In this episode, Yurii Filipchuk (Founder of OpenBabylon) speaks with Katie Wasilenko Miller, a Developer Marketing Leader with 15+ years at Google, Slack, and now a steering committee member at the Developer Relations Foundation. Katie shares her career journey, insights on building communities at scale, and lessons from both successes and failures in tech. This conversation is packed with practical advice for anyone leading developer relations, marketing, or startup communities.
Transcript
Yurii (00:14:05): So, you know, when you host an event, you want somebody with a big name and a cool background to be on stage. This is going to attract a lot of interest from other participants. And we started doing our research, looking for people who are well-recognized in dev rel and community space. And then we came across Katie. And we were shocked. Like, 15 years at Google. Global lead for events for developers. Katie saw how Google changed from a startup to a giant. And she was part of the transformation. She was part of Google building connections with developers. We are super, super excited. So also Katie worked at Slack. So actually, let's raise a…Who's using Slack for their community? And who's using Discord? Oh, it's 50/50, you see? If Katie still would be there, you know, guys, it's going to be one-sided for Slack. So yeah, super happy to have Katie here, and actually lost a list of my questions. But I think we could have a round of applause for Katie.
Katie: I haven't said anything yet. You might want to wait. Don't want you to have to take that back.
Yurii (01:52:19): OK, so the first question, I think, can be about your background. So you are a history major, and how come you became a developer connector, people who connected developers with technology, with business, and how being a history major helped you in that?
Katie (02:10:12): That's such a great question. And there's, at least within the U.S., when I was growing up and going to school, if you were a history major, the joke, which was really so awful, is like, what are you going to do with that degree? And reflecting on it, I'm not sure if I could have had a better degree for the type of work that I've done. And the reason is to be successful in the tech space requires nimbleness, flexibility, curiosity, the ability to learn new things quickly, and the ability to connect dots. And I did see these questions in advance, so I did do a little bit of prep. But I thought about what it really means to study history. And it's not just memorizing a bunch of facts and knowing what happened. It's understanding how things happened, why they happened, what we can learn from them. There's business, there's economics, there's education, there's health, there's culture, there's conflict. And I think all of those lessons, everything from the principles of how one learns. One semester I'm taking Renaissance art. The next semester it's U.S. Civil War history. The next semester it's, you know, the history of Ireland and Scotland. And these are things that I don't know. And I need to learn them like that and to be able to be conversant and curious and to write papers and things like that. And if you think about how tech has transformed in the 20 years that I've been in it, you can't be static and you can't just have one skill set and you can't say, this is the thing that I do and this is the thing that I'm good at and this is what I'm going to continue doing. You need that dot connecting and that curiosity. And so I really do see the profession of developer relations as being what I call the liberal arts of tech, because you're not only tech savvy and tech passionate, you have to be a communicator, you have to be a creator, you have to be a community builder, you have to be a dot connector, and that's exactly what the foundation that history gave me.
Yurii (04:27:49): Thank you, thank you. It's very humble, but interesting answer. So you mentioned the word curious a lot, and I figure out that I'm really curious about the birth of a new profession, like 25 years ago, I would suggest even 20 years ago, nobody would say like, oh, when I grow up, I will be a Developer Relations Foundation, no? So it's a new profession. And you are a steering committee member for Developer Relations Foundation. Could you please tell us more about this foundation and your role there?
