How Pagerduty is building a dev evangelism program - David Hayes

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Shownotes / Question List

  • (Dove in too fast, forgot to intro Pagerduty - product/what they do!!)

    • Pagerduty is a product which sends alerts only when necessary to make an administrator able to sleep better :)

    • rate limiting - came too late

    • PagerDuty has a support team which helps users with code -

    • good and technical support team - similar strategy to Kevin Hale’s Wufoo story  shared at Stanford’s how to start a startup class (Kevin is now Y Combinator Partner)

  • Brief overview of your background

    • David has been at Pagerduty for 3.5 years,

    • Met other foudners of Pagerdut at University of Waterloo in Ontario

    • already scraping the app to put together their APis before you released it

  • What does a dev evangelist do?

    • Dave looked for - headlined conferences, has lots of energy

    • hired Amanda in August -

    • Dev Evangelists are different from engineers because their TOP priority is going to events and repping the company, they are unlikely to be pulled back to put out a fire

    • Need to be able to gain energy from going to events and fielding the same question again and again

    • People asking repetitive questions is actually good - you already know how to answer it and can really nail the answer

  • How to keep track of questions fielded to your evangelism team for later implementation?

    • PD keeps track of feature requests/integrations

    • 100x more feature requests than PD team can possibly

    • It’s unclear what the best way to do it is -

    • Sometimes people implement your product in a novel way, but are dissapointed they had to do it for themselves  

  • How long have you been running your Dev Evangelism program

    • Pagerduty is operations performance platform first and foremost.  

    • Developer focused product, not a concrete Dev Evang program.  

    • didn’t hire first dedicated until about 3 months ago

    • #chatops - works with Hipchat, Slack (see also), and Flowdock.  Also many bots built by customers

    • Checkout developer.pagerduty.com for more example - PD tries to help with Open Source

    • Pagerduty has a pilot program to sponsor “bug bounties”  to encourage more developer engagement

    • people who build something for themselves aren’t focusing on deployment for other people - main idea is to reward people for going final 20% of the way and making their code deployable for other people

  • How to keep support excited?  What is their reward for taking care of business

    • Their job isn’t trivial

    • Main motivation is to crush it, doesn’t matter how that gets done, just that it is happening

  • What is an API or product (not your own) that you love?

  • What is your favorite hackathon format?  

    • Competitive - pitch for big prizes (Salesforce, Disrupt, AT&T)

    • Collaborative - science fair expos, finalists demo (MLH)

    • Themed - (Space Apps)

    • As a Sponsor - all sorts of hackathons are recruiting opportunities - Pagerduty likes the kind of person who goes to hackathons - smart + get stuff done

    • There may be an inverse relationship between cool demo vs and useful products.  It was hard to get traction at the event b/c it’s a B2B unsexy product

    • Right now it seems like hardware has an advantage in winning hackathons - tools like Oculus and Myo

    • Many hacks die - which is why ChallengePost and Hackerleague exists

    • Many hackathon attendees have full time commitments which take priority over their projects

    • It would be great if more people would document what they built so others don’t have to reinvent the wheel - you should get credit for your hack from the system

    • Companies notice whenever David does a new hack or implementation and posts it on his blog - he is frequently offered phone interviews which he is not interested in taking

    • Opportunity to have a fund to encourage people to make a blog post / documentation for their hacks so others won’t have to reinvent the wheel

    • A pagerduty interview candidate once cited existing code and blog post they’d done previous - they aced the interview

  • also participant in many hackathons -

    • Dave wanted to go to a hackathon to meet a cofounder

    • Pagerduty loves doing monthly internal hackathons, great because it’s easy for the team to get excited about a 10% optimization of existing process

  • Anything (product, API, idea) you want to plug?

  • Where to find you?

    • euri.ca - David writes about code samples, what he’s learning at a quickly scaling startup in Silicon Valley