they will understand the communication protocols for example, or how to use the hardware kits they are given to work with. The two-day hackathon starts with participants coding straightaway and building tangible prototypes to solve real-life problems, which is appealing as it carries the aspect of usefulness and usability. As an example, one of the teams created a smart safety helmet for factory workers, which would check and communicate whether workers are properly equipped in factories or building sites, at the right time and the right place. The team members met during the event kick-off of the Industry 4.0 hackathon and received €4,000 as a prize, sponsored by EDF,  a leader in low-carbon energies and Air Liquide, the leader in gases, technologies and services for Industry and Health. This team then launched their own start-up: e-novact and industrialized their connected helmet solution which is now available to large industries. VisionMobile: What experiences can you share from your most recent hackathon? Thierry: The most recent event we organized was the LoRa IoT challenge, in collaboration with Objenious, a subsidiary to Bouygues Telecom, which was held between December 2016 and the 18th of January 2017. This was appealing for us because as competitors we have contrasting agendas, but also a shared interest to promote LoRa®, the Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology. As members of the LoRa Alliance, we share the same IoT goals and want to demonstrate to the French market that the two leading companies are joining forces to promote the same technology. The 25 participating teams of developers and other professionals were called to solve real-life challenges presented by three of our partners: Groupama, a leader in the insurance industry, covering 70% of French agricultural businesses, which was looking to mitigate risks of agricultural activities, Schneider Electric, global specialist in energy management and automation, who were looking to optimize electricity distribution, and Colas, a leader in the construction and maintenance of transport infrastructure, interested in embedding LoRa sensors in bridges, carparks and more locations, to monitor traffic and improve driver experience. Together, these teams have received a total of €30,000, comprised of six prizes. From the IoT LoRa Challenge and previous hackathons, we had various teams applying for the Orange Fab accelerator start-up program – from which over 240 start-ups have “graduated” so far. We often invite start-ups on our booths to large events, as Viva Technology, to let them showcase their products/services. We also often present start-ups to our Go-Ignite alliance counterparts (Deutsche Telekom, Telefonicá and SingTel) to widen the scope with a total addressable market of more than a billion customers worldwide. VisionMobile: What is the greatest benefit for Orange, from these hackathons? Thierry: The placement of a hackathon-borne solution on the market is not a requirement but part of our goal to promote innovation. Part of this is ensuring participants are serious about joining our hackathon and spending quality time, ideally to fully develop a solution, which is the primary reason we run our hackathons on weekdays. The second reason, is making our experts available during this time. The Orange Partner experts are present at the hackathon to both make sure participants are comfortable using the resources available, but also receive first-hand feedback from developers. This feedback is key to our product development. It informs us of what technologies and tools developers in our community are using and like working with. We get the most valuable feedback as we speak to our developers at the time they’re solving a problem, when we can get to the core of how they work. Participants come to hack with their own tools, they know what our competition is doing so this is an opportunity for us to understand why they are using each tool, what process and platforms our competitors use and through these understand how to improve our products based on this feedback. Looking at our developer program, these hackathons are an important way for us to engage developers in our community, in addition to our digital marketing and participation to key events and exhibitions. In the past 18 months, we have doubled the number of developers in our network, as well as other professionals such as business developers, marketers and designers – not just with the hackathons themselves, of course, but with various meet-ups and promotion campaigns targeting fast growing market segments, such as West African countries and Egypt, with many innovative startups and small businesses using our SMS, USSD and payment APIs, for instance. We’ve also managed to better qualify our customer or developer base from the feedback that we have during various events. It’s very important that we offer something tangible for the community, not just announcing a new product or a competition, while these hackathons are also a way for us to make sure we have a more direct contact with our community. VisionMobile: What are you looking to improve in the next hackathons? Thierry: One thing which needs to be improved is the right mix of participants’ profiles, in these events. We aim to grow our developer network and also make sure participants are serious about what they do. In similar events there are always the “hackathon professionals” who are well prepared and pitch-winners of earlier, similar events. We try to limit the number of participating pros, to make sure we allow for fresh talent to surface. Another challenge we have faced is the simplification of the legal framework of the overall event, like the need to provide contracts protecting participants’ intellectual property and solutions. As those contracts involved multiple partners, we can now rely on a solid foundation for planning the next hackathons. On another note, we plan to arrange hackathons in other French cities. We know we’re missing some very interesting teams who cannot attend the Paris events, and we don’t want to restrict these projects inside the capital city. Finally, we’re working on ways to improve even further what we do. For example, we’d like to be able to give away the resources we make available at the event. In our last event this included kits by Microchip Technology and Sagemcom, and our own devices, such as Pops (embedded computers with BLE/SMS gateways), beacons or other systems. Did you know that VisionMobile measures developer program satisfaction twice per year? We survey 40,000 developers annually on their attitudes and satisfaction across the industry’s 20 leading developer programs. Disclaimer: Orange is a customer of VisionMobile, but there was no financial motivation behind this article. #developercommunity #developerprograms #hackathon #orange

