Tag Archives for Developer

Every year, we’re getting… younger?

At BlackBerry Jam Europe, I was asked what was surprising to me about working with the BlackBerry developer community over the last year; and I replied how rapidly the average age of developers is decreasing.  This observation is supported by both market research sources, and what I have observed first hand.

Last summer on the BlackBerry Jam World Tour, part of the event was a “lightning pitch” contest.  We usually had ten to twelve developers participate; they had five minutes to demo and pitch their app to the crowd.  What was notable is that the youngest winner of a lightning round was sixteen years old!  The youngest “pitcher” that participated was 13!  There were many exceptional young people who competed, all of whom had demonstrated advanced programming skills, and were not afraid to speak in front of audiences of several hundred people.

At our events I speak with college students who have already published multiple apps on multiple platforms.  What’s fascinating is the degree of sophistication they possess; they tell me about analyzing download and sales data and how that lead them to localize their apps to better target other countries.  Others instrument their code to see what their customers are really doing with their apps.  I had a group this week walk me through all the different business models they’ve tried with their apps, from free w/ads to paid and even in app purchase and how they’ve optimized the revenue potential of their apps, this is phenomenal.

I always leave our events inspired by the passion and creativity of the developers I meet.  But these young developers who have developed such great technical and business skills so young, I can’t wait to see what they are going to do next.

Anatomy of a developer mind share turnaround

Today at BlackBerry Jam Europe 2013, my boss Alec Saunders (VP BlackBerry Ecosystems) announced that several leading developer research firms have reported a 28% to 38% developer primary target of BlackBerry 10.  To understand the magnitude of this reversal of fortune one must realize that during January 2012 NPS reports showed a developer sentiment of -40 for BlackBerry overall, so we achieved this turnaround during a single year with highly charged events occurring like the CEO changeover, network and financial issues.

I’ve previously discussed how operationally we quickly innovated on various well known evangelism tactics as a team and how that both focuses and unifies the team.   This also enabled us to try different tactics and strategies running simultaneously.  However, to achieve the developer mind share turnaround we need to take a year long look back.

First: While our team monitors and highly values third party research,  nothing beats actually talking to developers yourself.  Research inherently lags actual developer mindshare, our entire team “talks” to developers face to face and via popular forums constantly.  As I’ve always said, developers will tell you what they want, you just need to listen, then act, quickly.

Second: Consistency of strategy and message.  This must be based on real capabilities of your platform and tools.  While we’ve refined our developer message to “Beautiful, Integrated & Social” we started the year with a bit wordier and more conceptual version of the same messaging.   Your SDK must enable your developers to embrace and implement the key features and technologies that make your message a reality, they quickly dismiss any “marketing only” platforms.

Third: Live your own value prop.  Your own apps or features need to consistently manifest the same qualities that you are messaging to the developers.  At my old employers this was called “dogfooding”.

Fourth: Early access.  I’ve already talked about early evangelism in a previous post.

Fifth: Have fun!  Alec, Marty and Chris made the now infamous rock videos to just have fun with our developer community.  This is the true ethos of our approach to evangelism, to enjoy working with the community and share the love.

One last thing, read an analysts take on our approach to developers that he witnessed at our European conference today, said it better than I am able to.