 Hello everybody, thank you for coming. I'm Kim McMahon and I work for Outchiff by Cisco. We are the innovation and incubation unit of Cisco. So we work on cloud native technologies and we are adding in some AI as well. And in that role I am, we do call it open source marketing, but it, you know, marketing or communications or awareness and with community on the open source projects that relate to cloud native. So thank you. I'm really excited to be here. So we're going to go on a little bit of a journey and we're going to talk about software, both the use of open source software and closed source software and how that feeds into product led growth, how it feeds into the product led growth model. And then we're also going to talk a little bit about community and a community of users and contributors and advocates. And we are also going to, on this journey, talk about how we can take a community along this journey of using software, but do it mindfully while we stay true to some of the key tenets of open source while also providing value back to the organization. So this is a new slide for this conference season. We're going to talk about the elephant in the room. And you all can let me know if I'm angered at any of our open source purists here, but I want to talk about this elephant that is really taking up residence in every one of our community builder room. And when we think about it, we, many of us, probably almost all of us in this room work for a company that is in the business to generate revenue. And they do give back. And in our situation, the company I work for, they give back a lot through a lot of corporate initiatives as well as through open source with our whole Ospo team or somebody like me who does our open source marketing communications and community. And but they still need to make money because if they don't make any money, if they don't sell a product eventually, then they don't have that money to contribute back into an open source project or develop new technologies or fund our lovely engineers here in the fourth row and or for me to be providing awareness of the technology and helping people use it. And so if we don't generate revenue, if companies don't generate revenue from their open source efforts, you know, those marketing jobs could potentially go away. Now, you might be saying yay, you know, there's one less marketer. That's what we really need. But you do want people like me or and like us that are in the community that really understand and have worked with developers and a practitioner community for a long time, because we respect your work and your processes and your privacy. And we work really hard to try to understand what information you need to be using a technology, how to get started, how to contribute back in the community or join the community and what you need to evaluate if a technology is good in your environment. And we are never going to sell you something like in me and my role, I'm never going to hand over a lead that I've gathered at an event like this to a sales person that's going to call you. And there are a number of us in the community that stick very close to those values. And that's when you when you think about that, my whole role is to get the technology in your hands. That's what product led growth is in a nutshell, where we're letting go of that technology experience, putting that decision for how you're going to use it or what you're going to use in your hands. And it's that end to end user experience. So I want to go a little bit more into how open source is made is potentially the original product led growth model. Now I'm never I will never I see the connection, but I open source was not created to fuel a product led growth model. I think a product led growth model, frankly, grew out of seeing how open source works. And that is that open source using open source software has a set of benefits, you know, our transparency and freedom of design and collaboration and bringing like minds together and everything, you know, all those kinds of things. And that the open source project, the goal of it is to get users and contributors. And it is that simplified. I mean, the open source projects and open source communities are doing a lot more than that before. But we're going to kind of really simplify it and focus on the users and the contributors. And and through that use of the project and contributing back, you know, the project grows and matures and maybe runs through a maturation cycle with open source foundations. So when you think I want to do one more, when you think about an open source project, whether it's Linux or Kubernetes, or in the case of outchiff by Cisco, it's open clarity. And these projects, they can live as part of a foundation, Linux and Kubernetes, or they can be part of just like out there, there is somebody's pet project, or they are part of an organization, they have developed this open source technology. And for the simplicity sake, you know, you have the project and then you have the users and the contributors who are often the majority are part of an organization who is contributing and contributing back and using back into the project. So when you have kind of this virtual virtual cycle of users from an open source project going into a corporation coming back and contributing back into the project. So then what happens is the organization then wraps maybe some products, wrap some services around it, or takes that open source technology and flows it into a product. So open source, free as in beer? Well, not really, because at some point, you know, through this contributing and giving back, organizations are going to take this technology and wrap it around into a product that they will eventually try to sell that to you. And that's the product-led growth flywheel where you're taking people along that journey of awareness to using, to adopting. And we do that through community and marketing efforts, such as events, hands-on labs and workshops, or going to conferences. Or we do that through digital, such as, you know, talking out on a Twitter space or, you know, through our digital, like our, like Slack or through our forums. And all of that is to help you, you know, give users the information to adopt the technology and hopefully they like it and they use it and they become fans. So that's kind of how open source and product-led growth kind of fit together. So we're going to continue along this journey, but we're going to do it with integrity and respect. And we're going to do it with openness and transparency. And we're going to do it collaboratively. And we're going to, and innovatively, where we're all included. And we're going to be fair and down the earth. And I'm sure many of you have heard these, but these are many of the key tenets of open source. And these are the key tenets that I use, that I recommend that we all use as we are building out our communities. And as a good community manager or a dev role person, we're here to help you with the technology. Are you good using the open source version? Is that work great in your environment? Super. Do you, you kind of need a little more service or support? Well, we're here then to help you cross over on that journey into, into product, product use. And that's what community and dev role people do. So the first thing that we're going to do as, um, the first thing that we do as community managers is we need to define our why. Like why do you want to build your community? And there's a number of answers. It could be that you would need a platform for customer support. You're trying to go for awareness or brand recognition, bring like people together. And, and, but, and there's nothing wrong with those answers, but I get down into like the real, like something that has a real effect on our organization, such as we're going to build community for recruiting because we, we're looking for engineers with a certain skill set, or we're going to do our actions are going to be there to gather user feedback, or it's going to be dry, you know, helping people use the open source project, or if let's get rid of that, um, sorry about that. Hey, how about that calendar? Um, uh, uh, or