Session: Build Developer Experience Teams for Open Source
Open Source has become the default strategy for many IT organizations and Enterprises. However, the constant challenge with Open Source leaders of these organizations has been –
- How is my product’s developer experience?
- Is this the right metric to track?
- How can I scale my team to support our products better?
- How can I add automation to scale redundant workflows?
- If my product involves working with developers, how can I scale to the complexity of the requests and reduce Engineering bandwidth?
The challenges within support of open source products continues to magnify depending on the end user persona whether they are consumers or contributors to your product. Consumers utilize your product, SDK’s and API’s and are blocked with using it or run into issues, whereas contributors are advanced users of your software that understands the codebase to provide a meaningful contribution back to the product.
The answer to the above is to look at Open Source support as a first-class citizen of your corporate support strategy. To employ the right level of developer focused support as opposed to traditional infrastructure based support is key to scale to the amount of developers using your product. Supporting customers in the open involves more than pure support – building customer / developer experiences (DX) in the open (across platforms and communities) that pivots over the ability of your product’s users or developers to be focused on the end-to-end value add. This helps with your active developer growth and retention of users.
Key Takeaways:
- IT leaders of Open Source will learn to employ strategies to build a DX team that engages on multiple platforms
- Work on identifying accurate metrics for product and organization
- Innovate on platforms such as Discord to build a bot and a dashboard
- Ability to leverage customer feedback and iterate over the customer success flywheel
- Distinguish between DX and Developer Advocacy (DA)
