The Evolving Role of DevRel with CNCF’s Lisa-Marie Namphy at KubeCon Paris 2024

This is Textron tv. Hey everybody. Welcome back here at Coup Con Cloud Native Con in Paris, France.

Uh, day two that we're doing interviews. A lot of activities happening. It's got the same buzz as day one.

The attendance is fantastic and it's really got a buzz. And I'm, I'm joined by an ambassador for the CNCF, uh, Lisa npi. Welcome.

Good to be chatting with you. Thank you very much. I Had privilege talking with somebody who's so involved with the CNCF and yeah, Well, actually being an ambassador, I don't work as directly with all parts of CNCF.

I work with the ecosystem, mostly community, and that's what ambassadors do. We're sort of the, the bridge between the community and the CNCF. Um, and I've had the privilege of representing this community for many, many years.

Um, and wearing the ambassador title for I think three or four years now at least. I was kind of early adopter ambassador. Um, so it's really fun.

And conferences like this are, are great. We recruit new ambassadors, but mostly we just help people, whether you're an ambassador or not, figure out how you can get more involved in the community, whether it's with the projects or running user groups like I do in the San Francisco Bay Area. Um, there's lots of ways to get involved with this wonderful community.

Now do you focus on a certain subset of projects? Is that how you kind of define what your work is or You do a lot of different things. I, For me, I started out, um, focusing on, you know, infrastructure and OpenStack and then Kubernetes and even, you know, Docker.

And, um, and then I just realized in our community, in the San Francisco area, uh, we had a lot of end users who, who wanted to solve day two problems. And I really kind of geared our user group to showcasing end user stories. Um, which is one of my favorite things to do anyway, because I think it's a really interesting conversation.

Yeah. It's real, really Quick. Yeah.

And you can get people up there who are really doing it and they can help other people solve. We're all trying to solve the same problems. You know, this technology is evolving very quickly and there's always something new.

And especially in the San Francisco Bay area, we really wanna get our hands on whatever the new, new thing is. Most people just roll their own vanilla Kubernetes, as they call it. Um, and so there's a lot of challenges.

And so if you can talk to other users, uh, about what's going on, which is why I love today, today is like end user day. I don't know if you saw the keynote, but it was, um, really great to hear from all those end users in the ecosystem that's Up. I knew they had a big lineup.

Yeah, I usually miss it 'cause I'm here doing some other interesting things too. Well, let's talk about dere too. I mean, given a community kind of role, and I know you've been active in, in in that kind of a role, and I guess you're given it a title for a few years now, but it's a really different philosophy about how we interact with customers, mainly driven by how, how the customer wants to be interacted with, or the users that being developers in that community.

What, what, for people who don't know exactly what Debre is, how would you describe it? Well, it's, it's a very fluid description. It kind of depends on what you need it to be.

Um, whoever is paying you to do it wants it to be, um, and what their goals are for their company. Uh, because you have tech evangelists, dev advocates, you have so many different parts of, of Derell and most of us who are doing this have been doing this before it even had a name or a title Mm-Hmm. Somebody pointed out to me that I started the first ever Oracle user group, Oracle Tools user group when I was at Oracle many, many years ago.

Never occurred to me that I was doing Dev Rel back then. Um, I think Guy Kawasaki gave it a name at some point when he was at Apple, uh, with dev advocacy. Um, but yeah, I think now it's really understanding how you can be a bridge between your community and your company and the goals of your company, or whether it's a project, maybe you're doing Devra for a project like Kubernetes that might be a little different and you're, you're, uh, trying to attract contributors and then trying to make sure that ecosystem is happy and healthy and vibrant and can, you know, continuing on.

Um, so when I talk about Dere, I always ask people, you know, what is it that you wanna get out of it? Are, are you trying to run a community like user group around a technology or are you trying to do this within a company and you're trying to get developer adoption on your platform? Mm-Hmm.