Katie (05:05:30): Yeah, absolutely. So I have to give a lot of credit to Caroline Luko. She's a name that you may recognize. She has a DevRel agency and has been instrumental in the annual State of DevRel survey. And a couple of years ago, she connected with folks within her circle who she had had very similar conversations with, not just within that circle in that time, but year over year, which was these patterns around grumps and kvetches that we would keep having in the profession but that we weren't solving. Everything from challenges around metrics to every time there was a reorganization and a new leader that came in, you would have to re-justify your existence. I see, Puff, I had the good fortune to work with Puff for many years and we were in the trenches together on a bunch of things. So there's, and I see a lot of nodding heads in the room. And so we said, why don't we do something about it? And we did our background research and looked at a bunch of communities and recognized that there was no one group that was thinking about the profession as a whole. There was no one group who was saying, if somebody is going to apply for a job or write a resume or create a new position, how is their consistency, how is their credibility? We were all just off in our own little silos reinventing the wheel. And some communities were marketing focused. Some were DevRel focused almost to the point that someone like me who has had marketing in my title wasn't allowed in. And so we said we need to create something net new using open source principles. It's not exclusive to open source DevRel practices but uses open source practices and how it was founded. where we could think about what are canonical resources, artifacts, measurement strategies, tool perspectives, that we could be opinionated so that it gives the profession a home base, a solidness, a credibility, that we can collectively be together in community, working to make things better. There is still the kvetching part that happens, but that we're also like taking action and doing something with that. So we're in the intent to form phase. We're part of the, we're under the Linux foundation and working towards, there are some major milestones that we're working towards to get to full launch, which are establishing an election process for the steering committee, governance best practices around working groups and projects, as well as launching our website and brand identity. So keep an eye out on our LinkedIn page.
Yurii (07:58:27): Thank you. Yes, that's a great mission. And I really hope that someday we will hear about the DevRel union going on a strike. You know, all the slacks and discords are down for a day. And take that, big tech. Yeah, maybe someday. And speaking of big tech, so at Google, you said that you transitioned from their money-making cash cow from holy grail of ads to Google Cloud. And we know that Google Cloud was quite late to the game, right? So you've competed with Azure, with AWS, and they already had well-established developers' communities. So was it rough to enter a market with existing players like that? Yeah, tell us more, please.
Katie (08:52:41): Yeah, it was really humbling. And I think the reason is, just as an anecdote, so when I started at Google, I started in the ads business. My fun fact is I started the week that Google Analytics launched and broke because they realized there was a massive demand for free web analytics products. Who knew? And so that also time boxes me. And I remember when I was in ads, I would always ask, shouldn't we be thinking more about what Yahoo is doing or what AOL is doing? And they're like, no, no, no. Like, don't look in the rearview mirror. Always forward, forward, forward. Like, there was so much confidence in what we were doing. And then I was in ads for, I like to say I got the seven-year itch. I was in ads for about seven years, first in customer support and sales and then in product marketing. That was actually my bridge, my little teaser into DevRel is part of my portfolio were ads APIs. And so I got introduced, and those were actually some of Google's first APIs, because this is, again, a little bit of lore. When you are the yellow pages, you don't want to make a campaign with one ad and one keyword for millions of customers. You need to figure out how to automate it. And so, yeah, that was kind of a little bit of the foundation of the ads APIs. But I then made the switch and spent a brief amount of time in kind of the broad DevRel portfolio, where, again, it was, we were always looking forward. We really were leaders in that open source space. And so even with Android, with growing pains and getting kind of the stickiness against Apple, we were lauded because we weren't a closed system, like the iOS development. and then I switched into cloud and then I just assumed our brand would carry us and it didn't and I definitely showed up at events proud with our branding and our beautifully designed booth and people walking up to us being like why are you here like what are you doing in this space like some of it was industries of still I mean this is 2017 so a lot of distrust in the cloud still but a lot of why what does Google have to offer and we just assumed like if we were there and we had a competitive offering people would be on board and they were not and so seeing what it's like to be a number two or number three or number four player for one piece of the business was was humbling and even though I don't take for granted the brand might and the budget might and the staffing and so forth it it really gave that perspective of I'm under the same umbrella but had to learn a lot of lessons of how to actually build trust that I had taken for granted in other parts of the organization
Yurii (11:58:09): Yeah so I think it's really humbling to open the door and say I'm with Google and nobody cares. So, yeah… But was it also like, you know, like Google is well known for its crazy culture. Let's call it this way. So was there a certain shift when the Google Cloud was introduced? So for me, culture is always like the most interesting part of the business. Did you notice some changes or?
