Guo Yue: how to build the developer community from zero to a | DEV. 2021 China developers ecological summit Together

On June 5, 2021, the 2021 China Developer Ecosystem Summit hosted by SegmentFault came to a successful conclusion. At the meeting, Guo Yue, former head of developer market of JD Technology, delivered a speech themed “How to build developer community from zero to one”. Guest: Guo Yue, former head of JD Technology Developer Market stenographer finishing and publishing: SegmentFault Editorial Department

My topic today is How to Build a Developer Community from Zero to One. I will introduce this part from five aspects, and expand it in detail with the real community cases I have been responsible for.

What is a developer community?

Before we start building communities, what do you think a developer community is? Some of you may have GitHub, Q&A media and community platforms in mind, such as Zhihu or Sifou.

What is the community I’m going to talk about today? I look at three projects, and they fall into three broad categories.

Number one, technology products. In terms of technology products, for example, when the mobile Internet broke out in 2011, we changed from traditional feature phones to smart phones. In fact, one manufacturer played a very important role in promoting the development of feature phones, and two forums also played a very important role. One is millet, which is “born for fever” and has built its own community. One more thing, I believe that whether it is Apple or Android mobile phone early smartphone users must have been on the weifeng forum and weifeng forum. In fact, when users are using some new technology products, there is a certain threshold for early entry, we need to build such a community, to better serve users.

The second category is actually the open source projects that are particularly popular right now. For open source projects, I actually built the Apollo developer community from zero to one. At that time, we gave our community a slogan, called “Developer’s success is Apollo’s success”. Who is our tech community serving? In fact, most of them are users of the Apollo open source project, and we hope that those who use our open source code will contribute more code back to the community to build our autonomous driving ecosystem. This is how most open source projects build communities today.

The third category, TOB technical services. This is also what the teachers shared a lot this morning, no matter from Huawei or Aliyun. They are all companies that provide technical services to B, and when they do community work, they actually have their original intention. I was also in charge of the developer community of JD Cloud in JD Technology before. At that time, we also gave the community a slogan called “Create the future together with developers”. Why is it called that? In fact, the community is more inclusive. Community User Portrait 1. As mentioned earlier, as a cloud vendor, the developers of enterprise users are our developers. They exist as users. The second category is the indie developers who can build on our cloud services or the underlying capabilities that we provide and then add their capabilities to our ecosystem, the developers who are our ecosystem partners. There are also college students, researchers in scientific institutions, fans who are very interested in our products and technologies, and developers in our community. There are other kinds of developers. They are the developers and builders of the new IT era, so we want to work with developers to create the future.

These are the three communities that I want to share with you today. The next simple definition is the community of developers created by companies that provide technology products and services in order to better serve consumers and Indies and their technology and enthusiasts.

Why a developer community?

With that defined, let’s look at why we want to be a developer community. We know that large cloud vendors have established developer communities, so what is the value of developer communities to the enterprise internally and externally? I will introduce it in two parts. This is also a real case. I want to share it with you.

Let’s talk about the value of the developer community externally. What can a community do externally? In fact, I think a community can change the communication between people from cold product technology to warm human connection.

In 2011, Baidu made its own mobile phone operating system, but also made Baidu ROM brush forum, at that time every month the new version is released through the forum to communicate with everyone, guide and teach users to use the brush. What value is that externally? I think it’s useless to say it myself, we’ll have to see what the developers say. The picture on the left is the real information I cut from the post bar. You can search for it. At that time, we created a character called “Bai Xiaoyun”. When our community communicates with users, we establish interpersonal links, which is also a virtual image of a girl. In fact, there are many people behind the operation. For example, Sifou has a little sister Sifou, and we all hope to establish such emotional links with users through the community. I was this little sister at that time, every day in the forum to communicate with everyone, release products. Then you will see on the left there is a user said, “Alas, a few months have not ROM version released, before the release of Xiaoyun in the time, I use Baidu cloud 512 card dead it does not matter”, what does this show? In fact, after establishing the emotional connection with users, we can better understand our users, understand their pain points, do a good job of product iteration, and also enable users to give us more understanding and tolerance. This is where I think community is a better value for developers. In addition, the image on the right shows the first anniversary of the Apollo community when we solicited contributions from developers to the Apollo open source community. I took some comments from talented developers: “Apollo is wide enough to give us the opportunity to use it in thousands of different scenarios based on our own needs. Apollo is tall enough to allow us to stand on the shoulders of giants and focus on our own development. Apollo is meticulous and the Apollo community has given us a lot of support throughout the development process.” So on the right, communities can help your developers grow themselves, but we can also empower developers. These are from the perspective of external analysis of community value.

