The current economic climate has led many tech companies to lay off staff and cut budgets, impacting developer relations teams. Speakers have experienced layoffs and budget cuts firsthand.
Leaders must understand their team's outputs (e.g. blog posts, events) and impacts (e.g. new users, engagement) to measure success. Focus on goals that align with company priorities.
Developer advocates should have broad skillsets to allow flexibility in programs. Quantify available time and effort to set realistic goals. Carefully track metrics to optimize high-impact activities.
Automate repetitive tasks to boost productivity. Use tools like Python, Zapier and low-code platforms. This saves significant time and effort.
Build resilient processes and help your team understand shifting company goals. With the right context, dev rel professionals can pivot programs to deliver the most value.
(00:00) uh I would love to introduce your final speakers of the day we have a fantastic Duo here from sneak uh I'm a huge fan of their tool I'm a huge fan of their devell team and Randall is a really nice guy personally I just met Matt he seems really nice as well uh but they're going to be talking about building resiliency into your devell team so please give a final Standing Ovation for the day to Randall and Matt from sneak [Applause] all right so quick question because our whole talk is a pretty common theme that
(00:40) everyone's sort of thinking about today about building you know building Devo and doing Devo in a potential recession maybe not formally a recession but you know on the DL kind of a recession right so question how many of you sort of feel a little bit uncertain about your job at the moment maybe throw your hands up in the air don't be afraid it's fine everyone is and and then uh secondly how many of you know someone who's been impacted either with layoffs hands up for layoffs ooh a lot of layoffs or what
(01:09) about budget cuts hands up if here budget got slashed yep yep it's pretty normal and so I think it's a really good time to talk about this stuff some of the other speakers today address bits and pieces of what Matt and I are going to be talking about but we're really going to go in depth about specifically what we do and I think we do a really good job of this at sneak and so we're going to give you the exact Playbook we use so Matt so um quick introduction I'm Matt I'm one of the directors of devell at sneak
(01:34) I do a whole bunch of other um Community related stuff in the open source and Cloud native world and uh I'll let my glamorous assistant um introduce himself yeah I'm Randall I lead the dev R and uh community group at sneak um let me get that clicker actually yeah feel bit see we haven't had a chance to rehearse with the clicker you know so one moment yeah so I'm I do a lot of python JavaScript and go Development I've been doing open source for about 25 years um I do a lot of building so previous to getting into
(02:05) devil I was like a founder and CTO for many years and really enjoyed building companies and selling them and stuff um and I also do a lot of writing so that's sort of my background okay so uh no surprise but the tech economy kind of sort of sucks right now as we all know now the reason I want to mention this before get into the interesting parts of the talk is because first of all it's in the news all the time but second of all without a good fin anial understanding of where things are at it's sometimes easy to
(02:33) like forget the basics because at the end of the day all of us work at companies those companies make money and that money is what pays for all the things that we do and so it's important to understand this stuff so why is you know technology not doing super great at the moment well there's a lot of macroeconomic conditions that are influencing this but one of the things you have to fundamentally understand is that technical companies over the last 15 years have been really highly valued so investors basically treat investments
(03:03) in technical companies with uh a lot more uh promise than they do with traditional non-technical businesses the reason why isn't that hard to understand it's because tech companies generally have lower fixed costs like if you're building Instagram the costs you have for running the business are servers and employees if you're building you know Target or Home Depot or a big you know retail company you have lots of expenses lots of building and rents and lots of inventory to pay for and so it's a very
(03:29) expensive company additionally technical companies can dramatically scale their business and everyone knows this so if you're Instagram and you have eight employees and you have a billion dollar valuation and you have literally billions of users that's something that you can't really accomplish in any other type of industry and then finally uh tech companies tend to have higher margins in the long run so because of all these factors uh this means that tech companies spend a lot of money and that's why you've heard over
(04:02) the last 15 years about people saying ah these Tech businesses are super overvalued people are investing way too much money and then they have these crazy high price to earnings ratios the reason why is because tech companies know that their their their goal isn't a short-term goal it's a long-term goal like these companies that are bleeding and spending through hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital and you know there's different types of debt of course but that's just one of them but they know that if they can grow
