 And off we go. Thanks for joining us, everyone. We'll go ahead and get started now. Welcome to today's CNCF live webinar is the open product led growth motion. I'm Libby Schultz and I'll be moderating today's webinar. I'm going to read our code of conduct and then hand over to Kim and leader of out shift community and open source out shift by Cisco. A few housekeeping items before we get started during the webinar. You're not able to speak, but you are able to post your questions in the chat on the right hand sidebar. Feel free to drop all your questions there and we'll get to as many as we can at the end. This is an official webinar of the CNCF and as such is subject to the CNCF code of conduct. Please do not add anything to the chat or questions that would be in violation of that code of conduct. And please be respectful of all of your fellow participants and presenter. Please also note that the recording and slides will be posted later today to the online programs page at community.cncf.io under online programs. They're also available via your registration link you used to join today. And the recording will also be on our online programs YouTube playlist. With that, I will hand things over to Kim to kick off today's presentation. Thank you. Thanks so much Libby and hello to everybody who's there working on kind of a dual laptop. So when I'm looking away, it's because I am looking at my speaker notes. This is what happens when you do your presentation last minute, you're gonna basically be following, I'm following along with my notes. Anyway, I am Kim McMahon, long-time open source, cloud native, community building person, used to work for the CNCF. So if I look or sound familiar, you might have worked with me when I was there working while, when Dan and Chris, well Chris is still there while Dan was there. Anyway, I am excited to present to you today and I'm using our brand new OutShift by Cisco logo here. Cisco Emerging Technologies and Incubation has morphed into OutShift, serving as Cisco's incubation engine from emerging technologies to emerging customers. Our new identity is built on the foundation of Cisco's decades long track record of innovating technology solutions for the world's biggest and best organizations. We've closed the loop time again, from innovation to action as it consistently builds and launches successful new products used by billions of people worldwide. So there's a little bit about OutShift by Cisco, if you've seen us at KubeCon, this is that same team. Today, we're all gonna go on a journey together to discover is open source, the original product led growth motion. I'll be presenting some information on product led growth and what it is, open source project growth and how it's similar and different and how other companies have done it. This will not, I don't expect this to take the full hour and I hope you stick around at the end of the presentation where we'll get to your questions, but I also do hope that it's an information share, a little bit of debating, continuing kind of hearing each other's opinions on this topic. With that, we're gonna get into, there we go. How did we get here? I don't know where you are in your journey or how you got there, but here is my aha moment. It happened in late 2022. I'm having a lot of conversations and I hear product led growth and PLG in the same breath as technology adoption. And in conversations, things such as we are growing our business using product led growth or we need someone to support our PLG motion or navigating the developer centric landscape is our focus and supporting the developer and operator audience and their use of our software will drive technology adoption. And the use of open source is the first step in the use of our technology. This will drive adoption of our free tier. And I am being a little tongue in cheek with these comments, but this is the kind of conversations I was having with typically companies, obviously, not obviously, but companies for profit companies. So I'm kind of curious about this PLG thing and what it is and what it really means. So I started reading some articles and the more I learned about PLG, the more I realized that this is basically the open source software model that I've been working in for nearly a decade now. I'm gonna give you another reference point. Stephen O'Grady's book, The New Kingmakers, How Developers Conquered the World. And this is a quote, explores the rise of the developer class, its implications and provides suggestions for navigating the new developer centric landscape. So if you are a developer or working with developers and you haven't read this book, I highly recommend that you jump on out to Amazon or book by place of choice and download it. It's a really quick and it's a great read about that power shift in organizations and in technology adoption, that power shift to developers, to the people who are using the technology. So to summarize further, developers are the most important asset organizations have with the availability of open source and free versions of software, they meaning the developers go out and find the tool or tools that they need. They don't wanna ask, they just download it and start using them or they take the technology they find, they build upon it, contribute their enhancements or not back into the open source project, but they use the technology to make their day-to-day tasks better. Organizations need to give these highly trained developers, DevOps teams and operators, collectively we sometimes call them practitioners. The freedom to get what they need to do their job and if they don't, these talented individuals will go to an organization that will let them do their job and your organization will be stuck with the super hard problem of replacing that talent. So coming back to me and others similar to me and in my role, we need to do our job, get the software in the hands of the users. We need to work with them to help them get past any bumps they may have in the road, talk to them, get the feedback and then share that feedback back with product management and engineering. So one little