Or are you trying to do this, uh, for your customers? Um, one of the recent arcs of Devereux that I've noticed, uh, in the last, I would say five or six years, uh, you know, startups need you initially to use your, your DeVere skills to put brands on the map, you know, to get visibility and events like this. Um, and to get those early adopter customers really happy and users of the product.

And if you have an open source version of the product, then you have another community that you may or may not know how to access and how do you get more involved in with your open source users. Um, so you know, those kind of things. And it's about, uh, supporting them and, and having, having happy end users.

But then it kind of arcs, it evolves a little bit as the company grows. You have put the brand, if you're good at your job within two years, maybe you have put your brand on the map and you don't really need that as much, but you need to, um, ensure customer success. So you've had your, your early adopter customers, but then there's the programs shift and you need to go into those companies and focus on expansion deals.

Um, you know, how are you gonna, you know, make sure that, that those early, uh, those early deals become a bigger thing. And people don't always understand how Dev Rel can play a part in that. You know, you can go in, um, at my last company I was at Cockroach Labs and we did something we called Infestation days because an infestation of cockroaches.

Um, but we went into our customer sites and we helped the customers be successful. It was developers that didn't already use us. So maybe you have one team that you have advocacy in, but you wanna get into other business units.

And so you can create a day of workshops or something where you go in, there's lots of ways that we can go in and work with developers in a company that is already a customer. And I found that that's been an effective method for some of these companies to be able to grow and to evolve their derail programs rather than having everybody in Dere say, okay, budgets are getting tight and they don't need us anymore, and we're just gonna go off and build something else somewhere else. You can do that or you can understand, you know, we can show ROI from our programs now differently than we'd be able to, than we used to be able to.

And we can show companies that we can really affect sales, we can affect the bottom line and we can definitely help with expansion deals. Yeah, it's a really good point. I like the way you described one aspect of it as kind of think about it as evangelism, right?

Getting the branding and awareness out there, but it's really also about adoption, right? Because so many things can stand in the way of, I know we bought this tool or we're considering it, but you know, I've got so much on my plate, I don't have time to learn a new thing. Or I make up what I think might be the challenges that I had have to go through to start using this.

And having someone who can kind of close that loop for me really quick and say, here, you do these three things, you'll be up and running. I can show you the, the quick path here or help you solve a problem. Like this came up at our user group last week and somebody had the exact same thing you're asking about, and here's what was suggested.

And some ideas, you're sort of that knowledge resource and connective tissue for all those different communities. Yeah. Yeah.

And you might have teams of people who are writing sample apps and building, you know, tutorials and, and helping people get started and solve those problems. Or, I always say that Doc Docs is one of the most important parts of, of any of these projects. And you have to, especially open source projects, um, you know, if anyone wants to know how you can really make meaningful contributions, please consider Team.

Every project Always needs that help. Yeah. And uh, you know, I've worked at companies that have had great docs.

I always say docs are your original Dere folks, right. Um, especially when you're first starting out. So, uh, docs is really, really important to customer success and to end user success.

Um, but yeah, you are a bridge between all of those things. You know, you're, you're listening to the community and you're hopefully bringing that feedback back to the company. Um, and also just yeah, you're, you're bringing the fun of the, of the technology to the community as well.

Hopefully you're, you're evangelizing something you're super passionate about and then that's just a natural, you know, like, Hey, let's build this and have fun. Makes All the difference. Yeah.

When you believe in it, it's a lot easier to help other people. Yeah. Well, let's, let's turn to kind of what's happening at the event here.

I think we're, I dunno about you. A lot of people are impressed by the attendance, the buzz, the energy, the activity, um, you know, who's coming, how many not just, it's not just a vendor show where it's like most of the vendors sitting around talking to each other. There's a lot of, uh, you know, practitioners and end users and Yeah.

People on projects. Why do you think we've kind of gone to this next level of what's happening at KubeCon in terms of activity and attendance? I think there's, there's been a lot of, um, tags and, and SIGs that are focusing on things that aren't just technology.