Let’s talk about internal value. What is the value to the enterprise and to the developer community of open source projects? It’s four dimensions.

First, private traffic. The term has been a hot topic lately, with a lot of talk about how companies can build their own private traffic to connect with users and developers more cheaply and efficiently. The community is definitely the best place to start, because you have your users in the community, so you can connect to them directly, and there is no extra cost for each communication. So this private traffic pool is our first core value for the enterprise.

Second, technological influence. Because we are a community of developers, the technical content of the community revolves around the company’s bright technologies and core products. So in the invisible influence of your audience to increase cognition, understand your product technology.

Third, user reputation. In fact, as we saw in the previous example, community users can be more forgiving and give feedback to your product.

The last is to strengthen the corporate sense of social responsibility. I read an article on 36kr a couple of days ago about the “goose effect”. In fact, some leading technology companies and leading open source projects are actually the goose of the era. Whether it is cloud computing, AI, or the rise of the mobile Internet era, at different stages, these enterprises’ investment in technology, talent cultivation, and construction of technical content actually promote the progress of science and technology, and enhance the social responsibility and sense of mission of enterprises.

Therefore, from the perspective of these four dimensions, it is the value realization of the developer community for the enterprise itself. However, we did a survey at the beginning of today’s summit. 80% of the students are technical operation students. Do you think that if you ask your boss for resources with these four values, they will give it to you?

Let’s talk about the dry stuff and the practical stuff. How do you quantify the value of the developer community to the organization and the project? I chose four dimensions, which can represent the indicators that the community should pay attention to at different stages, as well as the quantitative indicators that bring value to the community when talking to the boss. Let’s start with the left-hand side. Let’s start with the contribution of value. The first one, needless to say, was about private traffic pools. Your community can help you acquire users and developers, so it can be measured by the number of fans on “We Media”, or by the number of star or fork of an open source project. Or there are some large platform companies that have their own community platforms. They will pay attention to the number of registered users on this community platform, which is generally the first stage to quantify the community assessment indicators. The second part is the discovery of business leads. Actually JinYu first share has been said by the teacher, most of the time we have to do up the management, so often some drive business indicators are able to help you better go to the upper resources, so as we in the community every content and activity to obtain the number of Leads, is actually can be a quantifiable measure of community. Third, around the technology ecosystem partners, generally in open source projects and cloud vendors see more. When we were at Apollo, we were really looking at this metric, which is the ability to grow the technology ecosystem and improve your product capabilities. The main quantifiable metrics are Contributors, ISV Indies, and SI numbers. What about the last one? What I want to talk about, and many teachers talk about today, but don’t mention it, is the commercialization of community assets. Because we have a lot of users in the community, and we have great technical content. As a matter of fact, it has been verified that, no matter what the teacher said this morning, textbooks will be published. For example, we used to have hardware cars and self-driving teaching materials for Apollo, and we have real income every year. Some cloud manufacturers will develop training and certification courses based on the content of developers. In fact, these can bring direct commercialization, quantifiable indicators to the community, corresponding to sales and revenue. In addition, with the recent two years, two big acquisitions, one is GitHub and the other is Stack Overflow, actually quantify the value of the community itself.

After presenting the value to the business and the project, I think we’ve basically convinced the boss to do this, so we’re now ready to start building the community.

How do you build a developer community from 0-1 and complete the cold start phase

Next, I’ll show you how to build a community from 0-1 and complete the cold start phase. Here is divided into three parts to introduce one by one. I think building a community needs to pay attention to three core places: the first is the building of product power, the second part is the building of channel power, the third is the training of operation power. And the power of that product is that I can do all of my operations cheaper and more efficiently. What about the second channel force? It can help spread and attract new people. Operational power is what keeps the users you’ve acquired, keeps them in the community, and keeps the community alive.