little reference here to this slide. I thought this was fun building this for you 80s people. If this slide is put a song in your head, you're welcome. If not, just think about it and maybe it did and you're welcome again. Anyway, moving on, the slide's gonna build here. To be clear, I do not believe nor will I ever support the thought that open source software is around to support a PLG model. Open source software has a set of benefits that we all know and live by, things like transparency and collaboration, inclusivity, community and the benefits of working with open source technologies. For any of us working in them, we know this is speed and innovation, driving adoption, shared resources, improved reliability just to name a few. That being said, I do believe that the goals for an open source project is, one, let's get some users and two, let's get some contributors. And this is super simplified. There's a lot of goals in open source projects, but for the sake of this talk and where I am starting on this educational journey with this series of talks, I'm gonna focus on the user audience and the contributor audience. If you wanna dig deeper into personas, goals and open source project success, we got a little pitch here, come to Suzanne Ambles and my hopefully accepted CFP for KubeCon North America, where we're gonna be digging into this. And if it doesn't get accepted, this is something Suzanne and I are super passionate about. We love talking to people about this. So make sure you grab her or I at future events if you wanna dig, get into more details on this. Back to the presentation in a nutshell, bringing in users at the open source software level is a great first step in giving users that hand-on experience with the technology. The benefit to the project is driving it through the project levels and maturity levels. And some of you may recognize this long-term graph from CNCF. See, I think I have a mouse click. I do, let's see, should be building. On the product side, we have the product-led growth flywheel. And this is a version from PL Collective. You'll find a couple of them out there, they all basically look the same. The PLG Collective flywheel is a framework for growing your business by investing in a product-led user experience. In this framework, the experience is designed to generate higher user satisfaction and increased advocacy, which in turn drives compounding growth of new user acquisition. It depicts five user segments that correlate with stages in the user journey from awareness to evangelism, and in this case, they use stranger, explorer, beginner, regular, and champion, and the key actions that users need to take to graduate to the next phase, evaluate, activate, adopt, expand, and advocate. The goal is to focus company and team-level strategies on optimizing the user experience to move users from one stage to the next. As the rate that users complete each action increases, the flywheel spins faster, increasing that rate that users move from one segment to the next. This creates a positive feedback loop. As more users become advocates, they drive more acquisition, and so on and so on. Now, PLG, it's not a well-known path for technology adoption, especially in organizations that are focused on the top-down selling. The one where they have, where all the leads from an event come into a sales reps list, and they basically start calling and saying, hey, do you want to buy some stuff? PLG is different. It's like open source. Let's get people using the technology first. So in our organization, I created this version of the open source community and PLG flywheel to align our team and how closely our activities for user adoption are, while the how we do it and the content we provide is where those slight differences will come in. Our team was pretty diverse. We had many people that were really good at top-down. We had many people that were really good at bottoms up, and sometimes they just didn't, it was a little bit of a learning for all of us to see how we would interact. So I created this graphic here. For the technology user, if we follow the circles and the arrows, we seek to activate through easy access to our technologies for testing and use in their environment. As they use the technology, they adopt it, make the commitment to use the technology in a production environment. This may be open source, this may be free tier, this may be enterprise. And as they become a fan of technology, they become a fan and an advocate, CNCF ambassadors, for example, any of the ambassador programs. Great example of the advocates. But then this is all done through typical marketing motions where the top-down and the bottoms up, crossover, events, KubeCon, workshops, webinars such as this, Kubernetes community days, DevOps days, digital platforms such as Twitter and GitHub, for example, high-value content that gives the user or the reader what they need, when they need it, and is easy to find. So it's like a getting started guide or debugging when attaching to a Kubernetes cluster. And that's the kind of content that I focus on when I'm, quote, unquote, marketing is those how-to, how can you get started? How do we make this whole process easier for you? And then as they come into open source adoption, they become a user of technology, hooray. Not exactly sure, I think this might be my quote or somebody at the news stack wrote it and put it in my article at the news stack. So I didn't attribute it to anybody here, but when we let go of control and put the technology decision in the hands of the users, people will choose to use something because it's good, because it solves a problem, because it makes their life easier, because it makes them happy. So what this means is to make the technology accessible for someone to easily download it and start using it if it works and solves a problem. Voila, that is the whole goal of open source. That's the whole goal of product-led growth motion. I had promised some examples from product-led growth companies. One of them here, the first example I have is from Atlassian. Information gathered from a blog by Matt Rael, and