Build a developer community operation strategy from scratch!

The author of this article starts from user portraits, combines user stratification, and community operation levels to discuss: "How to build a developer community operation strategy from scratch?"

With the rapid development of technologies such as Mar-tech, ToB marketing has undergone tremendous changes compared to the past. Compared with short-term and direct BD methods, establishing long-term relationship marketing plans and extending the customer relationship life cycle have become executable, sustainable, and relatively low-cost marketing strategies. At the same time, as the customer relationship life cycle lengthens, it also begins to require providing corresponding value to different user groups during the marketing process.

As an indispensable and important group in Internet companies, developers have always been the focus of ToB manufacturers (such as PaaS and IaaS). So today let’s talk about what we should do if we operate the developer community as a product (part of the content will use cloud native as an example).

1. Developer Profile

Since most enterprise users who use related technical products or services have enterprise attributes and contain multiple role attributes. To build a complete developer user portrait, it is necessary to survey all relevant roles in the decision-making chain. Therefore, the research needs to include the following main dimensions: industry attributes, enterprise attributes, and role attributes:

1. Industry attributes : such as the market structure and operating models/rules of different industries. Through industry characteristics, we can understand the current status and development trends of the industry. Taking cloud computing as an example, the banking industry’s demand for cloud computing will definitely be stronger than that of real estate, with more stringent requirements and more sufficient budgets.
2. Enterprise attributes : such as enterprise size, revenue scale, active users, usage evaluation, etc. Understand the target developers’ business needs and pain points in enterprise development through enterprise characteristics;
3. Role attributes : such as decision makers (CIO, CTO), middle-level managers (technical experts, R&D directors), and users (front-line employees). There are great differences in the concerns and needs of decision makers, middle-level managers, and users. It is necessary to clearly define the watershed between them.
4. Personal attributes : such as age, skills and other requirements are more about issues related to the upper level of Maslow's theory.

Here we can use two research methods:

1. Qualitative analysis : Through interviews, questionnaires, and other methods, combined with industry research reports and past experience, we explore the behavioral motivations, needs, and changing patterns of developer users;
2. Quantitative analysis : Based on existing data and industry benchmark research, compare and analyze the various indicators, characteristics, and relationships of developer users.

In actual operation, interviews are conducted with a small number of core high-contribution users. The survey was completed on a large number of ordinary users through questionnaires. After a fierce operation, we can outline a relatively complete user portrait. Through the Key Messagge marked in red, we can see relatively clear and strong developer user characteristics (here we quote the CSDN report as an illustration).

(1) The three technology fields of Internet, software, and IT manufacturing cover more than 84% of domestic developers

• More than 80% of developers are under 30 years old, and nearly half of the developers in China work in first-tier cities.
• 61.6% of developers have been in the industry for 1-5 years, and 18.3% have been in the industry for less than 1 year;
• 66% of developers have a bachelor's degree, and 12% of developers have a master's degree or above.

(2) Developers are enthusiastic about learning, with nearly 60% of them learning for more than 6 hours per week;

• 50% of developers learned by themselves, and 31% received on-the-job training in software development;
• 37% of developers are willing to pay for learning;
• 70% of developers’ training budget comes from personal sources.

(3) 60% of developers use Java, and nearly 50% of developers want to learn Python in the near future

• Only 15% of developers use cloud or containers, and more than 60% of developers use the Notepad++ text editor.
• 34% of developers use containers for development. In terms of software development based on cloud/browser IDE, they generally believe that the startup speed is fast and the operational convenience is comparable to that of desktop IDE.

(4) Apache projects and Linux are open source projects that developers prefer

• 68% of developers have been exposed to open source for 2-5 years;
• Half of developers rarely participate in the development, maintenance, operation and community development of open source projects, and only 7% participate full-time.
• More than 60% of developers do not earn income from open source projects;
• 77% of developers spend no more than 5 hours per week on open source.

From the above description, we can conclude that the industry and regional attributes of the developer group are relatively concentrated, and they generally have high education and cognition; they have a strong desire to learn and have a certain interest in participating in activities. Although I participate in community or open source projects, I don’t make any money.

2. Developer Community Positioning

After clarifying our developer user profile and products, we hope to establish a developer community as a vehicle to achieve user conversion and retention. So, what is a developer community and what does it require?