(04:29) to a certain size and win the market that they will hit all of these big ambitious Revenue goals in the future and that's why tech companies in particular usually have a lot less cash flow if any and a lot more debt than other businesses and by debt again I mean either Venture Capital that a company raised a startup or it could be a publicly traded company that is selling shares of their business to shareholders that's another form of debt or it could be just privately held companies that are funding things
(04:56) themselves now because interest rates around the world are right in like in the US if I go to buy a house today I'd have to get a 30-year mortgage and pay like s or 8% interest uh a year ago that number was like 2 and a half% and so the difference in how much it costs to borrow money has gone up and so as a result of that a lot of companies and particularly companies that need debt to operate like a lot of these big Tech businesses have been doing things like laying people off cutting budgets Etc so they don't need to borrow additional
(05:28) money or raise additional money at these unfavorable interest rates and then finally in any sort of Uncertain economic time investors are going to reduce their risky Investments and they're going to put things into safer options because you can get higher yield from safe things that aren't risky you have government bonds you have you know more conservative retailers Etc so this is just the state of Finance now the part of this that everyone gets scared about is this bit here the layoffs and budget cuts right because
(05:57) that's the thing that's like most impactful to each individual person but before we continue on I just want to highlight it's normal what's happening right now if you're at a company for a long time you're going to go through Cycles you're going to have really good times where the company's doing well and hopefully that aligns with good economic conditions and there's going to be bad economic conditions times when the company doesn't do well it's very rare for things to always be on an upward
(06:22) trajectory and so change is hard but it's really critical and important so you have to sort of be used to being resilient it's like a core skill in any field particularly devil so how are devil teams and individuals uh being impacted right now well if you take a look on Google either Trends or search or whatever you'll see there's quite a lot of people talking about Devo layoffs recently and due to the show of hands we saw earlier everyone knows someone who's been impacted is pretty common so why is this
(06:53) happening first of all companies have limited budgets to work with and sometimes they have to prioritize other areas of the company for spending it's just the reality right like if your company is not doing well you're bleeding money and you only have enough money to make payroll for the end of the year are you going to prioritize sales to potentially bring in more Revenue are you going to prioritize R&D to build new products are you going to Prior prioritize Deval to help improve experience and like market cap um
(07:19) sometimes companies make different decisions and it it is what it is secondly uh a lot of devell employees are very senior engineers and they have a lot of other valuable skill sets we'll talk about this in a moment and in a lot of companies that means that your devell employees are very expensive and so sometimes when companies are taking a look at payroll and trying to figure out where they can cut back Devo can be a really tempting Target for that just because you have very experienced senior employees who get paid
(07:47) disproportionately a lot of money and then finally the thing that I've heard for years at every Dev I've ever seen But company leadership doesn't see sufficient Roi for devro and this is is a common thing everyone knows about it it's no surprise right so just as a fun example one of the things I did before coming here to Devcon is I went through the Devcon website and I went back to 2015 at the first ones they did in San Francisco and New York or uh in London sorry and I went through and I wrote a little chat GPT prompt and I
(08:21) said hey please take a look at the titles of talks from Dev rcon tell me how many of these talks are focused on how to show kpis and prove value to your organization and the results are pretty big like devalon 2019 had 78% of the talks talking about metrics and kpis of some sort which really goes to show you that in the meta of devil all of us generally know and understand that this is an issue like everybody talks about it it's like the number one thing devel professionals communicate about right so how do we change
(08:52) this uh one of the things Matt and I have done at sneak that I'm extremely proud of is we built a super resilient Deval team um and that's what we're going to go through for the rest of the talk we're going to show you exactly what we do to have a team that's thrived really well in super good economic conditions and has also done really well even right now when there's a downturn and also just a shout out but we're hiring ahe of security relations our team is growing uh so you know talk to
(09:19) me after if that's interesting to you so the first item we want to talk about is impact everyone talks about impact right but there's two things you need to know as a leader of any team at any organization the first thing is what outputs you're going to generate from your team right now in a devil team this might be things like the number of blog posts you create YouTube videos you publish speaking engagements you do technical workshops that you teach whatever it is those are outputs the second thing you have