How do you grow a successful developer community around a financial product? Intuit’s Quickbooks is a well-known small business accounting software that has 100s of accounting applications built on top of the platform, from tax planners to CRM and HR apps. We spoke to Intuit to better understand the mechanisms the company uses to make sure its developer ecosystem succeeds. Originally a desktop accounting software, QuickBooks has moved to a Software-as-a-Service model with a clear vision of the core product features it can enable through its service model. But they also know that customers often need additional functionality, so they have created APIs to let third party providers build those features. QuickBooks found that by offering a range of app integrations with their main product, customers spent less time moving data from one system to another and saved time, increased their satisfaction with the product, and ended up looking for more ways to use QuickBooks in their daily business systems. In 2014, when QuickBooks API program was in its infancy, they offered up to 50 third-party apps, and began to see the impact this was having on their customer lifetime value. They decided to invest more heavily in their API program and now they have over 450 published apps (and over 1,200 in total, including private integrations) and thousands of developers building on the platform. The network of app developers has provided a wide choice of high quality app integrations to small businesses using QuickBooks, solving important problems in its user base. This has helped QuickBooks strengthen relationships with its existing customer base and also grow the base. The QuickBooks Online platform is now growing a two-sided “network effects“ platform by delivering benefits to both developers and small businesses. We spoke to Ketan Kittur, Director of Product Management and Partner Integrations at Intuit to understand how Intuit ensures that its app developers are successful. “The two-sided value of our platform is critical. We want to be serious about measuring retention and quality, so that we can give our customers the best experience and outcomes for running their business. We also want to understand the value these integrations are bringing to our product,” Kittur says. VisionMobile: How do you first identify which developers need to be targeted in a developer program? Ketan Kittur: We look at what problems our small business customers are facing that are not part of our product roadmap. Our developer team then scans the developer community – local and abroad- for potential solutions to the problems. The identified developers may already have solutions or they may include developers who are interested in building applications to address these problems. Our outreach team then works closely with the developers and guides them through the integration process, so their app integrations are of high quality delivering value to the customers. Through these discussions, we have found that there are two main things that matter for developers: They are also entrepreneurs. They are serious business people building their own products and customer base. They do not want to waste a lot of time. Their development effort needs to return value. VM: How do you align building a developer program with overall business goals? KK: Our goal is to help our small businesses be successful using QuickBooks. For problems that are not solved by QuickBooks, we need a thriving a developer community delivering high quality app integrations so we have a highly engaged user base of QuickBooks users. Hence, the goal of both our developer team and developers are aligned- solve critical problems for small businesses using the QuickBooks platform and grow our businesses. When your company has a global footprint like Intuit, we become an attractive platform for developers, allowing them to grow beyond their geographic reach and inspire them to solve for problems that may exist in certain parts of the world. With a customer-centric focus on everything we deliver, quality becomes an extremely important consideration. We use specific metrics to measure the apps in our app store, examining the number of users/connections the app has, the average app rating, customer reviews as well as churn metrics. These metrics help us figure out which apps are doing well and how we can help developers become even more successful by solving issues with their integrations. VM: How do you measure the success that developers are able to achieve by being part of your developer program? KK: There are two key things we track to measure success: How we can make it a lucrative option for developers, and help them grow their business. How can we help developers build (quality) apps more quickly, efficiently First, let’s talk about how we are helping our developers be successful on QuickBooks and grow their business. To do this, we offer developers a channel to our customers via our personalized Apps Store and through relevant in-product discovery. For example, if you are a small business owner and you’re in the expenses component of the software, all of the apps relevant for expense tables can be discovered through in-product discovery In doing so, we are enabling apps to be “found” based on need and necessity. As a result, we can help developers retain –and gain – their customers. We strive hard to increase the number of relevant leads to developers from QuickBooks. We are working on implementing analytics that help us monitor this metric. Please note that while we can deliver leads to developers, the actual conversion depends on the specific developer application. While the reasons are beyond our control, it is important to understand how we can ensure that the leads