Let’s start with the product force. I come from a PM background, so when I do community, I build it as a platform product. This is a complete community platform product architecture diagram.

What are many operations teams doing, as observed? Most do the second layer, the product layer. Organize different summits, do different meetups, do a lot of competitions, do a lot of courses, this is the current situation of most students who do community operation, only pay attention to the product layer. But I hope you can build your own community products in a platform-based way.

I’m going to divide this idea into four levels. The first layer is the building of the community platform, because only a good platform can enable you to conduct activities efficiently and conveniently, make the content you do more precipitation, and constantly optimize your operation strategy by using data analysis. Therefore, the first layer can be built according to their own needs, whether the company or the project. For example, if you want to let everyone see the technical content at the beginning of the startup, you can prioritize the construction of the blog platform. Or maybe there are only some activities in the early stage, so I can set up the activity center first. In addition, the teacher from Huawei just mentioned that there are many incentive strategies in the community, which also requires a platform similar to points to carry these strategies. This is the platform that is presented in the foreground, and there are two other things to pay special attention to: the CMS and the statistics back end. CMS is a back-end management system that can template published activities and products, allowing operators to publish their own activities. Many students do technical activities every month, the activity finished some reason, you don’t know how much you did a year, the activity of technology, the content has not retained, but with the CMS system, you can clearly management statistics, and the application of traffic to their website channel platform, at the same time release is templated, There is no need for research and development resources for every online activity, which is very efficient. In addition, the CMO just talked about marketing. In fact, marketing pays great attention to data-driven, so if you don’t have a good statistical background, you can’t track whether the activities are well run and the channel quality is good. This is the first layer I talked about, the platform layer.

The second is the product layer that we are most familiar with. We have a lot of activity products and content products, such as column, product case, technical dry goods, developer talk, big coffee talk, technology popular science, foreign language translation, which may be the content column we create according to our own product technology content. The second is form. We can make articles, long pictures, white papers, short and short videos, interactive games, that’s what everyone is doing.

Third, to talk about the mechanism layer. The mechanics layer is all about creating a strategy that motivates the community of users and developers. The first is to do the user portrait of the subdivision. The first is the incentive strategy for the MVP team. In fact, both teachers mentioned in the first half that, no matter Microsoft or Google, they actually have a lot of strategies in their own BuLID culture and MVP. The second is a community evangelist. You might have to give them incentives to get the community to do the work that the authorities do. The rest are around different points, MEDALS, badges and so on. Actually, the teacher has introduced all of them just now, and I uniformly put them in the incentive layer.

The last layer, the data layer, is one that I think is very, very important, and one that I hope everyone who works in developer operations will focus on. We need to track every step of the way so that we can better distinguish between what’s good and what’s bad about your content, what’s good and what’s bad about your campaign, and then optimize it. Therefore, based on these complete sets of products, we can actually see that the statistical background is to support the data report output of the data layer. According to the results of the data report output, we can constantly optimize your products and strategy layer. This is the product power I mentioned first.

With the product power, we will talk about how to complete the cold start stage of the community, this time will test our channel power. In fact, when we do a community, channel power is often ahead of product power, why? Because I can not come up with a such a perfect platform – everything is built for me, the official website R & D personnel still need to schedule, I must wait for the product is fully built, I will do it. No, a lot of our activities and content are pre-existing. What I want to talk about here is channel force. In fact, quality channels are a shortcut to expand communication and access to users. Here are three tips: the first is “where the user is more I go”, the second is “where the user is I go”, the third is “where the user is I go”.

Let’s start by saying “where there are more users, I will go”. It is suggested that at the beginning of community construction, we should first choose some large flow channels. Think, CSDN, InfoQ, Zhihu, Nuggets these communities are more mainstream, above the content is very rich, so a lot of users. At the beginning, when we selected the content to spread, when there was no good product, we could choose to open some of our own “We Media” accounts in their channels.

