Dong Jianhua: Developer Ecological Construction and Operation Strategy | DEV. Together 2021 China Developer Ecological Summit

Content source: On June 5, 2021, the 2021 China Developer Ecological Summit hosted by SegmentFault came to a successful conclusion. At the meeting, Dong Jianhua, Director of Huawei's Developer Ecological Operations, delivered a speech on the topic of "Developer Ecological Construction and Operation Strategies".

Sharing guests: Jianhua, Director of Huawei Developer Ecological Operations

shorthand compilation and release: SegmentFault Editorial Department

good afternoon everyone. Let me first introduce myself. I am Dong Jianhua. The strategy department of Huawei is now responsible for the structure of developer operations. What I want to share today is relatively dry, partial to strategy and methodology. I hope to take this opportunity to communicate with you and hope to resonate.

First of all, do you have this doubt in your mind: Now that every company has some To B and To C businesses, what kind of developers do we need? Do you have any doubts about what kind of developers we need or reach out to our products throughout the business development cycle? Second, that is, the topic we are discussing today is the stage of ecological construction from 0 to 1, which is the stage of the cycle from product development to large-scale growth to pre-commercialization. So, the development of the developer ecosystem is in the 0 to 1 stage, what aspects of the focus do we need to focus on in operation? The third piece is how we choose in terms of developer development strategies and operational goals. Just now a teacher said that some questions have not been answered, that is, whether the developer brings revenue to the business or forms a trust relationship with the developer. Today I mainly focus on these three issues.

Insight

Let’s take a look first. Why do technology companies or some To C companies develop developers? What value does the developer bring to the business? Why is everyone doing developer ecology?

It can be seen from this revenue table that those companies that provide developers with high-quality services and have a developer ecological operating system rank very high. I listed Microsoft, Huawei, and Alibaba because I have worked for all three companies, and the entire workflow was originally based on this technical group.

First of all, let's take a look at the developer insights. When we segment the potential developer population, we must first look at the status quo of the developer ecology.

On the left is CSDN doing research on Chinese developers. It divides developers into several groups of people, one is technology enthusiasts, there are small and medium-sized developers in the Internet, and some are enterprise developers. These three groups of people constitute 84% of the developer ecosystem accounted for the majority. And as developers get younger and younger, the post-90s generation has become the mainstream. What are their preferences? For example, developers have a strong demand to learn a certain new technology, right? So we have to provide him with some learning content, such as technical documents, as well as training certification, to help him empower or improve a certain technical ability. And if they come to develop, we need to have an open platform, we need to provide a more convenient way to build, and provide similar cloud services like API. He also needs technical support, and technical exchanges need community. This is the overall portrait of the developer.

For To D or To B companies, I used to work in Alibaba Cloud and Microsoft in cloud computing related departments. So who is the developer ecosystem they developed?

Here is a reference architecture. They tend to develop To D, that is, individuals, with a mid-to-long tail. This group of people is very large. According to incomplete statistics, there may be nearly 10 million in China and even more in the world. So how do we reach this group of people? This group is not limited to managers such as CIOs and CTOs, but their influence is still great. Developers refer to a broad technical group. We also need to affect these people. They may play certain roles in the enterprise, such as software development engineers or software architects. These people actually have certain decision-making powers in the enterprise. If it can affect the minds of this group of people, it will ultimately affect the company's technology selection and use our products and services. They are equivalent to product spokespersons.

Developer groups have technical preferences, that is, developers in a certain field will learn certain programming languages or programming frameworks, and are interested in certain technical application fields. This is a good insight for us. . Know where the developers gather most, what tools they use, and what are the most popular development techniques at the moment. Through these insights, we can provide corresponding development tool products and services to help them better build on the open platform. At the same time, before choosing a new technology, developers will pay attention to whether the manufacturer can provide a complete service system, such as documents, tools, tutorials, etc., as well as whether the technical support and training are complete. For them, after choosing your technology, it takes time, energy and money to grow with you. It needs to be growable and sustainable. This is his focus.

Strategy

Second, I want to talk about it from a corporate perspective. Due to the complexity of the developers themselves have different technical fields and preferences, at different stages of business development, we have to think clearly what kind of products we provide to developers and what value developers can bring to our business. In business design, we must first have some strategic designs. We treat the developer population as what kind of objects, such as the developer as the user of the product, should he pay for it, or the developer as a technical partner, providing components and capabilities to optimize and polish our products, for different The business object should have a corresponding design.