become actual customers – this is how we can help our developers succeed. Lately, we have been working with a handful of developers in efforts to share insights we are learning from customers and identify opportunities for developers. In doing this, we are educating developers about our customer pain points, while also sharing an analysis of where the gaps are, and how we are looking to better integrate their apps into our workflows so it becomes seamless. Now let’s talk about how we can help developers build quality apps quickly and efficiently., For this,  we look at it from the perspective of the overall developer experience – i.e. easy on-boarding of APIs with SDKs and documentation, API stability dashboards etc . If you go to our website we have details of how our APIs work, access to sample code, SDKs, etc. The website includes everything needed to build an app – and we also have a developer hub where to post questions. Then our focus shifts to helping developers publish an app. Each developer will work closely with a member of our team to get through the entire process. We conduct an annual security review and a technical review to make sure that the app works the way it is supposed to. Our experts will give developers feedback and guidance. We also conduct a marketing review, which entails looking at the app store page description, the introductory video, and how the integration works. We use a portion of our marketing budget to help developers position their app to our customers so they can be successful. There are several other programs and opportunities to help developers find new customers, market their apps and grow their business. For example, last year Intuit hosted the ‘App Showdown’ contest, where almost 100 developers competed over the course of several months for the chance to be selected as one of ten finalists. The winner received a $100,000 prize that can be used to get their business to the next level. Finalists were chosen based on several metrics including quality of integration to QuickBooks, innovation, market impact, and number of users on QuickBooks. These are all metrics we are already looking at to ensure the success of apps on our platform. Building an API program is about a business accepting its new market positioning as a platform. Third party developers become a key asset in how well the platform can grow. Not only do they encourage new customers to your business, but they also create greater lifetime value for existing customers by giving them more reasons to use your products and engage with your business in multiple ways. Network effects of a platform is a core strength of the platform model, but requires an investment and recognition that there is no longer a go-it-alone mindset required. Now it is a raise-all-ships mentality that supports network partners to grow their businesses successfully as well. A platform that recognises that API developers are businesses and sets in place metrics to help those partners grow is a platform that has a greater chance at long term success. Intuit are building that into their DNA by focusing on the metrics of platform network effects. VisionMobile measures developer satisfaction twice per year, across the industry’s 20+ leading developer programs on 20+ program features and services. If  you wish to know more about our Developer Program Benchmarking research drop us a line here: sales@visionmobile.com. Disclaimer: Intuit is a customer of VisionMobile, but there was no financial motivation behind this article. #api #developerprograms #intuit #quickbooks

Many modern competitive battles have been won by attracting developers – whether it’s Apple in the case of mobile platforms, Amazon in cloud, or Salesforce in CRM platforms. Companies are now investing 10s of millions of dollars in attracting and engaging developers to build extensions, products and partnerships around their platform. As these developer platforms and programs are becoming commonplace, we wanted to investigate their best practices; what makes them tick. Scott Apeland oversees developer relations at Intel and has recently launched a whole new developer program aimed at encouraging developers to build new products with their artificial intelligence and machine learning tools. We spoke to Scott about how he identified which developers to target and how he is tracking the effectiveness of their developer program. Intel hosts one of the largest developer programs in the world, with over 20 million active developers visiting their platform and making use of their APIs in projects and products. With a central focus on developers as customers, Intel has been able to introduce more commonly understood metrics to measure customer satisfaction. One of these metrics is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which asks: “How likely is it that you would recommend Intel Developer Zone to a friend or colleague?” Intel survey their developers every three months and aggregate the responses. Developers rate their likelihood to recommend out of 10 Intel conducts the NPS surveys via monthly emails, anonymous feedback, through their Innovators and Managers Programs, and at roadshows and workshops. In the first half of 2016, Intel received over 2,500 responses and 2,600 comments on developers experience with Intel. Measuring their results by business unit and overall, Intel has recorded a jump from an average NPS score of 19.5 in 2015 to 27 in 2016. The Internet of Things and Robotics developer tools jumped the greatest in terms of improvements in developer satisfaction during this time, while other developer programs such as mobile app development and 3D cameras also increased levels of developer satisfaction. VisionMobile: How do you first identify which developers need to be targeted in a developer program? Scott Apeland: Because Intel’s developer program is one of the most diverse and broadest, it is growing quickly. We had 16 million developers in 2015, and now we have reached 20 million in the Intel Developer Zone. This means we have to be really good at understanding different types of developer needs. So we profile the developers in each audience segment and then create developer personas. We also use VisionMobile’s developer segmentation model to understand the different motivations of each