The second is “I go where the user is”. Here I mainly talk about the fine content operation. This is based on the community’s own positioning, as well as their own users decided, you have to choose suitable for you. In a comprehensive community, more people may see and learn about you, but if you want to reach out to users and engage in deeper communication, you need to go to the vertical community. For example, you may be doing database field, you may want to see Dbaplus, ink wheel; If you’re doing it safely, you might be paying attention to looking at the snow; If you are concerned about open source, such as open source society, open source China must be your main channels; AI is like the heart of the machine, I won’t go over it. There is another kind of open source project. From the very beginning, the orientation of open source project is international development, such as PingCap, so we must pay attention to the construction of overseas communities when we are doing open source projects. We are familiar with Medium and Stack Overflow. If you want to do Japanese market, then you can pay attention to Qiita, which is known as the “little red book” of Japanese programmers. I’m sure the list above is not complete, just a few representatives, want to tell you, must go deep into the precise channel, and to constantly find out what your users are in the channel.

Third, we’re talking about “where the user goes, I go.” Speaking of this, let me first expand to say that, in fact, with the change of channels, the change of media, the fundamental reason that affects it is the change of carrier. In the old days, we got our information through print media, we read programmer magazines, we read newspapers. Then with the outbreak of the Internet era, we have the PC Internet, we may go to the website, browse the forum, so CSDN and other forums of the early technology community should be born. Then, in 2010 or so, the mobile Internet broke out, and the carrier of users’ access to information became mobile phones, and the channel changed again, possibly moving to the WeChat public account of the WeChat system. And that goes to the fourth stage, which is the audio and video content that people now rely on very, very heavily. Here is a part from the current new energy vehicles, I do not know whether we pay attention to, now many new energy vehicles on the media entrance, flow entrance, audio content is also worth paying attention to. What about other than changes in the medium? You also need to know what developers like, because developers have gone from the traditional I see your content to I want to participate in your content and I want to interact with you. Live like that, I can be with the user a message, like a short video, I can send barrage, even said some competition platform, it actually has nothing to do with the media, but there are some deeper need to be involved in your project developers, it may release is the source of the competition to select some channels and promote competition.

After talking about these channels, where do you put these users until the platform is built? Because it is a community, we also need to communicate with users before there is no platform, so some enterprise WeChat, WeChat group, QQ group, including some enterprises have some communication groups, in fact, it is the earliest to deposit that part of users there.

After talking about product power and channel power, let’s talk about operational power. Operation power is the following mentioned, how to run a community well, the following are basically real cases, to share with you some of the projects I have done.

How do you run a developer community?

In terms of operation power, I think operation also pays attention to two core points, one is high-quality content, the other is active community users. Operational power is the killer weapon to promote user engagement and activity. I will give examples from four directions. The first is how to do a good job in content operation, the second is how to do a good job in user operation, the third is how to do a good job in data analysis and data operation, and the fourth is to drive the operation by means of technology.

Content operation

The first one is interesting, the operation of content and events. I have a sentence here that says “expensive ingredients, easy cooking”. Why is that? Because when we do the technical operation content, we are actually dealing with the production and research team. There are some AI engineers, they are very expensive, they write a piece of code is also very expensive, we want to put their very expensive technology to more people to see it is actually difficult, because people do not understand. When we were doing AI promotion, we found that it was very easy for other marketing teams and PR teams to spread an article of 100,000 +, but such a good project of ours might only get a few thousand page views, which was very painful. Why? Because most people don’t understand it.

I’m going to focus on a few points, and then we’re going to talk about technology that’s very expensive, but also the ability to get more people to help you spread it. The first one is about hot spots. The contents of operation should be good at seizing current events and spreading on the occasion. Let me give you an example. We have an article that has been ranked No.1 in CSDN. It was when the epidemic broke out last year. This article gets more than 10 times the page views because it captures the buzz.

