DRC2017 talk – DevRel Judo: Leveraging your company’s organizational structure …
Larry McDonough, Director of Product Management for the Developer Ecosystems at VMware, is giving a cool looking talk at the upcoming 13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference (March 27 & 28) in Palo Alto California. The full title of Larry’s talk is “DevRel Judo: Leveraging your company’s organizational structure to build a stronger Developer Relations team”. Larry has given talks at several of the past conferences and is an intelligent and engaging presenter.
DevRel Judo
Developer Relations is traditionally a centralized function, but what if you don’t have a dedicated DevRel team? Can a decentralized DevRel team succeed? This presentation will highlight the dynamic and sometimes rocky journey that VMware has traveled regarding Developer Relations and the pros and cons of a decentralized structure. I’ll talk about identifying and understanding developer personas, sharing standard developer relations functions across business units, managing resources and clarifying responsibilities, the importance of relationships with the product teams, and of course, constructing analytics to measure shared progress and success. The purpose is to help you strengthen your DevRel teams by exploring your own company’s structure, it’s impact on your success and how you can leverage it’s strengths to improve developer outreach.
VMware {code} covered in this week’s “Learn the Secret Sauce of Developer Relations Programs” DevRelate Webinar
VMware’s developer program, VMware {code} was one of five spotlight programs that I covered in this week’s DevRelate webinar, “Learn the Secret Sauce of Developer Relations Programs“. I also had the opportunity to ask Larry a few questions about VMware’s developer program and developer outreach.
Here are my questions and Larry’s answers.
Q: What are the top three benefits to your company in having a developer relations program?
Good for Us: Health of our ecosystem. Our DevRel program, launched last year, is called “VMware {code}” and it’s main mission is to make sure developers new to our platform can easily get started, learn about our SDKs and APIs, and get connected with the larger VMware community.
Good for Customers: Adds value to our solutions. As a virtualization platform company, we can’t be experts in every vertical market segment. For areas where there are gaps in our solution coverage, or that require specialized vertical segment expertise (like disaster recovery, security and anti-virus, etc.) our partners have opportunities to complete the solution story for customers.
Good for Developers: On-ramp to “Partner” status. Partner engagements at VMware are taken very seriously, and it’s a big leap from a member of a free developer program to our TAP (Technology Alliance Partner) program levels. TAP Access is $750/yr and TAP Elite is $7,500/yr. These programs provide a lot of business value to partners by enabling special integrations, technical support, and customer leads.
Q. Where does the VMware developer relations team/program live inside the company’s organization?
It’s distributed; but there’s a central organization called “ROCS” for R&D Operations and Central Services that’s responsible for hosting and managing all the centralized developer and partner infrastructure that’s used by all the other groups. This is the group where I work. We manage our developer/partner portal, developer and partner programs, partner product certifications, compatibility guide, and coming soon, a centralized marketplace micro-service. Business units are responsible for keeping their developer content up to date on the developer portal. All Developer Marketing, Events, Newsletters, blogs, Slack and social networking is handled out of Digital Marketing. And lastly, all partner go-to-market (non-technical) engagement is handled out of our Partner Alliances team.
Q. How many applications have been created using the VMware SDKs/APIs?
The number of apps is very hard to measure. We have over 100k SDKs downloaded per year and a lot of development is for on-prem purposes. Our Office of the CTO has a site they call “Flings” where a lot of really cool apps are highlighted: https://labs.vmware.com/flings/ It’s not part of VMware {code}, and it’s all built by VMware engineers. But they’re very popular and I’m exploring how to integrate these with VMware {code}
Q. I noticed that the VMware Developer Center and VMware Code are now one and the same. What were some of the reasons for combining them together?
Great question! The main driver is to centralize developer outreach infrastructure. The previous VMware {code} site was a simple WordPress site maintained by our Digital Marketing team. They are really good at community building and hosting events, but they didn’t have any core developer goodies to offer like SDKs, API explorer, Sample exchange to name a few. Developer Center had those, but no market resources to get the word out, organize events, and build community. It just made sense to merge. This has been a goal of mine for 2 years. Together, we’ve now get the strength/weight to strongly encourage the Business Units to build their developer outreach on us and not recreate their own thing. This is where all the micro-site work comes in this year.
Q. Are there any other key performance indicators statistics that you track and provide to VMware management to keep them informed and supporting how the developer program is doing?
Our big focus this year will be member registration and developer engagement. I’ll be tracking how these track to our social media efforts and actual events. Of course, we track closely SDK downloads and community engagement as well.
Q. Is there anything else that you’d like to add about the VMware program its uniqueness and where do you see developer relations and developer outreach going in the future?
We’re going to continue to invest in the DevOps area since that’s a big ecosystem surrounding our products. We’re also going to be encouraging a lot more open source engagement.
Larry McDonough Bio
Larry McDonough is the Director of Product Management for the Developer Ecosystems at VMware. He has previously presented on his work in numerous topics affecting developers including Developer Relations & DevOps, Developer Evangelism, Home Automation/IoT, Mobile App Security, and Android Development. Larry has a BS in Computer Science from University of California Riverside and an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management.
Follow VMware {code} on Twitter
13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference
To see Larry’s talk, six keynotes, additional sessions and network with developer relations program managers and experts, register for the 13th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference taking place in Palo Alto, March 27-28, 2017 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. You can find the full conference schedule with information about all of the keynotes, sessions, speakers and the all day Sunday DevRel Boot Camp (March 26, 2017) on the conference website at https://evansdata.com/drc/.
As a thank you for reading the DevRelate blog, use code DRCSocial17 to save $100 off your conference pass!