Katie (12:30:36): Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like I've had two very interesting examples around culture and brand. One was within the same umbrella moving from one part of the Google business into another. The other was being part of Slack after it had been acquired by Salesforce and so having like a very distinct brand in this larger umbrella. And of course there's always a culture collision because you are recruiting in the Google instance you're recruiting people into cloud who have come from very different corporate experiences, intentionally so because it builds up the skills, the knowledge, the credibility. And I would say it was always a healthy struggle intention of wanting to really lean into the playfulness and the irreverence, the fun, the color that had really set Google apart. And that when you went to, for example, Google Cloud Next event, it didn't feel like a wash, rinse, and repeat of any other cloud conference that you were going to go to. So we still really, really deeply cared about brand, deeply cared about the audience experience and things like that. And at the same time, though, it was a completely different motion for selling, a completely different pressure and expectation. And there is going to be a change around that. And I think on the DevRel side, what was interesting kind of bringing it back to what might be useful for all of you is how to dev rel in an open source space where it really is about building it it's not just about this but it's it's about creating together and there's a certain freedom that comes with that and on the cloud side we needed to close big deals and so all of a sudden things like money and adoption and marketing pipeline and things like that come into the conversation which historically it felt very antithetical to dev rel and so how to carry through that culture of authenticity and transparency and leaning into what made us special while still showing that we were relevant to the business when people spoke a a completely different language than we did when it came to metrics and success.
Yurii (15:01:19): Okay, that's interesting. So we'll probably dive into metrics a little bit further. I'm still on the cultural side of the things. So no culture is built when you win, but it's forged when you lose. So any interesting stories of failures you could share? Especially if something around events and something we all can learn from.
Katie (15:30:21): I would say one thing, that we really strove to hang on to in the event space and I know we had talked about one example and I might give a couple of others is hanging on to the principles of the blameless post-mortem and bringing that in. There were a a lot of things in events that we actually I will give the example so we were going to I think it was a computer storage event or something like that and it was up in Washington. It was very very Microsoft centric. And I inherited this sponsorship decision and so you know I was like okay we're gonna make the most of this and I got it staffed up and what we had had as our practice for events was very hands-on oriented so half of the booth would be a demo and you could talk to staff and half would be like getting to touch the products with these code laughs and folks like I said would come up and they'd be like what do you want me to do like who are you what are you selling and needed to very quickly pivot this space that we were in and on one hand reflect back to the company if we're gonna do this again we should probably revisit how much money we're spending and what the story is that we're telling and how we staff it and then on the flip side we're like we need to make the most of the time that we have here and so that was where being flexible and nimble pivoting really really quickly to meet the audience where they were at and in the reflections not shy not placing blame for the decision because there were reasons that we made the decision but also reflecting and saying let's do it differently next time and I think that that culture of the blameless post postmortem that I think carried through from Google being like a very engineering centric culture helped us a lot.
Yurii (17:37:44): Okay, a note for myself and Nazar. As part of the blame of postmortem, I forgot to do an email blast before the event. We'll discuss it in the retro. It's true. It's true. Okay. And any specific, like, failures on events? Or maybe some funny stuff that was happening at Google events?
Katie (18:06:54): Well, and I see…Is that the I/O 16 shirt you have on? It's I/O 16. You gave me that message. So one of the things with Google I/O is when we would do it in Moscone, there's like a capacity. And so we, you know, we're in a luxurious position, a privileged position of selling out every year. And so we said we want to go big, we want to go different. So we're like, we're going to do it in the parking lot of an amphitheater. And we're going to go kind of like Burning Man-esque and build all these really interesting tents and things like that. And then it was like 100 degrees. And on the first day and on the third day, it was like 60 degrees and windy. And you think about the 99 things and it's the hundredth that's going to be the gotcha moment. And so that was a doozy of how can we quickly…And this was before we had reservation systems for sessions. And so folks would line up for like the what's new in Chrome, what's new in Android, and there would be a thousand people lined up for a 10 to 500 people standing in the sunshine. So we learned a lot very quickly. And I think the lesson that you take away from that again is how do you be responsive in the moment how do you document and how do you learn so the next year everyone got a water bottle everyone got a travel size sunscreen outside of the bathrooms there were massive like pump bottles of sunscreen they put a reservation system in place they built the tents and structures completely differently I don't know if I would call that funny as much as in I didn't wake up one day and say I want to throw a tech conference in a parking lot when it's 100 degrees out so but I think the lesson that comes from all of these is you're going to think of 99 things and it's the 100th that's going to be a gotcha so being responsive being nimble and learning from it not not burying one's head in the sand but always learning from that. And I think that that's a lesson regardless of the size and scope and complexity of something is, you know, it's a…My kids go to a school that focuses on like a growth mindset, always be learning. And I think that that's really the lesson to take away from it is balancing kind of feeling bad about it and knowing that there's richness in the learning that comes from it as well. I call them glows and grows.