I apologize, I don't know if that's how you say his name. You can see the source there at the bottom and when I post the slides, you'll see the link there in the slides as well. Matt has led product teams at Atlassian and Atlassian is the company behind JIRA Confluence and Trello. Some notables from the blog, Atlassian was a PLG company from the start. Their typical evaluator was a developer or a manager of a dev team who had heard about JIRA Confluence, Trello, et cetera, and came to the website to get started with one of their products. Their product could be adopted right there on the website, all self-service. Their target persona were individuals who actually prefer trying and buying on their own products. That's this kid as well. They would set a price that's affordable and relatively full-featured and easy for the customer to set up themselves. It's important to note one focus is on the user, kind of that little hockey stick there on the left. The other focus is on the organization and as Matt highlighted in this blog, there's work to be done internally in your target organizations. When you're using a product-led growth model or an open-source project growth model, your product needs an internal champion within that customer account, within that user account. Someone who has the idea of trying out the product and evaluating it. Now, once they have fallen in love with it, they invite their colleagues who use the product to give their approval back to the champion. The champion used their internal support to drive the process of purchasing and rolling the product out across the organization. So a direct quote from Matt, and I'm gonna read that this here. Perhaps it's obvious, but it's also worth pointing out why you might want product-led growth for your business. Having a product-led sales process means you can spend less on salespeople and your business will start to grow organically over time with a sustainable or even decreasing customer acquisition cost. Product-led growth enables the so-called hockey stick graph, that internet start-ups love. So just kind of think about that, that they were using it to get product and software revenue. I don't know, I've been kind of doing that to get interested in an open-source project and trying out an open-source project. So my second example here is Sneak. This image, I don't know if I attributed that, but this image is directly from Sneak's website. And the source here is from a podcast that a gentleman, Lenny, who had Ben Williams, a VP of product at Sneak on his podcast. In November of 2022, when this podcast was recorded, Sneak was valued at 8.5 billion with over 2,000 paying customers, about 1.3 thousand, 1,300 customers, excuse me, 1,300 employees, goodness, of which around 500 in R&D and nearly about 70 in the product org. And I don't know if all you all remember Sneak. I remember Sneak when they were early on in CNCF and this is just an amazing growth stat of Sneak from where they were to where they are now. So Ben is their product and growth advisor there at Sneak. He's led product-led growth, product-led sales. And I don't know Ben, I don't know his history, but reading his background, he has a lot of experience in this area. But the podcast, and it is down there at the bottom, it'll also again be in the meeting notes of the slide. Podcast is long, it's about 90 minutes, but it also goes into a lot of information including how Sneak structured their growth to set them up for success, how their initial plan for self-service monetization fell flat, and how they grew the team, including sales, marketing, and engineering. It's really good listen, recommend you listening or reading the transcript if you're interested in how a startup used the product-led growth method to grow their business. So in the podcast, Ben discusses what we're calling here the winning strategy. And first is the developer first approach. The Sneak founders saw a real opportunity to do things differently, and they believed that the most effective way to improve application security posture was a developer first approach. They knew that the developers are increasingly caring about the security of their code, in the same way that they cared about performance and functional quality of their code. But they also knew that to empower developers to own that security, they needed just much better tools and way less friction that they had before. And their approach was a focus on community. So the community focus, number two there, was really, really important element in their evolution. They started with a narrow focus in terms of personas built around community engagement. It was a single persona, a single context, such as a single business problem they were trying to solve, single use case, and what it meant to the Sneak user developers. So they were laser focused on solving a problem for a very defined individual. This turned, by doing it that way, they turned this into a community led model and community led growth. They presented at developer conferences, meetups, and created a lot of online content. Data was really important to Sneak. And we all know data is important to measure our efforts, but they took it to the next level and had a team, probably have, I would suspect still a team of data analysts, combing through data to answer the questions they need and communicate a shared understanding of how you grow. It's too much to get into examples here. It's something that I do talk about frequently on what kind of data do you need together to figure out if you are moving that needle with your community or with your open source project, for example. So watch for upcoming talks and logs on that. But investing, so Sneak augmented the quantitative with the qualitative side of things, brought all that together to drive a quarter to quarter focus and ensure that they were intentional about where they were investing from budgets to headcount. So focus, you're never going to have a short of ideas in high performing growth teams. And if any of you are working in them, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So what is really