driving people into product use, uh, product via the free trial or, or through the open source use. And the, and the one thing to know is that we also need to know what our organization is expecting out of these community building efforts, like what, what are their goals? And the only caveat I have to that is that on occasion, you could have leadership come back and, and give you a goal for building your community that really just doesn't make sense and doesn't fit back into your key tenants. And that's where it's your job as a community manager to do that gentle pushback, do a little bit of education, tell them about why that is not good for community, community growth. Because at the end of the day, we need to be in line with what our organization needs as in defining our why, but it can't really, it should not conflict with the greater tenants of good community building. So I have a couple examples that I'm going to show you. And these are based on real companies, although I'm not using any of the company's names. Um, these are people that I've talked with to gather their use cases. And the first one I'm going to, and that we're going to kind of go in order from, you know, young community to a more mature community. And the first one is, um, an open source community that was acquired through a technology acquisition. And with most technology acquisitions, a lot of assets, such as the community building efforts or even technology assets software, they kind of get forgotten and go down into maintenance mode, perhaps. And with this organization, that's what happened. There was a great thriving community when it was purchased, but it kind of just fell away for a couple years as the, as everything was getting integrated into the organization. So, so leadership comes and says, let's build an open source community. And, but they really don't. Leadership didn't really know why they wanted to do that. And they couldn't articulate why they wanted to do that. So the community people got together and said, well, what's a gap that we have in our organization right now that could be a value for building a community? And the gap they identified were two of them. One of them was getting user feedback for the product. There was no product use feedback loop going back in the product management. And the other one that was building out content to make that journey more easy for anybody to be using the technology. Now their measures were simple. Number of interviews, putting a playbook for putting the documentation together and producing the documentation. And hopefully through those efforts, they would grow their open source projects. So it was super simple. Just let's talk to some people. Let's get some content. And that's what we're going to measure. Oh, and through that, I'm going to see, go back, go back through that. They got a couple great quotes from users when they talked to them that I put at the bottom of the slide. And these things are gold to share with your leadership because I can sit there and tell the leadership all day long that quit saying secret sauce because it makes you sound ridiculous. But when a user of your project tells you that, it just resonates so much more. They really listen. So that was an exciting thing that they learned out of that experience. So our second example is an organization that had an open source project. They had developed it. They had donated it as well to a foundation. They were using it. They were using it heavily in their environment, but it really wasn't gaining any traction in an end user environment. And actually the project, when you look at that crossing the chasm kind of curve, it hadn't really totally crossed that chasm. So they wanted to try to figure out how they could get more product use. And the reasons that we were getting that people were not adopting the technology was, is it really going to deliver the benefits? Is it going to break other things when it gets installed in our environment? So they focused their efforts on producing use cases, talking to users, like what was the business problem you were trying to solve? How did you implement this technology in your environment? And then what benefits did you see in terms of availability or uptime or any firm metrics that you would see in a cloud-native environment? So they wrote up these case studies. They used, they created snackables. They used them in their social. They had a whole communication plan to be sharing about the value of this open source project. And then put in presentations and took it on the road to events such as this to talk about the open source project. And their measure was simple. It was the number of case studies written. It was number of presentations at events. And it was the number of organizations participating in the feedback. And one of the things that they gave back to organizations who participated in the feedback was access to leadership, access to product management, and access to free trials. So access to the people making the decisions on the technology direction so that they could have their voice heard more clearly and loudly about what they might need in the features if they were to adopt the project. And the third example I have is a company that, I loved, I loved how they called this the adoption led strategy, which is another, which is very similar to, you'll see community led strategy and you'll see product led strategy. But theirs was adoption led strategy. And they had a very strong community already, a number of people using their open source project that was built, well around Kubernetes. And their goal was to drive more adoption. But what they were finding is that people were afraid to try their open source project that was wrapping around something like Kubernetes. So they had to, they discovered that they wanted to do, move from engagement and directly into education. So they were doing hands-on activities at conferences. They were running hands-on labs. They were building out education courses. And the whole goal was to show people how much easier it was to use a Kubernetes when you wrap their open source project around it. So their measures are very simple. Number of courses produced, the number of events and hands-on labs they did, and the numbers of enrollment. And what's really interesting about this organization and for you non-marketing people out here, we have our top of funnel, right? We're just getting people in the door, getting their names so we can email them with content to our middle of the funnel, which is when they're starting to really use your technology. And they moved down to that middle of the funnel to identify people that were really happy using their open source project so that if they needed those services to be wrapped around it, they could easily move into that service model. So none of these community examples, it was not some grand plan produced to go from nothing to everything. And when there's a lot of books out there that give you that grand plan to go from nothing to everything. And the point here I have is that you can build community and you can do developer relations efforts on a smaller scale with a smaller team if you think about what your community needs, what your gaps are, and what your organization needs. And coming back to our elephant here, our revenue elephant, your activity should not be about driving revenue. They should be about enabling your community and your users with your content to be able to make that decision for themselves. And at the end of the day, always you're going to have to align with organizational goals and figure out how you're going to navigate that. That's all I got. I have time for questions. Thank you. I got clapped in the back of the room. I got two of them. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions? Okay. Good. Well, you all can do this. You all can build your community of technology users. Figure out what they need and just do little things. Don't boil the ocean. Thank you. And who found the puppy? I said I hit a puppy and I always had a puppy in my presentations. There she is. That's a baby dog. Anyway, thank you all. That's how we're going to do that. Thank you.