Yurii: That's beautiful. I think the story deserves a little bit of applause payoff. And now I also understand why the half of San Francisco is still carrying Google IO bottles with them on every occasion. Yeah. Okay. It's beautiful. Event failures. So I guess everybody failed a lot.
Katie: Oh, I guess the other one is always have your demos recorded because the Wi-Fi will fail.
Yurii: Is your demo recorded?
Katie: Outstanding.
Yurii (21:46:53): That's bold. Okay. So, I believe you learned a lot and that you always emphasize on learning. But being educated and learning a lot, it's always good to share the knowledge. So let's do a small case study, and we're really going to keep it simple. So let's think of you are running a hypothetical AI startup. You just gained some traction. Like I know 100 developers started using your product. You are one of the founders or you're first hired DevRel, and that's going to be probably the next question. You just moved to San Francisco. What would you do to build a thriving, funny, successful, and highly growing AI developer community in SF?
Katie (22:41:34): It's a great question, and I knew you were going to ask this, and so I did do some mental preparation for it. With any community, it's kind of the chicken or egg thing. Do you start the community and folks will come, kind of field of dreams, like if you build it, they will come? Or do you hedge a little bit in terms of the official declaring of community to where there's a foundation and a need to start to scale? And so I'm in a couple of, I'm in a Discord channel, a Slack channel for a couple of earlier stage companies just to kind of follow along and see what the communities are like. And the truth is they're pretty quiet. There are the company founders that are in there kind of prompting things and sending reminders and so forth. But there hasn't been that catalyst yet to get folks coming together. And so to me, hearing the example that you raised where there are some folks who are engaged with the product, who are starting to double in it, to me the point where you start to build that community is, is it no longer scalable for the folks within your organization to be the ones like in the channels answering the questions? Do the folks who are asking the question seem genuinely curious and have some stickiness and resonance with the product so they're not just kind of voyeurs but or kind of dabbling but they've actually started to build something and run into roadblocks and that's the point that I see bringing it together and that's when that community flywheel can start because I have seen if you just put community out there and you don't have that catalyst to get people engaged, it can sit quietly and then it becomes more of a one-directional channel of keeping people abreast on updates and resources, which isn't a bad thing. But with community, you want the community to be asking and answering each other's questions. You want people to become, whether it's a big or a little, ambassadors of the product. And so that's where I do hedge a little bit where it's kind of like unofficial community with a small C before it becomes an official community. And when you put it out there, it's that point where it's like, no, this needs a little bit of scale. This needs a little bit of structure. And even to the point that you were going to ask about hiring, it's the same thing with hiring, is when it becomes too much of one person's job to be able to do it. When you realize that someone who is an engineer, someone who's in product, all of a sudden is spending 50%, 70%, 90% of their time doing advocacy, and that work can no longer scale while ensuring the other pieces of the business get attended to, that to me feels like... So you almost need to get to a little bit of a breaking point, But knowing that startups are so lean in resources, even with all of the AI tools that are available now, like someone still needs to be the one to set those up and to kind of understand how they're going to function and kind of be the checks on them. And so it's getting almost to that breaking point and seeing like we're not going to succeed. We're going to end up failing other places if we don't get that next person in the door. So that would be, you can agree or disagree with the opinion, but that's kind of how I would approach both community and hiring. Because there's nothing worse than a quiet Slack channel.
Yurii (26:34:28): Yeah, it's really sad. Okay, but where is this magic line between a group of people on Slack and a community? So my theory would be that the real community is when there is a common meme, something that unites people and when you are part of it, you get it. If you're not a part of it, you won't get it. You're just there to ask a support question. So, is there any other things that you think could define this thing, magical line?
