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Job revolving around programming, community outreach, developer evangelism - getting more people to use the platform.

In the job as a coder, the best metric is whether software works or doesn't work.

In the job involving human element - shall I measure a number of calls, number of emails sent?

Not sure what is the best answer that would score me some points here... Any advice?

EDIT: someone suggested it is a duplicate. Well... I don't think so, maybe there is some genuine metric I should use? Just like agile, kanban, pomodoro there is some magical technique of measuring my success? Or maybe it is a traditional curveball question after all - silly me, me monkey.

Content from an answer given by OP added into the question:

This is my current best effort

Will send it in about 2 hours... You can still help me before I make some disastrous mistake :)

Measuring success and efficiency in what I do - that question made me think.

I’m successful when I’m happy. Happiness can be defined as the happiness of me, the happiness of the company, the happiness of our customers.

We could measure a number of new STO created after a blog post / webinar / video. We could measure a number of visits on the blog, minutes watched on YouTube. We could measure a number of contributors and forks on GitHub.

If we were to measure clicks / likes / downloads, most of the time it is the team effort with a lot of activities already in the pipeline

We can invent a new metric, associated with me personally. Something that has aligned incentives in place. As opposed to one of my previous jobs - going to conferences as an ambassador but being paid for hiring permanent senior node.js developers in London - competing in a market with a shortage of talent. Wish I had more wisdom to realize this mismatch right from the start and realize my negotiation position to call it a BS!

Don’t create gameable metrics - otherwise, it will be “paperclip maximizer” exercise - converting every atom in the universe into a paperclip or paperclip producing machine.

We should talk, discuss, negotiate, agree on an arrangement that is benefiting you, me, community, the universe at large.

Jane S
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Mars Robertson
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  • What is the goal and what does success look like? If your goal is to call as many people as possible (regardless of outcome), then number of calls would be a good metric. If your goal is to spam emails, then number of emails sent would be a good metric. Who are you trying to "score points" with? – Seth R May 31 '18 at 18:58
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    "Whether software works or doesn't work" is a very poor metric for a developer unless you define what "working" means. I can write you a program that solves the traveling salesman problem with 100% accuracy. It just takes 2 years of CPU time to calculate. Is that considered working? – Seth R May 31 '18 at 19:04
  • In your first line you state the job is revolving around "getting more people to use the platform". I'm confused because if this is what the job is focused on then it should be a no brainer in terms of success. – TheRealLester May 31 '18 at 19:09
  • "Not sure what is the best answer that would score me some points here... Any advice?" ----- I believe the best answer to your question lies in your previous accomplishment as a developer. You should be able to look back at your work and see the work that you did that had the most impact in 1) your whole company 2) your team 3) your own workload. – Isaiah3015 May 31 '18 at 19:44
  • I've already started writing response... Several paragraphs, starting from "this question made me think". Scoring the points - I want to impress my new team - so far I was consistently acing at 3 consecutive interviews so I want to finish it in great style. I'll write some more, sleep on it, and tomorrow in the morning remove the fluff – Mars Robertson May 31 '18 at 22:19

2 Answers2

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Having transitioned from engineering to product strategy, metrics can be very tricky, because it can be hard to pinpoint your exact impact. I recommend measuring your individual goals and how they are related team-level, organizational-level or company-level goals.

For developer evangelism, it's likely you're part of the marketing or customer success organization, I would use metrics like click-through-rate, NPS, etc. For instance:

  1. How many people are reading your blog posts and how many people then go on to purchase a product or a service? Did a major company adopt your product?
  2. How many people attend your webinar? Is there a spike in web traffic afterwards and are they buying anything?
  3. Is customer support getting fewer tickets on topic X, partly because of your efforts to educate the community on X?
  4. If this is an open source project, are there more contributors now? More features? More adoption?
  5. Did you give a talk at a high profile conference? Approximately how many people attend and how many signed up to try/buy your product?
jcmack
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I do think your question is a little broad - it could be edited to narrow down the scope.

It is the simple. Common sense and Feedback.

The feedback you recieve from stakeholders will determine if you have been successfull in fullfilling the requirements that you set out to achieve.

Common sense applies to efficiency. Without going into too much detail, is it justified doing X using method Y with regards to time taken and the requirement? If the feedback at the end (or throughout!) is X is taking too long, then it could be assumed that y was the wrong method to use.

Overall - Feedback is your metric.

John
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