The third is operating strategy. For example, for different potential developer groups, what kind of operating methods and business processes should we adopt, and what goals and operational indicators should be set.

Back to the business stage, we will launch an MVP early in the product's life cycle to see if developers are willing to try such a product. This requires feedback from users and iterates on the functional features of the product, so it does. An evolutionary process. At the very beginning, we want to promote our products, so we need to make more investment in technology brand marketing. Focusing on the product value proposition, we need to reveal the brand, and we need to do technical evangelism to increase the number of users of the product and expand brand awareness. After expanding the user base, we need to build a service system. This is the process of leaping from 0 to 1, that is, the process of crossing the gap from the launch of a new product to its approval. After market verification, our products are marketable. After we have accumulated a certain scale of user base, there will be a few developers who think there are business opportunities. They will integrate your products to bring commercial value, and there will be more in the future. Developers entering this field require us to provide better and more timely technical services, such as a platform-based self-service system, to accelerate their innovation. More and more people use the product on the user side, more and more developers will join, and more and more applications built by developers. The diversification of product forms that are finally delivered to users will make users continue to grow. It is the construction process of the growth flywheel. Therefore, the ultimate goal of developing developers is to form a business ecosystem similar to a positive cycle. This is the ultimate goal of the developer's ecological operation.

Developer 0-1 operating system

This is a detailed development, that is, from 0 to 1. We are more concerned about how to bridge the gap from the initial stage to the growth stage. When the product is just launched, we may not know whether the product meets the needs of developers, so in terms of operating strategy, we first need the developer's portrait, and who the product itself is aimed at. If there are already similar products on the market, where is our differentiated value point, and then extract the value point as brand packaging or technical promotion, and get the first batch of users through product promotion. After attracting these users, we must continue to operate to identify seed users and active users, because these users may be product improvers and advocates.

During the growth period, as mentioned earlier, the number of enthusiasts and individual developers exploring emerging technology fields will gradually decrease. As the user base of the product grows larger, more commercial developers will join in, because they will feel that there are business opportunities and product integration can bring economic benefits. At this time, we have to increase the number of developers, that is, the large-scale growth of developers. Because the entire stock user base is relatively large, it is necessary to improve retention and conversion, and at the same time require a complete platform system. We are talking about developers. In fact, it is a collective concept. As a business, developers have different business attributes, that is, are developers as your users or help you with product improvements, complete components, and functions. The perfection of the developer is as a technical partner, such as a developer of an open source project; or as an ecological partner, he participates in the business ecosystem of the enterprise to help you build joint solutions, or sell and recommend your product. These roles played by developers need to be distinguished from the perspective of business objects.

From 0 to 1, that means developers are mostly users, especially cloud products. The cloud product itself provides some APIs, some open interfaces, and development tools. The developer first, as a user of a cloud product, try your product, and then after experiencing it personally, he feels that your product is very powerful and the development efficiency has been significantly improved, then he will be willing to help you further Product improvements. At the same time, developers are mobile. Developers, as individuals, start their own businesses, set up companies, become CTOs and CEOs. At that time, they may become your partners and even your customers. So when it comes to developers, we must figure out who the developers are from a business perspective.

As a developer, as a user, we need to have the function of developer operation. The developer operation function is a relatively comprehensive function, which may be biased towards the market. Focusing on developer operations will involve collaboration with the functions of relevant departments within the enterprise. Developer operations need to mobilize these functions and resources to support developers and provide them with a better experience. At the same time, developers will have comments and feedback in the use of the product, and it is necessary for the operation to provide such a feedback mechanism to pass on product suggestions and feedback to the product development organization, thus forming a positive product improvement operation chain. Therefore, in the 0 to 1 stage, we need to pay attention to the polishing of the product, and then we need to pay attention to the growth of developers and the incubation of innovation.

The work of developer operations is around these three principles. The first is the content that developers are concerned about in the insights we talked about earlier, that is, documentation, tutorials, training, and so on. The second piece is the code, which is to build tools for them to provide convenience and improve efficiency. The third piece, the community is to allow developers to technically communicate a sense of belonging and identity, whether it is an open source community or a community built by the manufacturer. For example, some technology companies have their own developer communities, where you can meet many big cows and increase their influence.

Developer operations are divided into two levels. Externally, it provides a good developer experience at the interactive level, allowing developers to feel that their needs can be met during use, and feel that it is very cool to use. The second level of developer operations is to connect products and users, and coordinate with various departments to gather service resources, ensure service supply, conduct external demand, and continuously improve the quality of products and services. This requires relatively high comprehensive operations.