Katie (27:07:48): I think that's a great question. And in fact, I want to, I need to figure out how to share this, direct you all to, so a former colleague of mine from Slack, who's the head of community there, did the most brilliant post today looking at the success of Taylor Swift's community. I am an amateur Swifty, so I'm gonna put that out there, but he broke it down in such an eloquent way. And one of the things that he really leaned into is this shared understanding and the sense of being included. It's one of those things that when somebody puts up a post with some sort of Easter egg and a clown. Everybody knows that everybody's clowning. And so I do agree with you that it does start to feel more connected when there is some sort of language or identity that is connected with it. And I've seen that really successfully with, actually probably with Firebase and the pineapple. And I was not at Firebase, and I got to work with the team once they were acquired by Google. But didn't you celebrate a pineapple's birthday or something like that? And it just became this iconic thing. And so it doesn't even have to be contrived. It just has to be kind of a shared moment within the space. And sometimes you can't create those. Sometimes they just emerge organically. But they emerge organically because everybody feels welcome and included and has a shared passion for what they're doing. And so in many ways the company can't force the community to be, but what it can do is create the space for that community to emerge.
Yurii (29:00:17): Couldn't agree more. You could like, no matter how many pineapples you have at your office, you couldn't force people to celebrate their birthdays. That's...
Katie: Oh, Frank?
Yurii: Yeah, you want to add?
Katie: Yes, please do. Please do.
Frank (29:24:19): So I was at Firebase for decades. With Firebase, we were lucky to have a community. But luck is not something that happens to you. Luck is something you create, right? And there were some very simple rules we had from day one. We called them Firebase Voice. How do you speak to the community? And if you're a developer tool, then you want to speak to developers as developers. So it's one of the key things. It's nothing to do with the pineapple story, by the way. But you also want to be able to just be yourself, have fun. And Firebase was the third pivot of the two founders. And there's two things there that are very interesting. I think one of them is they were building that this was their second pivot was building a chat app So right you can include chat with just a tag, right? That's it And so they were all in on that one and they were trying to help the customers They were doing okayish and they were reaching out to a company and and it was a games company and they said look We're not sure what's happening But we think you're getting hacked because chat right we all know chat is append only right like you add a message to the end And you sure you can delete or edit but 90% is append only They said, your chats are edited only. There's like 10 messages, and they're constantly being edited. Not sure who works for a games company, but games companies are really good at abusing any infrastructure they find. So it turns out that this was not chats. They were actually using the chat service to synchronize the game state. So that was the pivot to what became Firebase, which was then acquired by Google. The pineapples, whole different thing. They didn't have a lot of money for the longest time and finally they got some funding they hadn't signed a little office somewhere so one morning one of the founders goes by the supermarket and buys a pineapple for lunch and So the other founders like why did you bring a pineapple and he says well don't you know? It's bring your pineapple to work day and he puts it in the calendar. So a year goes by and they have some employees and one morning three employees come in and they have a pineapple and they're like "Why did you bring a pineapple?" I was like, "Well, it said so in the calendar, "bring your pineapple to work day." They leaned into that heavily, and to the point where Dole, the largest pineapple producer in the world, actually recognizes Pineapple Day, and they celebrate it every year. And it's crazy, right? This is a tiny San Francisco startup that gets acquired by Google, so not so tiny anymore, that puts a global national holiday on, which is just so weird. Okay.
Yurii: That's, that was beautiful. Oh, we have another question, or a story. Yes, yes. Yes?
Speaker 1 (32:19:47): Well, one thing I was thinking about when we were talking is, like, online communities versus in-person communities, and I really value face-to-face interaction, and I feel like that's where organic means and things like that, like, really stem from. So even in that example, it was, like, an IRL event that just organically came and became bigger thing. Do you think that communities inherently do better when there are in-person events? Or do you have examples? I don't touch online-only communities in my experience as much. So are there examples of really thriving communities that are exclusively online?