segment and that’s very helpful for us too. For example, in our data center developer program, we are working with HPC (High Performance Computing) developers with advanced C++ skills. They are really proficient at optimizing software to get the most out of the hardware. These developers are trying to get the most performance they can through techniques such as parallelization and vectorization. We help them by providing have the tools, training and support at the right level for these advanced developers who have years of experience. But also in the data center program, we have developers who are trying to take advantage of brand new tech like network function virtualization. These developers need a different set of tools, and have different partners in the ecosystem and skillsets to deal with. That’s just in the data center world. In the laptop space, we have a game developer program where we are helping devs take advantage of the latest platforms and create new experiences with 3D graphics, virtual reality, and 3D video. This is a whole different type of developer. And in the IoT space, you are often dealing with a “maker” looking at what problems they can solve using a combination of h/w and software together in a new innovative way. They are more likely to be individuals innovating by themselves but value sharing their knowledge and expertise in a community. VM: How do you align building a developer program with overall business goals? SA: Each business unit comes to us with their objective. For example, in the data center business unit, they have an objective to accelerate the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine  learning technology. To achieve this we must have the developer community on board and partner with them on delivering open source frameworks and tools. So we just rolled out our AI developer program on November 17. The program was front and center in Intel’s announcement and is focused on upstreaming tools, technology and training, making them available to all types of developers. We’ve been working with the developer community for many years but each time we put together a new initiative we start by interviewing real developers and software experts both inside and outside of Intel. Internally we spoke with developers optimizing the AI frameworks and creating the software tools. Externally we spoke with the top developers in our black belt program. We have a close relationship with them and can discuss what’s important to them and how to make them successful. They provided us with valuable insight to refine the program and focus it squarely on real developer needs. At AI day we rolled out a new AI Developer Zone with frameworks, tools, tutorials, videos, sample code, a partnership with Coursera, a contest with Kaggle to solve early detection of cancer, and a brand new student developer program. Academia plays an important role in advancing AI, so we put a strong focus on that as well. All of those elements came together and culminated in our entrance to the market. VM: How do you measure the success of your developer program? SA: We use a number of metrics, including the number of developers using our technology and the impact their applications have in the market. But one of the most important success metrics is developer satisfaction because without that we can not maintain developer mindshare and support long term.  To measure satisfaction we use the Net Promoter Score (NPS). It gives us a top level benchmark: would developers recommend us to their colleagues? It is an indicator that management can use to assess how we are doing in general. In addition to this score, what is even more valuable is the comments we get back from the survey. We get thousands of comments back (2,656 last quarter) around how we can improve things and that’s where we hear about the need for more additional tutorials and code samples, for example, or how the forums are tough to use online. We get continued feedback so we can really make this work for the developer side. What I do is I make the NPS a top level goal in our division. The goal is to improve our score year over year, and every quarter, my staff will review our NPS results. Everyone will read all the comments and then we get together and decide on common themes that are emerging. For example, we may notice the need for more tutorials in Chinese or that a particular developer tool is difficult to use, and we take that feedback and we form an action team. That team is empowered to dive in and address the issue. The team includes a dev evangelist, a content author, a community manager, a web experience expert and a geo-rep for global input. They go and look at each comment in greater detail and put together a plan to improve that area. Then the team reports back every couple of weeks on their progress. Since we’ve started this approach we’ve been able to move the needle on NPS with a jump from 1.6 two year ago when we started to 27 today – you don’t see that kind of jump in the NPS world. NPS has really helped us in driving a customer-centric culture in our organization.. For any business opening up APIs to external developers, it is possible to measure the number of visits to the developer portal page or the number of developers requesting an API key. But in the same way that ‘likes’ in social media are often just a vanity metric, developer portal visits and API signups tell you very little about whether a developer program is successful or not. Intel have found that by using the Net Promoter Score, they can engage regularly with their developers as first-class customers and support them to become champions of Intel’s products. It is not just a satisfaction metric that Intel have introduced, it is a key customer engagement strategy. They use the NPS and associated feedback as a continuous improvement mechanism to identify what developer resources they can next create and how to respond to new developer needs. The proof is in the results: each year, more and more developers are comfortable with recommending Intel to their colleagues. Do you have best practices you ‘d like to share from your developer program? Drop us a line here: hello@visionmobile.com. Disclaimer: Intel is a customer of VisionMobile, but there was no financial motivation behind this article.