2.1 What is a developer community?

We define the developer community as follows: "It connects manufacturers and developers, forms an interactive (online/offline) business value incubation platform through content generated by both parties around common needs for a certain technology ." So, we can grasp a few of the key points:

(1) Common demand for a certain type of technology

Combined with the previous developer portrait, we can see that for specific products or technical fields, developers will have a strong desire to deeply learn a certain type of technology or product or solve the usage problems of a certain product in the specific work process.

For example, developers want to learn about DevOps-related automated release pipelines, CI tools, and how to achieve development and operation collaboration through the cloud native community. Then, he will choose the corresponding vertical developer community to search for relevant information.

(2) Both parties generate content

The foundation of a community is content, and the content category determines the community atmosphere and operational tone. After building complete structured content, we recommend and distribute corresponding content based on user and platform attributes to ensure that content reaches users.

Users realize UGC based on PGC, forming a complete content production closed loop. This will enable "manufacturers + loyal users to enrich basic content, ordinary users to comment and forward content to participate in interactions, and manufacturers + content supervisors to maintain community order and enhance a sense of belonging by reviewing platform content", allowing different roles to interact with the community through content.

For example, the Alibaba Cloud Native Developer Community provides comprehensive open courses on cloud native technologies to help users understand cloud native knowledge. While acquiring knowledge, users can also engage in discussions based on the courses or share their own best practices and interact with peers.

(3) Interaction

The UGC, comments, forwarding and other interactive behaviors generated by users in the community all have quantifiable value and can be used to cultivate business opportunities. By evaluating user stickiness through interaction frequency and interaction quality, it is also further verified whether the core purpose of community building is consistent with developer needs.

Through content interaction, developers are guided to complete the role transformation from "cognition-user-customer" and increase their reliance on the community. With the help of scenario-based social networking, a relatively stable social chain can be formed among users. For example, various forms of meet-ups to discuss hot technical topics, announcements of awards for outstanding contributors, contribution rankings, granting of ambassador titles, etc.

(4) Commercial value incubation

ToB manufacturers do a lot of things. Although they emphasize promoting the development of industry technology, their core purpose is always to sell goods and make money. The developer community is actually one of the means. Leverage users’ recognition of the community and content to acquire and incubate business leads and even upsell after-sales customers.

However, ToB technology products have problems such as long business opportunity cultivation cycle and long decision-making chain, so general community operations will pursue more operational indicators such as community activity and active product usage, and will not assess the direct number of leads or the amount of business opportunities.

2.2 Purpose of Developer Community Operation

Before enumerating the resources needed, we need to clarify the purpose of the community's operations. In this way, we can better coordinate the internal and external resources of the company. Common purposes mainly cover two dimensions: product level and marketing level, including the following aspects:

• Product brand communication : Improve the recognition and reputation of the manufacturer's brand among the developer community and popularize technology and products;
• Establish user traffic pool: provide traffic pool for product acquisition and conversion, and provide carrier support for product testing and market feedback;
• Business value incubation: complete the transformation from awareness to users to paying customers;
• Product service: Replace traditional help documents and work order systems, reduce after-sales service costs, and improve pre-sales service experience;
• Establish a community ecosystem : optimize technology, complete scenarios, integrate resources, and improve manufacturers' existing products through external developers;
• Learning platform: As a technology evangelist, we help more people understand and learn about related technology fields.

In fact, we can see that multiple goals at the marketing level are a complete funnel. Therefore, this also requires us to provide corresponding content to different links and different roles in the decision-making chain during the operation process to generate interaction. So how do we stratify users?

2.3 Developer Community User Grouping

After clarifying the purpose, who are the people we are operating for? What is the significance of each role in the decision-making chain for incubating business value?

• Decision-makers : CTO/CIO, VP of Information Technology and other decision-makers in technology product purchases;
• Opinion Leader (KOL) : An industry technical expert whose opinions have a great influence on other developers and even decision-makers, such as leaders of various associations, active experts in the technical community, lecturers of a series of courses, ambassadors of foundations, and evangelists in a certain field;
• Selectors and evaluators: technical/R&D/operation and maintenance directors, system architects, and other user groups in enterprises who have the right to evaluate and recommend product selection;
• First-line users : senior programmers and direct users of products after purchase;
• Public perception: Ordinary developers who have heard of related products and technologies and are interested in learning about related fields.

