 Okay, thank you very much So actually for really wheels Okay, let's just get started It's really really warm in here This is Tracy Evans Most people call me jam. My name is actually Jeffrey McGuire We founded a company called open strategy partners a couple of years ago and We help I'm not getting my speaker notes, eh Do we need speaker notes for this all right, okay, we'll take it Okay, so communication strategy to build digital experiences that connect open strategy partners We help technology organizations We like to translate between complexity things that you build and deliver and and stories about business value For example, a lot of us have a great idea that we know Adds a lot of value to the world and our lives, but we have a hard time in explaining it that's a sort of thing that we do and We have a deep background in open source So we can come in and have higher value conversations with you about your technologies than other Agencies who can also choose nice words and make pretty pictures Tracy has a really deep background in business and is a hot shot MBA. She's the smart one. I'm the one I'm the pretty one obviously We came together I came off of Starting as the 18th employee at Acquia and after nine years there I had a lot of ideas about how to talk with developers how to build communication And so on and I did several hundred interviews and other Publications along the way so communication and actual education and structure and strategy and that turned into open strategy partners We're now there's about eight of us on most days and And we're having a good time with it so far We've got a bunch of clients and projects so We're going to talk about how not to connect We're going to talk about a thing that we call authentic communication We're going to talk about our strategic communication foundation and how you can use that as a tool set Some specific things within that and then how that turns into a better way to connect because we only have Couple more minutes. We're going to skip all the details. We're going to talk fast Anybody who has any questions. We're super happy to hang out in the hallway afterwards We are going to be at the splash awards tonight We're going to be at the karaoke party tomorrow, and we're going to be here all week anyway So just just find us okay, and we'd love to talk. It's open strategy partners calm obviously So how not to connect who in this room is a developer? Right, so a great communication strategy does not start by choosing your version of Drupal And how you're going to set up the configuration and is it going to be headless and what modters are going to use right? Feels obvious, but like that's what we actually care about right? You know now I get to use this thing or I get to build a new thing right? But the web's a communication medium, and we really have to think about some other things It also doesn't start like this Right, which is the stuff that some other of us really really love So open strategy partners is definitely not about marketing bullshit bingo so If it's not the technical stuff, and it's not this marketing stuff What is it when you're thinking about building a communication strategy? It is a it is We think that you need to communicate The right stories the right information about what you do what you build To the people who need to know it and connect with them so that you can grow so it growing Could mean a lot of different things are you an open-source project? You need more people to adopt and use your your product Are you a company building open-source solutions? Maybe you have to explain to potential clients why a free and open solution allows you to do better work for them maybe your Open-source association and so on whatever growth means for you Do you need a partner network? Do you need more revenue? Do you need employees? There are different stories that you're going to tell about what you do to get there and One of the things that I brought to the company that we've developed a lot since then is what we call the authentic communication framework and we talk about communicating with empathy clarity and trust and when you use these and do these They build on each other and it becomes a very virtuous circle so Talking with empathy It comes all comes up a lot in society now a lot in sort of new models of corporate governments governance and management and so on but essentially there are When when on a practical level when we're talking about building communication about what you do Okay, how many of you were developers in the room? How many of you have a business background Tracy put your hand up? Yeah, right so you people and you especially Tracy, right? You get really excited about market analysis and target audiences and and and segmentation Segmentation and clustering even even worse right, but that's really amazing exciting stuff now developers Developers how do you feel about this stuff? Yeah Is it a solid yeah, right? but as Open-source practitioners we most of us we really care about what we do right a lot of us come from really idealistic Backgrounds and we're not just using technology for technology's sake right we want to make the world a better place We have a vision that we want to realize so Who in the room cares about solving a problem that other people need solved? Good right and people should know about that you're solving that problem right and You should probably know who else is solving that and how you're solving it better right so Communicating with empathy. These are exactly the same things For the business Personas and for the open-source developer so right so when we on a practical level this this empathy thing Let's us choose different words and different paradigms for getting across the same story and for connecting right with whomever You need to connect with When we talk about clarity we talk about making things that are clear to read, but we also talk about using logic We also talk about saying what we can't do right now because honesty What is honesty do in in our world? Honestly also really really helps build trust So we make we're very clear about who we are and what we do what we can't do We produce it as well as we can as communications professionals um and Then we talk about trust and we feel that once