Designing a scalable, community led developer support model
As 2023 winds to a close, I’m wrapping up a project where the client wanted to establish a community support model that would scale as their product adoption grew. As a PLG driven company designed for developers, it was important to the client that developer experience didn’t suffer as the community grew. Further, with so many companies laser focused on controlling spend through best practices rather than mass layoffs the client needed to rely on more than just their employees.
The table below provides a high level matrix of typical PLG led channels developers engage with when starting with a company’s product. To keep things simple, I’m going to exclude overlaying product phases such as a MVP, open and closed betas, GA etc into the model and focus primarily on key activities.
| General Questions | Strategic Customer Engagements | Frequently Asked Questions | Developer MVP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Channels | Sales teams, webinars, and content to point to customers to submit questions to community forums | Limited Slack channels created for strategic customer implementation questions. | Blog posts ,knowledge articles, onboarding nurture emails, product tours | Developer community members respond to forum questions and create blog or content articles |
| SLA | < 72 hours | < 8 hours | immediate | 24hrs - 1 week |
| Primary Support | Sales Engineer, Developer Advocates, Developer Marketing | Sales Engineers, Customer Support, Product Manager | AI Copilot, Community Manager, Product Manager | Community Manager, Developer Advocates, Developer Marketing |
| Escalation Path | If no response in 48hrs Community to escalate to CS management to get assignment, and/or work with Product Managers to address. |
Where possible, direct customers back to public forums and FAQs to resolve questions. CS to create tickets for product issues and manage per formal SLAs. Engage Product Management for product issues. |
Work with DevRel, SE, PM management to reward teams to contribute. DevRel to work with PM to provide product feedback |
Developer Councils, Monthly MVP meetings, feedback, Product Manager AMA |
| Response Process | Internal teams sign up for real-time notifications for topic areas. | Sales and support teams added to channel with customers | Community Manager to identify frequent questions. Source internal writers from DevRel, SE, PM and CS. | Community and DevRel to work with community members to reward and recognize contributors. Bug bounties. |
| Metrics & Success Measures |
Response rate, Leaderboard. CS to respond to x questions per week. Product adoption/retention |
NPS, time to live, customer retention, product improvements based on feeddack |
free to paid conversions, x blogs and knowledge articles per month, AI resolutions, reduction in support tickets |
Recognition for most answers in community forums. Number of developer contributed content, leaderboards, creator funds, MVP programs, Github pull requests and stars |
| Products | Livestorm, Demostack, Discourse | Slack, Gainsight | Twitter/X, Discourse, Hotjar, Pendo, GitHub Copilot, OpenCopilot | Orbit, CommonRoom, Discourse |
Obviously there is a lot of detail that goes into building the matrix out, but this should be a great starting point to help companies, especially those in series B-D phases and for organizations who want to keep a nimble, vibrant, supportive developer engagement strategy. My advice is start from the product out: make sure you know what customers are doing in your product and proactively improve that experience. In the end, the best strategy for reducing customer support is to remove as many points of friction as you can so they never become a problem in the first place.