Developer Relations @ Zeta — Introducing the Community Role
Hello from the Developer Experience team @ Zeta. In our last post, we spoke about the role of a developer advocate and how important it is for us to bridge that gap between our audiences in order to build world-class products that are easy to adopt.
As you know Developer relations aims at solving needs, problem statements, and issues that our audiences (Developers, fintech, banks, etc) face by providing them with a smooth experience.
The introduction of a community role looks at doing just that by helping Zeta understand its audience better. This will lead to the creation of engagement and cross-learning opportunities while also helping in creating systems that will provide for timely and constructive feedback.
The community builder will look at nurturing, engaging, and creating upskilling opportunities for Zeta’s community and in turn, will help in bridging the gap between Devx and its audiences.
Sounds good but how will we achieve it?
Let me walk you through some of the plans we have come up with to build, nurture and develop our community. The community structure at Zeta will look at focusing on three major pillars we have identified -
- Educate
- Engage
- Empower
The three E’s look at capturing every aspect of our community that we feel we can make a difference in. Let us run through each of them below.
Educate :
Our first aim is to start doing all the things necessary to give back to the communities that we directly interact with on a regular basis. Through this we plan to fulfill various needs that our communities might have by creating opportunities for upskilling, learning amongst peers, and networking.
We will do this in two ways :
- Promote conversations :
Our goal here is to create a space that encourages communication and engagement amongst the community. Through this, we want to play the role of the middle man who organizes/facilitates discussions that contribute to adding value to our audience.
These discussions will contribute directly to the community's needs and will take place in different formats. Each of them will give our community a chance to upskill, network, and share knowledge. Leaders from across the industry/ecosystem will be invited to come to share their knowledge and experiences both virtually and offline.
Eg: Leader in Tech, The Fintech Meetup, Developer circles
- Inspire :
We feel one good way to get inspired is to learn from others’ experiences, at Zeta we have a bunch of leaders who are eagerly waiting to contribute to an ever-growing community.
We are looking at creating a couple of formats that can give the community a first-hand chance to interact and engage with Zeta leaders from across the board.
Eg: Zeta office hours, Roundtable sessions, etc.
The second thing we plan to do is to keep inspiring our ever-growing developer community by running a number of open-source projects and introducing them to a range of Zeta products. Subject matter experts from Zeta will be available to run sessions on the different use cases of the products as well.
Eg: Zeta Hacks, Developer series, Zeta product explainer videos
Our first pillar’s goal is to encourage innovation and learning by contributing to and solving different problem statements within the community.
Engage
It is imperative that the community also learns from each other and keeps engaging with one another. This can only be achieved by creating an environment that nudges people to connect with each other.
We believe that a virtual space for people to connect and share their challenges will increase engagement within the community. Hence, we will design a space where our community has the chance to communicate with one another on a regular basis virtually. Eg: Discord, Slack, etc
It will also give Zeta a chance to communicate with its community on a real-time basis and vice versa. The virtual platform will conduct a bunch of engagement activities in order to keep our audience motivated and engrossed. This will contribute to the rise of organic conversations and building meaningful relationships within our community. An online virtual platform will also remove geographical barriers.
The activities on the platform will help promote interaction, communication, and networking within the community. Eg: Weekly intros, Tech Thursdays, Traditions, Microcommunities like chapters (Product management, Quality Assurance, etc)
Empower :
The last pillar looks at providing opportunities to our community members to lead from the front, the idea is to identify community advocates that can help understand our community better. These people will represent the community and will be the driving force in building this from the ground up.
They will help us create, organize and facilitate different systems that will gather timely feedback and community programs that will enhance productivity within the community.
This will give a chance to our community to utilize Zeta resources in order to build valuable experiences for the community and themselves.
Eg: Ambassador program — Github campus experts for students, Community interviews, Needs assessment survey, Referral system.
And that’s it, folks, this is our initial plan to initiate our community and begin the engagement. We feel this will lead the way to build better systems through which we can interact with each other, solve needs and promote product adoption.
I am here to lead the way in building this and I look forward to interacting with people across this space to learn more about how we can collaborate and build a strong system that can create value for everyone involved.
For the next quarter or so, I shall be working on kick-starting this process by working on activities such as :
Zeta Hacks 4.0 — This is going to be an internal hackathon where we are looking at people across zeta to come up with solutions to some of the problem statements we have identified. To get a glimpse of our previous Hackathon has a look here.
Zeta Conclave — This is a 2-day event that looks at getting leaders across Zeta to explain the changes in the product, features, and business. It’s an inclusive environment that helps people across the board connect and stay up to date with what’s happening at Zeta.
Watch this space for more details :)
About Zeta: Zeta is rethinking payments from core to the edge, algorithms to form factors, applications to solutions. Having built a modern stack that Financial Institutions (FIs) can use for debit, credit, and prepaid cards, loans, authentication, and Fraud and Risk Management (FRM), Zeta invites you to join their journey in democratizing payments. Check out the openings on Zeta’s career page: https://www.careers.zeta.tech
Read about Zeta: Business Insider, CNBC
Until next time, Adios.
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