(09:48) control over and that you need to understand are your impacts now these are things that are measurable uh things that matter to the business right so for example the more BL blog post you publish if you're you know doing a decent job anyways the more readers you'll have on the blog that's an impact and that will also influence the number of users who read the blog who then sign up and use your service right registrations so these are things that are the impacts and it's critical to know in Devo particularly in Devo what
(10:18) both your outputs and impacts are you have to have a little table that looks like this to understand because these are the only levers you have to pull to change things and it's really important to know what inputs yield what outputs so this is a typical developer Advocate now I was hesitant to put this slide in here because our Advocates are maybe slightly different than some other places everyone does it differently but I'm going to tell you the way the sneak team is composed so all of our uh developer Advocates are people who are
(10:49) extremely senior Engineers Matt's a great example of this he's a very well-respected engineer he has a ton of experience in our domain um he's also really influential he's known in his space people respect it respect him and he can act as a trusted adviser to other developers um he's a really good communicator so one of the things about Advocates that's really important is they're good at communicating their ideas through writing through speaking through making me blush now ronal
(11:17) they're doing videos and all so like he's extremely humble I'm talking him up but it's very true uh the other thing a good Advocate needs is they have to be creative and a bit of a hacker and I mean that in like the true like conscious of a hacker type person they need to be the type of person who's able to just get done they need to build stuff find Creative Solutions and work across multiple teams sometimes in a bureaucracy or whatever it is just like make things happen that's like a skill
(11:42) set that you develop and then finally you have to be empathetic to the core audience and in Devo you can cheat at this because if you're a developer Advocate and you're talking to other developers and showing them how to do stuff and being an educator you're already the target user for the service so you know know what's going on better than almost anyone else on planet Earth and maybe even outside of planet Earth so there's a lot of great things you can do there now flexibility is the main
(12:10) superpower of devil it's because these people have a lot of these broad skill sets that we can easily change and tweak those program outputs that we're generating and therefore tweak the impacts that we're generating because we have a lot of flexibility in the very types the the types of activities we can do because we have all these skills so here are some regular goals this is what goals look like for companies in good Economic Times all right a CEO and the seite of the company will look at things like this and say hey we are
(12:42) really focused on Revenue growth right like getting new users to buy our product we are looking at Market expansion so are we building new services and launching them to reach new potential customers how are we maximizing profits are we investing enough in R&D so we can keep ahead of competitors we need to acquire the best talent and retain them and then we have Capital expenditures that you can't avoid now here's what goals look like from a SE Suite level perspective when you're in a downturn instead of those
(13:09) Focus areas before companies are focused on reducing costs driving efficiency cash flow management retaining the existing customers you have is very important um debt management employee well-being and also of course improving your product so that the things that are annoying to people don't become blockers in sensitive times when people are looking to cut budgets so here's an a real world study from sneak uh last year in the good times I'll say uh we were really focused on these three goals uh Revenue growth
(13:41) Market expansion and profit M sorry and R&D we spent a ton of money on these three items uh this year we're actually spending a lot of money on cost reduction efficiency customer retention and helping product improve those pain points that lead to poor satisfaction scores so I'm going pass over to M now you've taken the entire slot there was a lot of words in that bit so um yeah so the the first thing I going to talk about is this this thing about being realistic and one of the big things that that we've both noticed is
(14:15) that um developer relations folks can uh sometimes put together um unrealistic plans for what output is possible and you know this is probably driven by a lot of different things not least of which is that most of the Devol folks that we know are all super high performers who you know want to uh they're really Keen to show their value all the time but overc committing has a bunch of dangers to it you know underd delivering for a start but also in driving burnout um which we all know is a is a massive issue so in
(14:51) our team what we'd much rather do is overd deliver than underd deliver and um you know focus on producing high quality output that really moves the needle and so we approach this in much the same way as you'd approach any kind of program management by sizing activity and knowing all the time how much effort we have available so to do this we kind of built this this resource model for all of the things that our Advocates do and we try and take into account the kind of full range of activity that's involved in