This page is the service flow experienced by the developers, that is, how the developers came into contact with our products. It may be through social media or like this conference, as well as some publicity, promotion, and even search for some application scenarios on the Internet to reach us. The product. After getting the product information, he will try the product. Is your product as easy to use as you said, can bring a 10 times increase in efficiency, can adapt to my scene, and solve my problem. Regarding the registration process, we make it very simple through user experience, and we can get some information at the same time. At this stage, users may be lost, because developers are actually worried about privacy protection, especially overseas developers are very reluctant to disclose private information, so we need to better guide and enhance trust through UX means. In fact, the entire user journey is a process of establishing a relationship with the developer, getting familiar with the product, and then allowing him to gradually build trust and ultimately loyalty to the brand.

So if there is only one indicator for developer operations, and it is the only true north indicator, it is satisfaction NPS. is used, the developer becomes a very loyal supporter of the product. He is willing to endorse your brand. Some MVPs will everywhere advertise that I have used whose cloud product is very good, which has brought about an improvement in business efficiency. I mentioned the satisfaction NPS just now. In fact, there are still many methodologies that are biased towards strategy in the operation of developers. In the 0 to 1 stage, there is a part of developer operation that is partial to marketing, and part of it is partial to user operation. What is the difference between the two? If a developer is a product user, he has to pay for it. But if the developer's usage habits are formed and a word-of-mouth effect is formed, then the company behind him may be the last purchase object, so for us, it is through the developer that influences his organization's decision-making.

Here I focused on some of the operational strategies we need to match from 0 to 1, because each company may have some differences in the overall operation of the transition from developers, especially developers to the ecosystem. , I am sharing this time to refine the common ways and methods.

First, let's take a look at how the entire operational map is designed to design this set of operational strategies. According to the business stage and product form of the product itself, whether it is a platform-based service product or a single-product tool product, we set our goal, whether it is to increase the number of users of the product or the number of developers. At the same time, the business process and the strategy adopted are whether it is large-scale growth or refined operation, and then what is our operation method, so this is equivalent to a map.

How to conduct developer operations? We also need to have a position.

From 0 to 1, the construction from the community to the center is divided into two stages, and I put both stages on it. The developer community is more to attract these users. You need to have a place to stay. You can continue to provide some technical blogs, forums, and some colleges in this community to provide some courses, empowerment systems, and activities. Contest, these are the channels carried by our developer community. The center is more about doing some development needs. We provide some tools, APIs, sample codes, and some advanced courses to support his development.

Among this, we have three more important functions, one is content, as well as user and community operations. These three operational functions are very necessary capabilities.

In terms of content, our community is not just a media, it is not only a one-way communication channel, but a two-way communication channel, so we need to have some interaction in it, to build this interactive content, and at the same time provide the entire The growth path can continuously improve his ability through the mechanism of learning, training, competition, and examination. On the user's side, we need to have some growth system design and incentive system design to continuously improve self-drive through our entire user experience path, so that he can grow into a high-value developer.

The content is divided into To B and To D, that is, on the content side, we affect two groups of people, one can be a business decision maker or an influential person. He needs to do some business selection, similar to Forrester's release of white papers, and some research reports or technological leadership. These contents can arouse the interest of technology decision makers of To B companies, and then form a decision on technology selection. The second piece is for the developer ecology group. He has a certain influence in the enterprise, but it is more to integrate into your enterprise developer ecology from the perspective of personal growth, so what we provide him is technology empowerment , Such as learning courses, and some sandbox experiments. At the same time, he may have his own growth path. That is, the growth path of each developer in the field is different. For example, the growth path of artificial intelligence developers is different. The same, so we designed some content based on these to empower him.

On the user side, I just talked about the design of the user operation mechanism. If we want to carry a large-scale developer growth strategy, who do we need to support? That is, we need to digitize him, that is, digitize the developer, and give him an ID, so that his entire path can be managed, that is, to know what he is doing in our community. How active is he, how is his interaction rate inside, and can have a complete portrait. Through this portrait, we can see what his growth path or advanced behavior path is like. If we feel that this behavioral path is a growth path after cross-comparison, it is a golden pass, plus leverage, and then increase investment, this is our growth map.