you start talking about trust this thing starts to build on itself right so Try not to use insider language that other people aren't gonna understand try and be as simple as possible be technically accurate at all times right For God's sake because that's like the developers generally we feel we're allergic to marketing and it's mostly because we read We read about vaporware in inaccurate, but then you know nonsense words, right? And that turns us off immediately and if we are trying to help our clients get something into your minds We can't risk that We've developed a thing we call the trust signal audit and this is around if you have an open-source Project, this is how this is focused Having these things We feel now picture trying to choose a module for your project in the Drupal in the repository, right? You're gonna see how many times it's been installed how active the issue queue is and so on those are trust signals So for a project we want to make sure that we have a clear code of conduct We want to make sure that there's a contribution guideline. We might look at how many times it's downloaded. What's the license? Who thinks I'm like it's pointless to measure that you need a clearly declared license because if we all know that right I Consulted on a project that was five years old at the time and 300 million euro investment From the European Union that had not declared its license. So all of the corporate contributors could take their code back It wasn't really open source and it was a huge mistake, right? So trust signals We think about these a lot and this builds an ecosystem around your projects around your products and so on That lets people trust what you're talking about in the rest of your communications And of course these are all communication exercises as well At a strategic communications level Tracy will now tell you about our framework So I guess everybody here in this room can appreciate the value of starting with a framework, right? And we do the same with communication and a lot of these topics which should look familiar to you in planning your communication one of the and And this framework is an important base to start from so aligning all of your ideas and plans around Mostly these topics are going to give you a solid foundation to better connect with your audience Most of these should look familiar I think a piece that's unique to to OSP is the value map that I'm just going to tell you a little bit about Essentially the the value map is an inventory or a or a collection of all of the value statements all of the features of a product this Value map helps us be more accurate because we we do some background work We get into the details. We sort out what exactly, you know, what your product does What it is what it does and the value that it delivers and the way that we do that is by having this collection of value statements and The value statements Result this might be so any given value statement for the data geeks of that any given value statement is is actually a triplet of a Feature and what we call an activity we could also call it a method or a delivery mode or a lot of other things But you have a feature and an activity and a benefit, right? So any given feature can feed up into one to end business benefits, right delivered by an activity so once we so there's benefits in the center and activities around this pie and and That benefit and that activity are connected with any with any number of features in the middle there. So then Every one of those triplets we produce a value statement, which is a very compact Dole not well written statement about what it is what it does and what value it delivers And as soon as we have that you can see that we can turn that into a database Do map reduce functions on it to produce different things and we can start to add layers about like whom we need to talk With and if it's for a different persona then we talk about it in a different way and so on right and then a CMS has six or seven hundred of these Middle complex design system tool that we're working with called knapsack has about 150. Yeah, yeah So this is a so we take these sort of atomic level features Put them into value statements, and then we organize them across different Feature areas is what we call them. And so this This image here might represent you know eight different feature areas of a given product and I think jam are has already explained this idea of a value statement and what that is and that it we take Essentially the atomic level features is usually what the the technical side Cares about we connect it to the area or the activity that Where that brings its value and then the benefit is the positive result and that's usually where what the business people that that is Usually the layer that helps translate the value of the technical feature Into what that means for the business person right so then there's a huge there's a huge like there's a huge picture here, and we'll just paint you a sketch and then you At the geek level we care about the individual features and how things are put together and the smallest atomic units Usually but we have trouble connecting what we're doing to the story of the value that's being delivered and what the business person Might want to spend money on right so with this mapped out We can look at the features we're working on and start to understand what is what value we're delivering and at the same time We can create communication you can create communication for the business personas saying you can get this in this from our Product and be like yeah sure you can how do you do that and we could say well boom boom boom And it's all documented and it means your sales team is not spinning hot air Right it means that you have something that's backed up by what what your product is actually built as The next step that we that we take the value statements and the and the value map is that we roll these up into Future area positioning statements and then product level positioning statements So we take these clusters and we collect them all into groups and we roll that up into a signal a single a single statement about the product itself and What this helps with is you know when you're when you're talking about the high-level value of a product