The second is fun. We are doing operations, not porters, we must be in the teacher these expensive ingredients up to add materials, to make this kind of difficult to understand things so that users can use a simple way to understand. When I was in Jingdong Cloud Community, Marvel’s “Avengers” was released in nineteen. I don’t know if you have seen it, but it was probably the hottest movie of that year. At that time, Jingdong had the IP of Marvel. As a community operator, I wanted to use this IP very much, but what did this IP have to do with technology? When I saw Marvel movies, I had nothing to do with technology or community. So I analyzed Marvel’s “The Avengers,” where there are a lot of heroes with different powers. Do we have any products that are like this, that have many different features, and we focused on the database. We did a feature analysis of the current mainstream databases, whether open source or some vendors. Then we do a mapping of all the Marvel heroes, so that developers can understand your product technology in a simpler form. This is the second thing I mentioned. Content should be fun.

The third is interactivity. We’ve been talking about how to distribute, and we’re going to talk about how to engage developers in building content for your community, which means growing your UGC content. In addition to having an operational strategy mechanism that motivates them, you can actually engage users in content building through sections like developer talk, like the experience officer recruitment program that we’ve been doing before.

The other is transmissibility. We put out an article that said, well, apart from our own operations people and the product owners and the teams and the people in the company who are going to move, very few developers are going to move on their own initiative, so you have to build communication into your operations. Here is an example. Before Kubecon started last year, we did a warm-up of cloud native, “Cloud native knowledge challenge”. After challenging everyone can hit the list, you can share to the circle of friends to let everyone compete with you score, this actually promotes the spread of users, it can stimulate the sharing power of community users, so that your operation content has a viral spread.

The user operation

Now let’s talk about user operations. Today, a teacher talked about marketing. As an operator in the community, I think the biggest pain point or problem is that the boss pays special attention to the result. Why is that? Because of traditional marketing thinking.

The picture on the left is actually familiar to all of you, including some of you who do marketing, and it’s the funnel model of marketing. It focuses on the whole funnel from the beginning to the end of the transaction. In the marketing system, the focus is often on the results. What about the picture on the right? I’m showing you how I, as a developer operator, feel about my users. This is just a snippet of it, but there are also a bunch of users, tech fans, student groups that we give different things to. But just to make a point here, when we did it at Apollo, we did a very precise segmentation of the user base, and here’s a selection of our key developers. And what you’ll see is, when we do a profile of the user, at the bottom of the spectrum are developers who are new to Apollo, who are using our 1.0 or 2.0 version, who are new to Apollo, who aren’t even using it yet, and we call that “mass developer.” What does he need now? Need content from your community to build its knowledge of your product, technology and acceptance. What can he do to us? After he gets to know us and agrees with us, he can help other developers in our community to promote it.

The second tier is the focus developer. You will find that the developer has some changes, he has just contacted to use different versions of our open source software, and then we will classify his properties and scenarios according to different scenarios. What kind of support can we offer him at this time? Instead of simply community content, we will directly have a technical evangelist to communicate with him, to provide him with some technical support of the evangelist, as well as some detailed technical documents, or one on one to answer questions. In the process, we provide a different level of support for this tier of developers.

What about the highest one? These developers can actually generate their own solutions based on Apollo, and we call this group “partners.” In return, we’ll give them priority to experience our code and some data that we haven’t released yet, and we’ll also provide a lot of technical support, and we’ll probably invite these developers to come on stage at every meet up and tell us how they’re using it.

So you’ll see, from the bottom up to the top, that open source projects focus most on Country Builders (community contributors) and the core people who can contribute to the community. So at each stage, what we care about is not the result, but the process. We want to grow the community the way we want it to be. It’s not like we recruit him, we keep him, we don’t pay attention to him, it’s not like that. Therefore, in terms of community operation, we hope to pay more attention to the growth process of developers, and provide the necessary help and support in the life cycle of developers’ growth, so as to facilitate the success of developers.

The data operation

The third is data operation, through data analysis, constantly optimize your operation strategy. This is also something I mentioned at the beginning of the introduction of product power. When we do products, we must build their own data statistics platform, but also to do their own data analysis this layer. Here cut two examples, respectively from the selection of channels and the structure of content.