For daily operations, the commercial value gradually decreases in the order introduced above. We hope to accurately convey business value information and brand power to decision-makers through various large-scale activities and influence their decisions. For opinion leaders, we hope that they can help us effectively reach relevant audiences that traditional media channels cannot reach, and integrate more external perspectives. For opinion leaders, although BD is relatively difficult, the value of cooperation is huge.

Selectors, evaluators, and front-line users have moderate commercial value and a huge base. Compared with the above two types of audiences, their reach and conversion costs are lower, and they are also an important source of traffic for the community. Public perception, as the external traffic base, determines the future size ceiling of our community.

Earlier we described the purpose of the manufacturer for the developer community, so what is the actual value to users? It can be summarized as follows:

• Solve real product usage problems in the business;
• Gain opportunities to develop technical skills and explore new technologies;
• Get the opportunity to discuss and collaborate with technical experts from different companies;
• Use your community contributor status as an endorsement in future job interviews;
• Material rewards.
• We mentioned earlier that the developer community is a platform for manufacturers and developers to interact with each other around product and technology needs. We also talked about the respective demands of manufacturers and developer users, so we need to coordinate the following internal resource support from manufacturers.

2.4 What support does the developer community need?

As the saying goes, those who have money support others with their money. Based on the demands of both manufacturers and developers listed above, we need to ask the boss for support in terms of personnel, content, and funds in order to carry out operations effectively.

(1) Personnel support

• Basic support : community graphic designers and front-end development engineers support daily activities;
• Community operations : online/offline activity implementation personnel, online content channel distribution implementation personnel;
• Community Q&A : Based on the community's activity and size, we will assign 1-2 long-term technical support staff (TS) to answer common technical questions in the community;
• Technical Evangelism : 3-5 technical experts provide irregular event support, including but not limited to training lecturers, salon guests, CTO/CIO irregular large-scale events, and platform support for large-scale events.
• Product promotion: Industry solution experts in the target industry combined with event support for sales rhythm, including but not limited to training lecturers and salon guests.

(2) Content support

• Technical documentation : product usage documentation, technical documentation;
• Scenario cases : best practices, industry scenario cases, and industry solutions;
• Learning materials: product tutorials, technical principle learning;
• Q&A content: FAQs on common faults, Q&A with experts;
• Technical certification: open courses for technical or manufacturer certification;
• Development tools: a collection of products and upstream and downstream extension tools.

(3) Financial support

• Conventional support : including product and capital incubation support for various schools, small and medium-sized enterprises, and associations.

2.5 Operational Startup Rhythm

After clarifying the target group, goals, and resources, you can start formulating relevant plans based on the product development rhythm (technical products are mainly open source). For open source community products, we can try to combine the following key nodes to start preparing an operation plan (the flowchart below was mentioned by Tencent Cloud in a sharing session).

Sort out existing internal resources and user research results reports; formulate operation launch plans and division of labor;

• Build content scheduling, topic selection process, production architecture, and content distribution mechanism;
• Clarify the service response mechanism for developers within the community;
• Formulate own activity plans, formulate activity SOPs, and prepare and execute;
• Sort out external channels, upstream and downstream partners, and KOL target groups, and formulate cooperation BD plans and implementation schedules based on budget;
• Track data from the entire operational process, including product-level indicators such as activity, and business-level indicators such as business opportunity leads. Evaluate operational results based on indicators, review operational plans, and optimize channels;
• Establish community encouragement rules and cultivate contributors within the community.

2.6 Operational Assessment and Evaluation

After asking our boss for resources, we must definitely set business-related goals to measure the value and ROI of what we do. Therefore, we measure from the perspectives of business indicators, community operation indicators, and content operation indicators:

• Business indicators : number of leads, opportunity amount, up-sell amount;
• Community operation indicators : generally include community penetration rate, number of new user registrations, user interaction rate, community function retention, community user retention, average number of uses per person, average login time per person, event registration, etc.
• Content operation indicators : may include the number of PGCs, the number of UGCs, the average number of articles read per person, article likes, comments, likes and comments, comment replies, etc.

