This article derives from a presentation at the Developer Marketing Summit in 2021. For more exclusive content, visit your member dashboard.
This article has been built from a Q+A discussion with two incredible product marketing experts:
- Steve Francia, who was Product and Strategy Lead for Go Language at the time
- Jeana Jorgensen, Senior Director of Cloud Product Marketing and Sustainability at Google
In this article, they’ll be focusing on:
- Why it’s important to invest in your community
- Learning from your developer community
- Building vs promoting your community
- Creating the right team to support your community
- Making your community relevant and useful
- The non-negotiables for an awesome community
Why it’s important to invest in your community
Q: Jeana, you recently launched the Google Cloud Community and in your release, you spoke about investing in the community. Why was investing in it so important for Google Cloud?
Jeana Jorgensen: There are a few reasons. The community is what makes the services interesting, right? There’s a huge amount of innovation that comes from our developer community, customers, and partners.
Investing in our consumers gives us an opportunity to learn from them, see what they’re developing, understand how we can make our services better, and just get a closer insight into what’s happening out in the world.
The real goal for us investing in StackOverflow in particular was to get closer to that community and be able to have deeper discussions.
You can ask and answer questions today on StackOverflow, but Google Cloud Collective gave us a closer bond because it’s made up of people who’ve opted into the community and want to have a deeper dialogue and learn. I think for any community, it’s important to invest in it if you want it to thrive.