Katie (33:06:28): That's a great question. And I think a point that… Do you need me to repeat the question? Were you able to pick it up? So the question is, simplifying it, have I seen examples of online-only thriving communities? Because there's so much that really comes from the in-person human experience. I'm going to answer it a couple different ways, which I've been given feedback multiple times that I need to answer one question with one answer. And I don't do it. The first is community is defined so broadly. And it's a point that you raised where you're like, when does it become community and not just a forum with question and answer? And there are some places that would define a vibrant Q&A interaction as community. And so some places will define it as actually community chapters with in-person events and things like that. And so making sure that whatever you do in that space, that it's clear what the program is, who the intended audience is, how you're going to measure success, how you're going to explain to your leadership what you're doing. Because there's no one size fits all. And so much of that has to do with budget, staffing, the size of the group of people that you're connecting with, the global footprint of the community. The pandemic obviously showed us the strengths and weaknesses of online only. And on one hand, I think that there was fatigue online. There was reluctance to come back in person. And it definitely took a long time to work through a lot of those things. And yet, if the rules of engagement are set, that puff defined around the voice that's used, how you participate in it and so forth, I'm part of the, so the Alliance, which is a global organization of professional groups, I'm in the Product Marketing Alliance, and I've never met any of these people. And that's not true. I've gone to a couple of summits, but the vast majority of that community work is online and it's a global community. And you do see people jumping in to support one another. And I think a lot of it is recognizing where there's a need and where there's an opportunity, and then creating the right ground rules in space for the people to engage. And then when we do get together in person, it feels amazing. But recognizing that that might only be once or twice a year, there's a really, really good place to go to in the meantime to stay connected.
Yurii (36:07:32): Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And I really wanted to add to this question. So my backstory, my previous venture-backed company was a virtual events platform. And we started during COVID and we were building beautiful 3D environments right in your browser. Then people, for some strange reason, started calling it the metaverse. You know, it kind of spoiled the idea. But I saw too many beautiful but empty online spaces created to really see that the online community is not about the environment, the technology, but about the people. And only a couple of communities were kept alive online, but those were crazy. Like people who acquired rights for the meme of Doji, you know, the Doji meme, they acquired it, and we built them a temple where I can pray for Doji, and they were having a weekly ritual there, but those people there were nuts, and that's why it works, you know? So, yeah, and now when I'm in person, I couldn't be happier of hosting in-person events, but I think we all learned a lot about community when we saw the absence of real-life events. Now we know that they are important, and probably all the events budgets should be there. Speaking of budgets and the business, and it's my question as the person who's running partnerships at a community. So we partner up with companies, with other communities when we run our events. Are there any advice on your side, something for us as a community, which is not under any specific company, and for people from startups, from businesses, who want to work with other communities. How do you make this joint effort thrive?
Katie (38:05:59): That's a great question. And in some ways, I don't want to say it's easy or easier. More often than not, I've found that there is mutual benefit to different communities coming together. Whether it be, again, a little bit more of like sales, marketing, drive, when a corporation is sponsoring something. It could be purely a brand play. But finding the hosts for space and food has often been one of the easier elements. I'm not going to say it's easy, easy. But everybody wants to build community, and everybody knows that community is stronger together. I think a great example of that is the two groups have now folded together, but there was a point where there was a developer marketing alliance and a product marketing alliance, and the DMA was quite small. And the Product Marketing Alliance had 10x the amount of reach. And so I said, hey, can you pair me with the ambassador from the Product Marketing Alliance? I bet we can find a shared topic. And in this case, it was around technical product marketing. And it was great because once we pooled our two networks together, we kind of made a list of potential companies that we could connect in with. We found a topic that was mutually beneficial. And ultimately, we were able to connect in with my first dev marketing boss from Google and do it at Google Space and use it with him to tap into his knowledge, having bridged the gap between product marketing and developer marketing. And that's just one small example, but I believe that with the networks that we have, and that's something that I do think is one of the really positive, healthy things that comes out of the online communities, is kind of creating these networks and connections without necessarily meeting people in person, and then being able to tap into them in these genuine and authentic ways. And like I said, everybody's looking to make community bigger and better and stronger and sees the value of coming together to do it. So I think in other words, I think what you're doing is absolutely perfect. And thank you so, so much to everyone who supported us in this space and the food to make it happen, because that's how community thrives. So thank you.
Yurii (40:43:21): So I believe we never finished any of our calls on time. Katie it was always a pleasure talking to you and it could last forever but I couldn't be stealing you from the audience from the one-on-one and wanted group talks so I think we should finish this beautiful part thank you for sharing all the knowledge we really appreciate it thank you. Thank you.
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