(15:24) actually producing something so you know writing a Blog doesn't take a day um even though the actual writing activity may be you know may take that much time in reality you know there's a whole bunch of research time you need to think about it you need to think about the structure uh perhaps you need to learn some tools perhaps you need to build a demo and then once you write it there's uh time involved in editing it there's time involved in Administration in terms of managing your um publishing tools and
(15:54) then most importantly you need to promote it um which is super important and we're come back to a little bit later but all these activities in our model uh combined to produce nearly five working days of effort and you know there's a uh for some activities there's some benchmarks you can use already you know there's this this is the example of writing a conference talk um you know there's this rule of thumb uh Benchmark which is pretty widely accepted in public speaking that it takes 45 minutes
(16:22) per minute um and then we add in a couple of days for building the slide deck and and practice the point of this isn't that it needs to be super accurate either right um obviously some things won't take as long some will take longer what we're looking for is a reasonable average that we can use when we do planning and once we have the full model of all the activities we then also look at how much time an advocate realistically has in a week um at any size of organization there's going to be a bunch of overhead in terms of meetings
(16:56) emails social media engaging with Upstream communities there's engaging with the product teams so we can sort of derive this factor which defines actual resource that's available to us um in our case for an advocate that's typically about one day a week of this overhead which uh really gives us like four days per week average month is about five weeks which gives us 20 days um of effort available in each monthly Sprint and when you build these kind of models you can you know you can go off down the rabbit hole here and uh cover
(17:30) holidays and sick pay and all that but um you know and and it'll also somewhat depend on how how much reactive work you have to do um in terms of unplanned things but by using this kind of modeling we are much more confident that when we do planning we're setting kind of realistic attainable goals um and it actually makes us we're able to respond better to to reactive requests because uh either we know we can't take more effort in or we can reduce the amount of of effort that we've already committed
(18:02) to so for this bit here uh you really want to make sure that when you are measuring things you're measuring the really important things um so let's talk about sneak for a moment last year in 20122 we had a vision right it's really really simple it's we want to get every developer in the world to know about and hopefully use sneak pretty broad Vision right now because of the current conditions of the time like what that trans reled to in terms of actual impact goals were that we really wanted to
(18:31) drive sneak awareness right so how many net new developers are our programs reaching like how many people are learning about sneak for the first time from a program we ran um secondly how many of those people did we acquire did we actually get to sign up and use our product right that's acquisition so there's ways to measure this right like you can go to Google analytics and you can see how many people read a particular blog post you can see page Impressions and net new um but it's not enough to go a level deeper to to get
(18:59) this more in-depth data that you need to run a successful program right you also need to understand how you know developers just aren't one group of people you have python developers JavaScript developers like there's people in different aspects right and you need to track and understand that and on our team we have different advocates in charge of each of these communities so in order to get that more granular data we had to build custom metrics into Google analytics to report on these things um but that's also not
(19:25) enough we then had to tie it into our con Bond system which is a where we have all of this stuff archived and lots of information Matt's going to talk about this a lot more in a moment um but these are the outputs that are yielding some uh bit of impact and I want to give you a highle picture real quick and the picture is this let's say your company has a sales goal for the quarter you want to gain $100 million of AR and let's say that you know that in order to have $100 million of AR your marketing
(19:55) team needs to have $200 million of pipeline cuz only half of it will convert so then let's say how do you get to $200 million of pipeline in the marketing team and marketing teams have a lot of strategies to get there they have paid ads they have content and a big part of that is devil so at sneak for example Devil drives about half of that top of the funnel stuff via the programs we run so that means you'd have a $100 million devil pipeline Target now how do you reverse your engineer your way to make sure when you're trying to