important is knowing where to focus, how to take those ideas and focus them to see what's really important and will drive the strategy. So at the time, I thought this was really interesting, their monetization part. Valuable product, strong developer user growth, strong retention, but the first self-service monetization efforts only really saw traction with individual developers paying about $100 a month. What they learned is that they needed to build relationships with the security leaders and educated at the high level the needs for security. And that's where sales and marketing came in, is kind of doing that top-down education that we were talking about, that we have in our organization, but also that bottoms up, let's get their hands on the technology and see if it's working to solve the problem. And I just want to say, I really like how Ben pivoted from talking about product-led growth to community-led growth, because I think that's really closer to the activities I know that I'm doing in the open source community and probably that a lot of you are also doing in the open source community. So I'd love to hear your thoughts at the end here. You might see a change in how I'm approaching this topic and may go from is open source, I don't know, a community-led growth. I guess we already know that answer, but I'm noodling what that might be. So what's next? And for those who know me, there is not a presentation that does not have a puppy in it. So again, you're welcome. Hopefully you like her as much as I do. But first, let's talk about open source project growth. It's okay to not, it is okay to not to pretend that you are not selling something to someone. And there are a lot of double negatives in that sentence. And I did that on purpose, kind of makes you really like think and pay attention to it. The point is we are all selling and marketing. If we don't get users of our open source projects, why are we doing the project? Granted, sometimes we create an interesting technology that is just for us because it was fun. But in reality, I think that we, even when we do find something really cool, we want others to think it's as cool as we think it is. We want other people to try it. This is where marketing and promotion comes in. And if it's done well, or even okay, you're putting up great how-tos, learning guides, hands-on opportunities, and you are out there supporting the user, helping them with the technology, which comes back to the quote I showed you earlier. People will choose to use something because it's good. Second, so get ready, get sharp in your pencils. What do you think? Is this all just kind of craziness? Or do you see how it applies to open source? Or you can't see it, but do you really want more granular information and specific examples and tools? And I'm asking that question specifically because so many of these presentations that I've gone to, that we've all gone to, are what I'm calling level 100. Same stuff over and over again. I have this theory that we all want, I wanna go to one where you're gonna talk about metrics and you're gonna hand me a set of spreadsheets and I can choose what kind of metrics I wanna go play with in my environment to figure out what's gonna make a difference. Anyway, so that's all I have with my presentation. We have a nice little thank you there. We're gonna move the other laptop and I'm gonna come out of presentation mode and I'm here to answer questions soon as I find my window. So I'm gonna stop sharing as well, bro. Hi. It's Kim. Okay, everybody, pop your questions into the chat for Kim. Let's see what we come up with. Oh goodness, how far back do we need to go, Libby? Okay, we have not had any questions just yet. Okay, oh, is he all technical? Conversation around some audio issues, so all good. So anyone, we can start now. So if you have questions for Kim, go ahead and pop them into the chat. Yeah, Chris, I don't know if it's a real dog. I think it should be, but I'm with you on that. Let's see. I'm trying to see who we have on here that I know and I've worked with. I see a couple of names. I can call out on some people. I see a couple of names of people that I've been working really closely with. One, on what does our open source project want to be when it grows up? Because I can't really define the product-led growth model. Or the community-led growth model, unless I know what we want to do with that open source project. So this may also be something that myself and one of my colleagues may talk about with you going forward is let's know what your open source project is gonna be. The only thing it's ever gonna be is feed into your product. Your open source work is gonna feed into a product. Fine, let's know it and own it. Is it, I'm only doing this because I wanna get it to a certain level to donate it to the CNCF. Well, own that, but also know why you want to do that. Why would you want to give a project to the CNCF? What is your goal for the technology and ultimately coming back into your organization? And then user experience. I see one of our user experience people here on the call who's just amazing at this. Really, she is looking at where are people dropping off? And that is so important when you look at an open source product or an open source growth. That's not me, I don't think. It's so important to know where people are dropping off, where are they struggling? So we have somebody here who's on the call and if either one of the two people I just called out wanna talk, feel free to jump in. But looking at where people are having trouble, where are they doing it really well and how can we improve that experience for them? Oh, that's okay Libby. Your dog's gonna bark all the time. Any of the people on the call, have you, do you feel you're doing like a product-led growth or you're using an open source technology adoption model leading into your products? I don't know if they can raise their hands or if we can unmute them Libby. Get no answer. Well, you can all put it in the chat if you want. Yeah, I'd love to hear if any of you are doing that because that, and how is that going? And the struggle I