It's no longer based on buzzwords or or or fluff It's actually based on this concrete detailed technical analysis of your product right and so your inside out Communication and your outside in communication match and they they both make sense and then what we do is Roll these clusters up in and You know if you have several products across Your your product line for example the ddev team and the ddev local might be might be one product and ddev live is another Product but then there's platform level features that you get out of using their entire tool chain for example And you take those and roll them up into the brand level positioning statement So With a massive six minutes to go We talked about how not to start connecting we talked a little bit about our tooling and and and one specific piece of the tool A couple specific pieces of of our tooling the value mapping and the trust signal audit So now let's just talk really really briefly about how to connect because the value map gives us Statements of of of functionality statements of benefits to deliver that we can back up that are factual right? It gives us a huge repository to then once we've done all the other marketing work of figure out who we're talking to What they care about how they're going to interact with with? With us right we figured out how trustworthy the the project looks we can we can look at strategic narratives Which are like ever been stories that you want to tell over and over again about what reliability about return on investment What it really is for you and then we do the work of making plans and and creating channels creating assets and and and Getting them out into the world and But this lets us do it in a way that connects with people So using empathy clarity and trust plus doing a lot of hard homework To really really get the facts out. Let's us put this all together to help people communicate connect and grow Any questions? And we have time for questions. Yes Where does my issue tracker? Your issue tracker. Yeah, is it a is it a is it a product? Is it a well? It's a trust signal So if you're maintaining your creating or working long. Yeah Into the map. Oh, that's definitely a trust signal right because if I see how how how often you're working on What you're doing and that you're taking care of people's issues Well, but if an issue represents the feature because it starts out as a request and you write a test to it And you you specify the feature. Where does that fit into the? component map that you had like do you do you Actually use issues generated and feature requests written in an issue tracker Create your maps. No, all right We do both in preparing this stuff and in a lot of the content we do we do Interview and workshop formats. So we like will usually get a multi disciplinary team together like a business person a couple technical people a marketing person and workshop What do you think's great about your product works? Well, it's really well. What are the products on paper? And yeah on paper on we have canvas tools for online workshops Yeah, there's a lot of interviewing the people who are actually building it, right? I think to expand on that the idea is that so some of these methods are the way that we start to get a baseline and then with every With every product development with every release You need to go back and update the value map so that it stays So that it's maintained along with all of your other documentation, so it's be Treated in the same cycle as the rest of your documentation, right? So so we we tell client that this should be this is documentation and that it you know It should be in your definition of done just like updating every other to writing good release notes and so on and then it becomes a tool that When you're planning a campaign you're planning a specific number of assets You can go into the value map filter it for a specific persona a specific product area specific Problem space and collect all of those features out of there and make sure that that's built into your communication plan Just for example As specific as possible It does need to be as granular as is practical and The reason for that is You know you might end up with a value map of a few hundred features that you'll never put in front of a client You know strict straight up. Here's you know overload them with with information But for anybody that's creating marketing materials for your company, whether that's an agency or your internal team You need a single source of truth and you need And you need to have agreed upon language the inspiration for the value map was actually Starting to work with a CMS project and trying to understand the space and seeing that Drupal was talking differently than Then typo 3 was then talking and they were talking differently than Adobe was and it was really difficult to understand and so and and seeing that and even within an existing organization have had a lot of experience where the product team versus the developers versus the marketing team were all talking about the product in very different ways and That makes it really challenging to have a Coherent clear message going out to the public and so so at that point when you've done one or more multi Department workshops the stakeholders eventually you're all on the same page about at every single level What your product is what it does and what value it delivers and all of a sudden everybody's pulling Actually pulling in the same direction and aware of what's going on And it can help you make a roadmap because if you then start to make a value map of your competition Then you can see what features you have and what they have and are you a market leader defining a niche? Are you following someone else what language choices have they made? How do you build your communications? Do you prioritize one feature over another it becomes the data set becomes really really powerful and also to help you Build your positioning right because in the value map you can clearly indicate what are What are table stakes versus what actually differentiate you from your competition and where you should focus some of your messaging around Being a lot clearer. Yeah, so we're out of time Thank you so much for coming on this race with us and see you around this week