(20:24) deliver these big numbers of things that you're able to accurately get there through the programs you run that's what Matt's going to show in a moment and it's extremely extremely important to do this type of stuff also uh John quick question we have five minutes for Q&A right can we skip the Q&A all right we're no questions I'm sorry too many words ask us after the party so as Randall was saying you know it's um it's not just about measuring but it's about presenting this information in the right
(20:51) format um we don't want to have our Advocates having to spend loads of time learning how to use complex tools like Google Analytics and digging around and stuff for the find the things that's important to them so we build these kind of custom uh metrics um pipelines custom metric dashboards that are uh specific to what that Advocate needs to see so this is the one for our Java segment you know showing performance of of blog posts over a particular time period and that often needs us to link up lots of
(21:20) different data sources um for our content program assana is our source of Truth every published piece has a task tracking it um and asan is where we handle all our tagging which is basically how we Define what we call segments um our Advocates are typically subject matter experts on a particular ecosystem so we build uh dashboards based on the tags for that particular area and how this works is we have a bunch of python that runs in Heroku that uh gets a list of URLs from assana for a particular set of tags then uses that to
(21:52) get metrics from Google analytics we do loads of slicing and dicing in uh in pandas and then we produce these these custom dashboards and pull them uh push them to uh to Google pages and we don't just build dashboards for the segment we build dashboards for absolutely every URL that gets published in the in the uh content program and we also produce like a range of kind of automated reports for different things um this is our referers report and this comes back to that thing I was saying earlier about promotion of
(22:22) things is super important to us because you know you've put loads of effort into producing content it's clearly prettyy pointless if nobody actually gets to see it um so we have a really extensive program of what we call go to market uh for a Content piece um this typically means uh promoting on personal team Twitter on the corporate social media accounts we cross post to loads of other different blogging sites like dev.
(22:46) 2 and medium we do Hacker News Reddit uh ecosystem specific newsletters and um Facebook and Linkedin groups and uh anywhere else we can basically think of and by using these referers reports we can see not only we obviously seeing where the traffic is coming from for that particular piece but we can see not only how well we've done at promoting it but how effective that particular route of promotion is and um we just adding this thing in here about Facebook and and Linkedin groups which a lot of people I think don't necessarily uh miss
(23:20) out on the power of some of these groups they've got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of members you know if you can get a uh a um thoughtfully crafted piece into one of those groups of people who are all interested in that particular ecosystem you can get a massive amount of visibility yeah you would be surprised even having like a massive Twitter following or X whatever they're calling you now of like 100,000 people fails in comparison to just publishing something on the python developers LinkedIn group where there's like a one
(23:49) and a half million people that actively read like there's no comparison at all so there's really effective channels you just have to go out and find them and do things in the right way so once you've identified those activities that have the most impact for your particular team your particular goals and you can you know you've got stuff in place to measure it you can start to think about how you would um really scale that activity and you know if you can identify that metric really clearly link
(24:15) it to business value and then produce a plan showing how you can grow that metric with investment then it becomes a lot easier to sell that to your organization but I think you do need to have some of these building blocks in place first before you can kind of make make those cases um so you know as an example in 2022 as Randall said our key metric was about driving traffic to the blog and the big number here was about driving um a million sessions by the end of the year once we' built the metric system and we focused the team around that
(24:47) metric we can then model how our different types of content which is what you're seeing at the top here typically Drive traffic to the blog and then we look at how many additional sessions we need to uh to drive during that period to get to that 1 million uh number and then we can work out basically model it on how many sessions additional sessions we need to add per month in order to get to that number by the end of the year and then basically look at at which combination of these things we then use to get that uh that particular number
(25:20) just to add one thing real quick what we're going through here is essentially our way of having reverse engineered like the growth model of the business and tied it down to very specific devil program so using all the stuff Matt's talking about here we're able to accurately say that at the start of the year we have some goal and because of this stuff we built out we can then tell okay well how many blog posts or videos do we need to publish and what is the expected amount of people who need to come come to these things and learn