After clarifying the boss's North Star indicator requirements, we can break down the long-term indicators and short-term indicators specifically. And rely on these indicators to better drive us to formulate detailed operational plans.

2.7 Common Problems in the Developer Community

Looking around, there are many developer communities and open source communities, but there are only a few that are well-run, whether by manufacturers or third parties. The problems mainly focus on:

• The software infrastructure lacks adaptation, it is difficult to obtain relevant resources, and there is a lack of development and testing environment. This is mainly concentrated in the open source community, and the vendor community generally does not appear;
• The development tools are not perfect, and development, migration, and tuning are difficult. This is mainly due to the product matrix of the vendors. Some tool vendors may be in competition with each other, but the cost of self-development is too high.
• There is a lack of development materials and documents, and a lack of sufficient code examples and templates. This is mainly due to whether the manufacturer's internal open source team has enough energy or resources to complete the relevant content;
• Leading companies are relatively closed, and the open source strength of software and hardware is a problem, which is mainly due to industry competition and product strategy;
• The commercial incubation closed loop has not been completed within the open source, and the development-release-sales-service chain is broken. This is mainly encountered by small companies that attempt to open source without thinking clearly about the commercial value.
• There is little technical education, and it is difficult to obtain the best practices for solving problems;
• The technical capabilities of enterprises within the ecosystem are not strong enough, their product competitiveness is limited, and they are unable to meet customer business needs.

Now that we have clarified our existing resources, objectives, user profiles, and possible pitfalls, we can begin to refine our operational strategies.

3. Developer Community Operation Rules

Ok, after sorting out the user portraits, user stratification, community operation objectives, and existing resources, let’s talk about the specific operations, namely “high-level users create value, and ordinary users build word of mouth.” The specific work can be divided into two parts: internal and external.

3.1 Internal Operations

(1) Community main site operation

As the main carrier of the developer community's operations, it plays an important role in the operation process, because all our external traffic will eventually land on the developer community main site, so the main site is very important.

Generally speaking, we use the form of PGC+UGC+PUGC+OGC to operate content, ensure the continuous output of content, and establish a content chain of "content collection - review - structuring - push - recall". The degree of operational intervention and basic sorting rules are clearly defined for new and old users respectively, to guide users to complete their exploration of the community while ensuring that high-quality content reaches users. The main content forms include:

• Training courses, certification;
• Use documents, manuals, cases, and Q&A;
• White papers, diagrams;
• Topic discussion.

After ensuring content operation, clarify whether the community format is question-and-answer (technical product Q&A) or reading (technical learning), and whether the content emphasizes people (experts, big names) or content. It is even necessary to clarify which forms of interaction in the browsing process need to be strongly guided, and whether related pages should be recommended.

During this process, if there are competitors in the same field who are already doing the same thing, you can use them as reference material; if you are already a leader or explorer, it is recommended to use A/B Testing to explore the retention and value of functions and determine the appropriate community form for the product.

After finishing the content and basic main site operations, we also need to establish a relevant user membership system, clarify the user growth path through points, levels, achievements, etc., and guide users with material/spiritual incentives such as cash and medals in this process.

(2) Content distribution operations

This part is basically a routine operation. All ToB vendors (such as PaaS and IaaS vendors) are very familiar with it. After all, the gameplay of ToB is relatively simple and boring. A full-time employee with two interns can fully handle it. For example,

• Columns: technical blogs, columns for external communities;
• We-media: WeChat official account, Jianshu, Toutiao account;
• External submissions: technical media submissions, community submissions;
• Q&A: Q&A in public communities such as Zhihu, and professional communities such as Sifou.

But it is worth pointing out that as content develops, external channels can easily become dizzying. In the process of screening channels, it is necessary to clarify the distribution purpose of different channels, whether it is search engine inclusion, media authority, or audience accuracy. For example, for search engine inclusion, we would choose Jianshu and Zhihu (although Zhihu’s inclusion weight has dropped a lot now), for authoritative media, we would choose InfoQ, CSDN, and SF, and for targeted audiences, we would choose the corresponding communities.