Audience member just asked, how do you choose different channels? Which one is right for you? Many companies have the money to do testing. When I started to do community no enough resources to support, all of the above a dozen communities is that we first started, we don’t know which community traffic is good, which traffic is suitable for us, from the beginning we can’t do the marking and timing analysis of the channel data performance, this is our year by analyzing amount of diversion channel and community. Of course, all of this I’m talking about is not paid for, not for the data being put out, but for the technical content being put out on these communities. You’ll notice that some channels are extremely high, and that they’re particularly suited to you, and you’ll use that data to analyze how much they contribute to your website and community. There are some low traffic channels, and when people are tight or capital is tight, I will choose to abandon them and focus on maintaining the good community channels.

The second is content analytics, where you use data to optimize your content and understand your users’ preferences. The chart on the right shows the ranking statistics of our published articles. The top one in this month’s statistics is the article “Today we bring Li Huanying back to 2021”. In fact, it also verifies that if the content of the article is combined with hot spots and interest, its communication effect will be greatly enhanced. So you have to understand your channels, what content is suitable for what channels, the above table is not to prove that these channels are good or bad, only that these channels are not suitable for your content. We take the same content of different topics, sent in different channels, its traffic is not the same, so you need to analyze through data statistics, constantly optimize the channel selection, constantly optimize the content of the topic of planning.

technology-driven

The last point is technical blessing. A lot of community companies are skilled or big companies. In fact, you have the ability and strength to improve product experience and operation efficiency through the ability of technology.

As mentioned earlier, there are two key points of community, one is content, and the other is users. On the left, it says that through the algorithm engine, through data marking, using the function of thousands of people, to provide interesting content for developers in different fields. In fact, this is through the AI capabilities, because we now whether it is cloud vendors or some open source projects, there are people who care about software, there are people who care about hardware, the developers who care about hardware see too much software content is actually a kind of interference to him. Not to mention in the cloud computing field, there are architects, there are operations, there may be AI scientists, everyone likes different content. When there is too much community content, we need to optimize it driven by AI algorithms. In fact, many manufacturers have the same ability, not necessarily the community. Content products are optimized by algorithms, but a lot of the community hasn’t focused on this yet.

The second is social. After all, we connect people, so social functions are very important. We are the first to connect people and enhance user to user interaction through community. So we need to visualize each user and create their personal business card, and we need some interactive features like in-site messaging, bookmarks, thumb up, or if you think the code he submitted is great, give him a chicken. In fact, these are all functions to increase social interaction. We want to increase the passion and enthusiasm of users to participate in the community by connecting with people.

Get out of the community and back to being a developer

I quickly introduced why we should do community, what is the value of community, how to build community, how to do product operation, and it has always been about community and how to do a good community. In the end, I actually want to mention that we should jump out of community, return to developers, people-oriented. Because at the core of what we do, it’s not about building a great community product, it’s about building relationships with developers.

Finally, I’d like to share a few thoughts: Our goal is not just to build a community product, but to build a platform that connects developers. What we need to do is to get close to developers, embrace developers, connect with developers, do it with your heart, and love your career.

The developer community is not an easy career path to follow, and it requires a lot of professionalism. We have to work both internally and externally, especially externally, so this is very difficult, and I hope you really have the passion to do it. To have more communication with developers, to make the community “live”, we do it from a person-to-person perspective, rather than an official perspective between the company and the product. The second is that we should be emotional community, to create a warm community. A lot of people think of developers as plaid shirts, code farmers, and IT workers finishing product development. I don’t think so. I think our developers are the people who use technology to create the future, the coolest people in technology. I come to them with that belief and that aura, so I have to be respectful when I talk to my developers. The third is culture: mutual respect. We have to respect the developers, and the developers have to respect our technology. Because our common belief is to advance technology. We also need to understand the culture of programmers. Programmers are simple, efficient, straightforward, and take pride in writing elegant code. They are the kind of people. And finally, there’s empowerment. Our primary goal as a community is to build a technology ecosystem, so we are a mutual achievement process. I just quoted Apollo’s community motto, “Our success is the developer’s success,” and those of us who run the community should take pride in the success of others.

This is what I want to share with you today, hoping to help you build your community a little bit.