Then after large-scale growth and more and more people, if it reaches the million-level level, how we operate is another problem. Whether to operate through the extensive AARRR pirate model, or to operate with a precise Account-Based model such as ABM, this is where we need to think again. In this, we need to drive operational decisions through data, that is, many such operational decisions can be achieved through strategies. For example, the lecturer just mentioned that we have some Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), developers In the whole process of interacting with manufacturers, he has reached a certain level of magnitude and what kind of strategy we adopt, which can be transformed into sales leads and marketing leads.

For user model selection, the AARRR model we use here is a relatively coarse-grained model. But especially for Internet companies, this set of models is very exciting. The point I want to emphasize here is on the contribution side, because the developer, as a user, does have a purchase behavior, but we are at the 0 to 1 stage, and he may not have reached the sales lead stage. If You give him a cold call and give him some marketing recommendations. In fact, he doesn’t care. He particularly rejects this. Therefore, we have to decide on this according to the stage of his business and the stage of the developer. What kind of operating strategy should developers use? There are a lot of methodological things here, so I won't go over them one by one.

Then, the incentive mechanism for user operations is to allow developers to stay and be active, to continue to grow in your community, and to satisfy their self-driving power, which means that self-driving power is actually our great grasp. Hand, there will be a model later. The user level mechanism here consists of four parts, one is the incentive mechanism of points, that is, what tasks the user completes, what actions he takes to give him points rewards, he can use points to redeem prizes or something. The second is the level, that is to say which stage of growth he has reached in the vendor community, his contribution to a certain technical field, and what level he has reached in the entire ecology, he needs to define and unlock the rights of the corresponding level. The third is a badge. For example, when a user completes a certain task or achieves an achievement, such as a user participating in a public test of a certain product, we will issue him a task achievement badge, or reach a certain defined developer level such as MVP, Give him a badge of honor. Finally, the leaderboard is a competitive mechanism that can inspire more users to participate. When designing the developer's operating mechanism, the incentive mechanism and growth mechanism of layered operation are the endogenous growth strategies of developers.

Just now we talked about the hierarchical level of developers, we also have different levels in the choice of operating strategy, which means which ones meet his needs at which level, and which ones meet his high-level self-realization needs. For example, for an open source person, he is born with some desire to achieve his own, because he feels that the products provided by the manufacturer may not meet his needs, or he has some application scenarios that he wants to integrate into the manufacturer's products, so this pair For him it is a kind of self-realization. Therefore, different developer groups need to use different methods.

In addition to layering and grading, developers also need to distinguish the circles. Here, the circle-level operation strategy will be applied. The design of the operation mechanism needs to be considered for different developer groups.

The most peripheral is the potential technical field crowd, this crowd is we need to subdivide and identify to reach. The characteristics, interests, preferences, and community forums of this technology group can be obtained through influence Pull, such as hosting a technology conference and holding offline activities in the local area to actively screen these people, make them interested and register to join the manufacturer’s private In the domain circle, become a developer who interacts with us and can continue to reach out. Another example is to influence the outer circle from the core circle. This is a Push strategy, that is, to influence peers in the same industry through the appearance of MVP. He is also a KOL opinion leader and can radiate the technical fan circle located in the outer circle. Therefore, push and pull these two methods can make the developer’s private domain pool bigger and bigger. Through the combined operation method, the trust of the developer and the loyalty to the brand will be continuously improved, and it will eventually reach the circle of seed users. Go inside, so the developers are from the outside to the inside, from the inside to the outside, cyclically and spirally.

Just now we had a session about MVP. MVPs are actually similar to the most valuable developers. The title of this group of people may be the CTO, CIO, and technical decision makers in the company. These people will eventually become our ecological partners, that is, they can have an ecological appeal to our entire manufacturer or developer. Very close contact, became our partner, even said that he used our products and became our customers, so this group of people is actually a very good object to be maintained. Through their influence, they can drive a group of people, for example, he can become our technical evangelist and CTO. The special developer conference will invite customers or partners who have a very good experience in using the product, through some special training or technology circle operation, to incorporate similar technology groups into our ecology, and we provide him with some mechanisms , Let him continue to be in the developer ecology.

For different developer groups, I differentiated from the technical dimension at the beginning. For different developer groups, we will also have some supportive plans and incentive mechanisms, some for students, some for small and medium-sized enterprises, and some for enterprise developers and partners. These plans are promoters. The core of on the operating side. In other words, during the entire business development stage, the form of our products and the choice of strategies and objectives determine how the entire operating system should be built, and what incentives and operating methods we need to use to continuously retain and transform these developers. Become our loyal developer and eventually become part of our business ecology.

The above is the point of view I want to express today, and I hope it will resonate. thank you all.