When devs create apps, it feels like that is the project. But once an app is built and released on an app store, it becomes obvious: creating the app was just the start of the journey. Developers are makers. They solve pains, entertain, enlighten, and enhance productivity. Building an app can be an exhilarating experience and the joys of shipping can linger for… about ten seconds. Then comes the question, “I’ve built an app, now what?” Now comes the really exciting (and scary) stuff: getting that app in front of users who will find it useful, and making sure they keep coming back to your app on a regular basis. Building strategies for user acquisition and retention are the two major tasks for dev teams after they have built an app. Acquisition  is really about marketing (app store optimisation, paid & organic acquisition) and user retention is about marketing and the product working together (user experience, re-engagement and performance). Analytics helps understand exactly what is happening and how to keep building traction. From there, new possibilities can emerge that will help you grow your user community even stronger and help you identify novel ideas that may offer you a winning edge. Check out this  infographic based on on VisionMobile’s series of articles by Mark Boyd on:  User Acquisition , User Retention and Growth Analytics. #mobileapps #acquisition #engagement #retention #userexperience #analytics #churn #performance

My most fun job ever was as a C++ developer. Ok, I don’t have much grey hair yet, but I fondly remember the late 90s and the challenges of writing a background synchronisation application on a Compaq iPaq. And reverse engineering Mozilla’s Navigator into an XSLT parser. My second most fun job ever has been building a company that helps the world understand developers, with research. We’ve come a long way – and a few pivots – from surveying the pulse of 400 developers in 2009 to 30,000 developers annually in 2016. That’s a lot of data – in fact more than our analyst team can chew. It’s a privilege to be working with some of the biggest names in tech – I ‘ve learned a lot the past 2 years. Earlier this month, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Adobe, Intel, Oracle and many more joined our first Future Developer Summit, and shared some of their best practices in how they work with developers. I ‘d like to share some the learnings here. Return on Developer Investment. You would think that with billions of dollars spent every year on building tools for developers, running hackathons, loyalty programs, tutorials and how-tos, evangelist and MVP programs – the platform leaders would have figured it all out. Yet, with so much money being spent on developer tools and marketing there is no standard for measuring the Return on Developer Investment. Most companies represented at the Future Developer Summit shared how they measure success. At their inception, developer-facing orgs measure success by number of developers touched – but that’s a meaningless metric, a dinosaur from the age of print marketing. Some platforms are using NPS (net promoter score), polling their active developers once a year for how likely they are to recommend the platform. Many are informing product decisions based on developer comments (“will you ever fix that”?) – you’ll be surprised how many decisions are taken based on “the devs that I spoke to said..”. Other developer relations teams are measuring success through the number of apps in the store, and the number of apps using signature APIs. In the case of open source projects, a popular metric is GitHub stars, forks and commits over time. The more sophisticated platforms track the Return on Developer Investment funnel from SDK downloads to app download and use. But there isn’t a consistent way to measure how the investments in hackathons, tutorials, how-tos, loaner devices, evangelism programs and some many more developer-facing activities are paying off for the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook. Quality of apps, not quantity. Another theme of the Future Developer Summit was the need for quality, not quantity of applications at the start of an ecosystem. B2B ecosystems like Slack and Intuit prioritise quality; Poorly written messaging apps can damage not just the perception of Slack, but also the perception of chatbots in general. Similarly, a poorly written app for the QuickBooks platform can wreak havoc to sensitive financial data for thousands of small businesses. As a result both Slack and Intuit have very stringent app review processes, including weeks of testing, usability and security reviews. To improve quality for bots, Slack has pioneered a “Botness” program, bringing together bot platforms and leading bot developers; the aim is to “make bots suck less” i.e. improve the bot user experience and avert a long-term damage to the reputation of chat bots. There are already 250 members signed up and the next event is on November 4 in NYC . The next Future Developer Summit will focus on best practices for developer relations. If you ‘d like to be part of the invite-only audience of platform leaders, register your interest at www.futuredeveloper.io #amazon #oracle #chatbots #developerprograms #developerresearch #slack #intel #facebook #quickbooks #Adobe #microsoft #intuit