believe that we also have is that when people hear product-led growth and marketing or open source and marketing, a lot of people typically will just shut off because they are like, I don't want to be sold to. And that, a whole nother stream of consciousness, a whole nother idea here, that's where it's important who you hire. Who do you hire into this position to help drive interest and usage of your open source project? That hopefully we will, they love the open source project, but maybe they want a little more support and they bribe the enterprise version. So it's important the type of person that you bring in to make sure that they are there to educate and not sell. And that is everything that I do in that one flywheel with events is all about providing high value content, make it easy for people to find it so they can answer that question themselves. They can answer the question of when they want to not work in open source anymore, but when they want to go ahead and maybe pay for some sort of enterprise version. People don't want to be sold to, the key for that is creating things that are actually helpful. Exactly, Chris. Oh, Becky, we can't talk. Thank you, Becky. Becky is who I was referring to as our user experience person. And Chris, that is why I brought you into Cisco. So thank you, because you know what we're doing here. I don't have anything else, I can keep talking. Invite me, I need a topic. People, I need a topic, I can't keep talking unless I have a topic. Is there anything you want to guide anyone to Kim after this? Or anything they want to, maybe any call to actions they want to maybe opt into or anything like that? Well, follow me on Twitter. So this is my first, this first time I've done this presentation. And as I mentioned, I'm really playing around with, to me this is a very level one on one. It's hard to ask a question because you're like, oh my God, it's just like so basic, but yeah, I think I knew this anyway. I just never thought about it that way. What I'd like to know and DM me or tweet at me or whatever we do on Blue Sky at me and say, you know, I really, you know, you talk a lot about strategy, or you talk about a lot about target persona, or you talk a lot about metrics. Can somebody please go into the next level of detail? And that's something that, for example, Suzanne Ambel and I have been talking a lot about that. It's really time to go that next level and say, what does somebody want to know about blah metrics, choosing your target persona, putting together your plan for gaining adoption on open source. So I'd like to know where you all feel that that kind of knowledge is, you have a gap in that knowledge and that's what I will be writing about and preparing talks about. Thanks. All right. Does anyone else have anything for Kim? I think everybody knows where to find you. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you all. I appreciate everybody who joined and thank you, Becky for the compliment. Thank you all for joining. I'm really glad you were able to join and I will be at KCD in Munich. After that, I don't know what events next, probably open source summit and then of course, CubeCon North America. Excellent. Oh, Chris has one more before we go. Yep. Nope, nope. I will answer this, Chris. Okay. So there's a lot of projects that are more or less driven by the company behind them so the company can control the roadmap. What would you say to a company to encourage non-company contributions? I love this question, Chris. Thank you for teeing it up even though I didn't ask you to do that. This is what Jody and I talk an awful lot about. So first, it comes down to what you want to do with that open source project. Is it really, for whatever reason, you came new open source, you're going to continue along with the open source but it's just only going to feed into a product. You're not really looking for any contributors, for example. And in that case, they are controlling the roadmap because it really is just feeding into the roadmap. But if you have an open source project that you truly want it to be open, you're going to be transparent about it and you're going to be collaborative and all of our different open source tenants, if you truly do have a project like that, then number one, I would look at other organizations that you think might be interested in that technology or have this product technology as a gap in what their offerings are and find out if they'd be interested in it and would like to start contributing. That's your first step in truly, I guess, diversifying your open source project is getting more than one company. But you may have to reach out to people because people aren't out there searching around for the latest security tool just so they can contribute to it. You're going to have to do a little work on your side to find other organizations that may find value in that technology. And ask them if they do find value in that technology. Would they like to partner? Would they like to contribute? Can we do joint events? Can we do joint talks at KubeCon, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not bad to control the roadmap if you're honest about it and that's what you're doing and you know that's what you're doing with it. But if you don't want to control the roadmap, you're going to have to reach out and find those organizations or those individuals that are interested in that technology and encourage them to participate and it's that same flywheel. You're going to encourage them to participate to where at some point they become advocates and then people just join. Did that answer your question, Chris? Yep, excellent. There you go. Anything else? Okay. Anything else? Anyone else? I think we may be good, Kim. Okay, excellent. Well, again, thank you all. Thank you so much. We'll see you at our next links foundation event. Everybody have a great afternoon. We'll be back for the recording later on today through the same registration link and online. Thank you everyone for joining us. Thank you so much, Kim. And we look forward to talking to y'all again soon. Yep, thanks. Bye. Bye, everyone.