(3) Community Operation

Apart from the main site, the community should be one of the most important ways for us to operate developers. However, due to the immediacy of the community, it is most suitable for daily communication, but cannot be used to record and carry content. In the process of community operation, we can differentiate operations based on the developer's source, discussion topic, and identity, for example:

• Live event groups for various developer events;
• A technical community that discusses a topic (such as agile development);
• A contribution group for daily operation and maintenance of an open source project;
• A high-end community composed of corporate CTO/CIO, VP of Information Technology and other technology product purchasing decision-makers, leaders of various associations, active experts in the technology community, lecturers of series courses, foundation ambassadors, and evangelists in a certain field.

Usually, tools such as Wetool are needed to help community operators manage the group. The relevant content of community operation will be written in a separate article because there is too much content.

(4) Event Operation

If communities and main sites are routine operations of developers, then various activities are the effective means to truly gather users. There are many forms of activities, such as:

• Online research, Q&A, and testing, such as Hackerrank;
• Online course live broadcasts and video series. There are many series of courses, such as Alibaba Cloud and CNCF's cloud native courses;
• Online programming activities and online laboratories, such as Alibaba Cloud's Tianchi Competition and Tianchi Laboratory;
• Priority qualification for product internal testing;
• publication;
• Offline meet-ups, expert consultations, and developer days;
• Offline Hackthon: Security vendors hold relatively more offline 24-hour hackathons;
• Offline training and certification, such as various CNCF certifications;
• Offline technology conferences, such as AWS summit and Huawei Developer Conference. Small companies participate in large-scale activities, including but not limited to booths, speeches, round tables, etc.; wealthy companies directly hold their own conferences, such as Qingcloud's CIC conference.

(5) Open source projects

Open source projects are mainly managed on Github, including:

• Development/release of relevant documents and code submission specifications;
• The open source team regularly maintains the project;
• Interaction with/incentives for external contributors;
• Operation of external hosting channels.

3.2 External Operations

If internal operations are about retaining users, then external operations largely help us attract users. I will not go into details here, just give a brief description to avoid suspicion of advertising.

(1) Payment for technical knowledge

• Training institutions

(2) Technical community cooperation

• Comprehensive technology community
• Vertical Community
• IT Publishing House

(3) Non-technical communities

• Young platforms such as Bilibili and Douyin

(4) High-end club community

• High-end community
• Industry Associations

(5) Institutions and associations

• CAICT, CNCF, etc.

(6) Colleges and universities

4. Competitive Product Analysis

After completing our own planning, it is equally important to understand the dynamics and gameplay of competitors. Taking the cloud computing industry as an example, Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and Huawei Cloud have relatively similar content formats and community purposes in their respective developer community operations, but there are subtle differences in the actual operation process.

4.1 Tencent Cloud

In addition to conventional gameplay, Tencent Cloud has adopted more ToC social gameplay, such as:

• Online course check-in;
• Foundation support;
• Reward support:
• Millions of traffic promotions in various technical communities and platforms;
• One-year use rights for cloud server resources and domain name services of different values;
• Tickets for offline technical conferences and salons;
• Technical books;
• Tencent Cloud community growth value incentives;
• Tencent Cloud peripheral gifts;
• Get in close contact with open source project experts;
• Tencent Cloud new product internal testing experience.

4.2 HUAWEI CLOUD

Huawei Cloud focuses on the operations of the opinion leaders we mentioned earlier. Huawei Cloud KOLs are divided into different levels, including MVP and Cloud Sharing Expert, which correspond to different rights and interests. This will encourage them to speak out, thereby covering the target population while also achieving the effect of KOL endorsement.

5. Postscript

Compared with other audience groups, I think developers are a more pure user group. They are a group of "straight men" (a compliment here) who can rationally and objectively evaluate the value of something, communicate directly, and desire honor and recognition . Therefore, there is no need to be too cautious during the developer operation process, but rather to help them solve practical business problems or gain honors.

Therefore, perhaps for developer operations, being honest is the best operational attitude.

PS. As a non-pure developer operator, I combined my own business experience with developer operation content. The original intention was to use it as study notes to prepare for a certain exam. This is just a starting point. If there are any mistakes, you are welcome to make corrections.

Author: It's a small pot

Source: Market Dog