(25:48) about it what is the percentage of people who convert from there and then what are the percentage of those people who then go on to become paying customers and there's a very clearly defined funnel and we have a lot of consistency in this because of the way we sort of like structured it and the resource modeling and everything it allows us to get these very accurate projections even from a big distance away and that's one of the key ways we've been able to continue growing the Devo function even in bad economic
(26:15) conditions to be frank because it drives so much of the value of the overall business it's it's quite cool I mean in this case you know we look at these numbers of pieces that we need to publish clearly you know our team is nowhere near big enough to to create all those ourselves so this particular investment case was about um investing in content agencies to provide us this very big pipeline um of content at a fixed cost and you know once you've got that that fairly simple equation of cost a result then it's a lot easier to take
(26:44) that to the executive team and say you know for this amount of investment here's the result that you're going to get from that and you know that's what we did for this and this model basically delivered almost exactly um what we planned it to so you know I think the point here is if you can get kind of data driven and provide that easy way of uh defining that cost to result you know that's what the executive team are in general looking for because that's how they run the rest of the business and you know in this this is
(27:13) the graph showing those uh those numbers um increasing to the final goal from Q2 uh these q1 numbers are driven a bit artificially High by um uh various kind of timely things like log for Shell um which uh we do take in into account of planning that we have some of these things which are uh unplannable and then you know we can see uh in July that's our typical monthly output of blogs for in-house for the team you know and we grew that by about 400% by the end of the year and I think this is the one that's
(27:48) kind of interesting because it shows that power of compounding so you know these are the sessions for only blogs which are published as part of that program so over that over that half year getting to that final number and one of the important things to consider is when you're doing Dev R work right you have generally two choices of things you can spend time on there's things you can spend time on that have a one-time payoff and there's things you can spend time on that have a long-term payoff that compounds over time um the stuff
(28:16) Matt showing here is basically we invested a lot of Team time in building compounding things like content where a certain number of people are going to come and learn from it every single month things like that grow a very rapid pace and it's easy to uh misunderstand how much impact it can make without tracking things in a very granular way like we have here but it contributes massive amounts to the business and it's pretty cool to take a look at um over the course of like a year or so um and you know obviously when you
(28:46) start to industrialize things like this um delivering work where there are a lot of stakeholders and a lot of um uh elements that process gets progressively more complex you know workflow can involve multiple teams multiple stages um most folks are going to be using some kind of project management tooling we use aana um but even fairly simple things can have a lot of moving parts so you know one the way we manage complexity through this is using um subtasks in isana but these can be across different boards across different
(29:17) projects across different teams to get a blog post published we have something like 20 different steps within our organization and what we're aiming for really is to make that super simple for the ad we don't want them to have to remember that they've got to create all these subtasks on different people's uh different people's boards it's very easy for people to get bogged down doing manual work and uh you know human error gets easily introduced so the message here really is is don't do donkey work
(29:44) um you look very carefully at where you're doing repetitive tasks and automate that completely away and what surprising is this can to be quite tricky for people to assess um some folks won't actually notice that they're doing loads of manual work or they attach too much value to them actually doing it so it kind of really helps to have someone on your team who's sort of ruthlessly focused on uh on assessing what things don't need to be done by a human being and I'll just say Matt's the
(30:12) absolute best at this in the industry uh so we use a whole range of different automation tools um custom python built in aana rules um but we do a ton of stuff with uh with low code and no code in this case this is our no code platform make.com and this is the workflow for uh one of our workflows for publishing blogs as you can see it's pretty complicated um but it automates away all of that stuff about creating subtasks moving things onto different boards and all that kind of stuff The Advocates just work in their own Sprint
(30:42) board and then everything from there is triggered um in a kind of if this if this and that kind of uh kind of situation you know the content team get notified to publish gets added to social media cues and all that kind of stuff so it basically industrializes the whole process and we've built a whole range of tools to handle uh a lot of other types of repetitive work the crossposting that we talked about earlier this used to be done manually someone used to cut and paste this stuff between different uis