So today, the, the keynotes were all about, uh, sustainability and climate and, um, some of the end user awards went to Shopify and CN and people that are really paying attention to this. There was a great, uh, talk by a guy from Deutsche Bond really, you know, talking about sustainability and how important this is. Um, I actually heard, I'd never heard this before, but I heard somebody who, who couldn't make it here because they had already used up their carbon tokens for their company for the year.

I've not heard that either. I mean, I was really amazed that companies are starting to pay attention to these things. And so I think having the conversation at a show like this switch to those kind of things and having a, there's a environmental sustainability tag that, uh, Leo runs.

He's also CNCF Ambassador. Um, a lot of the community is starting to focus on these things and from a technical standpoint, not just evangelists and activists for Yeah. Change.

Yeah. Not just a good thing to do. Exactly.

Here's What we can do to make a difference. It's not like, okay, we're all gonna march, you know, with science. It's like, no, we're gonna figure out the technology that's gonna make a difference here, um, and really solve problems because we are a technical community.

So I think there's a lot of really cool things like that. There's a lot of talk about ai. Of course, my talk later today is about ai Of course.

Absolutely. And data and how that's gonna impact. Um, and so I think, you know, just always keeping the conversation really current and what do people wanna talk about?

Um, and it showcase as many user stories as you can because, you know, that's, that's the cool part. Um, and then there's just so many projects that, that people are involved. I mean, so many.

Um, and so there's always something new happening that someone's building. And we talk about that stuff here too. So, yeah, I think I love how it's grown.

Um, I love how global it is, you know, and the European ones are always really amazing to me because I feel like in Europe, they, they get cloud, you know, a little bit differently and a little bit better maybe, or faster, or just the way that we can talk about cloud as as a solution here in Europe, I, I think makes it really exciting. So we end up having, um, a lot of people coming here to actually talk about, you know, to talk to vendors about, you know, how do you solve these problems? Then how should I, Very nice.

You know, I, it kind of feels like there's something here for everybody, right? If you're just getting started, if you're heavily engaged in projects and doing great things, or, you know, trying to reach out to customers and partners and other practitioners. So yeah, there's a time and a moment where things kind of converge and it seems like that Nexus has happened at this, uh, this particular coup con.

So yeah, You can Feel it. Well least this has been a lot of fun and, uh, good luck with your talk. Thank you so much.

I appreciate that. Two of my favorite topics, AI and data, you know. Yeah.

It's, it's interesting. I'm, I'm gonna have to check it out. See what you have to say.

Perfect. Well, thank you for joining us. And, um, if anybody's interested in, in doing more with CNCF, maybe they'd like to eventually become an ambassador or play some, some bigger role.

Um, how do they do that? How do you kind of step up and say, Hey, I might wanna help a little more or get involved? Yeah, So going to user groups, being part of meetups in your area, running user groups is a great way.

That's the original ambassadors that was at a, a requirement is, is building communities. Um, now there's other requirements. Uh, your, your dev SAT scores, how much you're contributing to projects if you're a maintainer on a project.

So there's lots of things you could do. There's a website if you just kind of Google CNCF ambassadors, they have the whole description of the program on the site and what the requirements are, um, to apply. Uh, but really the thing is the people who are ambassadors, we get the tiara after we've been doing it for a while.

So just do the things in the community, get involved in the community, write those docs. And then after you've been doing that, um, definitely apply because it's a great, uh, it's a great community with itself. The ambassadors really support each other, uh, and it's a really good program.

Um, but get involved first and then the ambassador program will be available, I guess SAGE advice. Sounds good. Well, Elisa npi, who is A-C-N-C-F ambassador and has a talk coming up today, please check that out if you're here with us.

If not, stay tuned. We have more great interviews with amazing people like Lisa, and, uh, it's just a privilege to be able to talk to such influential people that are making a difference in our community. So thank you, Lisa, and Thank you so much.

Stay tuned. We'll be back with another great interview. Don't go anywhere.