(31:11) and uh we now when you publish like 200 blog posts a year that's pretty labor intensive and uh we estimated the sunk cost of this is something like 35 days a year of just someone cutting and pasting uh so again we wrote a tool that takes the blog post from our cm s um paes Rich Text renders it out to HTML adds in all the images renders that to markdown and then automatically uh post to all the downstream blog sites and uh we also built this system where folks can automatically retweet things um we did used to have like a
(31:45) slack Channel where people could say could you retweet this but it's like it never works really well because people forget to do it or people don't actually action it and we kind of made the assumption that actually for stuff we published in house almost everyone would want to retweet it so we built this kind of Pub sub thing where um people create a tweet in an Nana board it then uses slack as a sort of messaging system and gets picked up by zapia and uh and posted to um an individual Advocates buffer
(32:15) account and like we try and do with everything we basically wrap a kpi around this so some of its guess work but it's actually quite a powerful metric you know it it the exact team kind of understand what these what these numbers are because they're about Hard Cash um so we measure this in devel days and we can kind of calculate a cost saving based on um average developer Advocate cost um so here's that blog reposting one save 60 minutes per blog 170 hours a year ques of 34 days um this modeling is pretty
(32:49) conservative as well I'd say Rand right yeah I mean since we've we actually built out a dedicated part of our devil team that Matt leads that does operations and Automation and this function has been extremely successful like we've saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in yearly spend and we've saved literally hundreds of full-time team member days in basic you know tasks so it's really a massive product multiplier to really treat your devell program like an engineering problem right like there's things you can
(33:19) engineer away out of your life and you should do that if you can so you know it's a fun fun reminder and um you know the future for us is is probably a lot of stuff that we've already started building with uh with open AI so we already do um our uh Meetup program we have something like 50 to 60 meetup groups across the world they do tons of events every month and we use open AI to uh to automatically generate tweets um to promote those events um we've also written a whole bunch of stuff to do uh podcast
(33:51) transcriptions and automatically write blog posts and we've we've got a uh A system that we're working on in how to basically replace content agency pieces with uh kind of pair programming uh thing for The Advocates to work with with chat GPT so I guess that we've come to the end do you want to recap the uh takeaways yeah so everything we talked about nothing super complicated right focus on impact be flexible that's one of the superpowers Deval teams have and so like take advantage of that uh be
(34:22) realistic measure the really important things that are going to get you to where you need to be in the future scale your key programs and please automate stuff it is so important like don't neglect it so thank you very much for listening yeah thanks for the time we'll we'll be hanging out the party so yeah you can do one or two questions oh okay we have extra time apparently so there we go I would have gone slower here you can use this one I'll yeah oh there we go um I know this is keeping you from beer and snacks but we
(35:02) will do a couple of questions here thank you very much great presentation um how large is your how many Advocates do you have in your organization uh our team is about 16 people at the moment well thank you great presentation uh top the ruthless automation I love it you think you have done to apply resilience to the people of your team instead of the processes of your team so the question is what automations have we done for people instead of process resilience for people rather than process ah resilience yeah so I'll
(35:39) just summarize my personal thoughts on this I think it's really important uh you're never going to have a very smooth perfect trajectory in a career or a job or a company like it's a myth that doesn't exist uh everything's going to change pretty much all the time and what you need to do is build enough uh understanding and context of your business to do the right thing I think what it really comes down to is each of us in Devil at a company we are there at the company to achieve a mission and
(36:08) usually that mission is to help get more people to know about our product but in certain situations it might be different right like it might be we need to help get more people to use our product or we might need to decrease the time it takes for people to use our product or maybe the goal is to engage current users of our product and get them to learn more things there's a lot of different things that companies want to do and being flexible as a devell team and understanding those outputs and those impacts like we talked about before is
(36:35) the key piece of understanding that you need to run a program and be resilient it's yeah hopefully that helps cool well you can find them downstairs for more questions give them a huge round of applause for our closing [Applause] talk
