This month officially marks my 4th anniversary at HashiCorp. As the date quickly approached, I took some time to reflect on this insanely fast moving rocket ship I strapped myself to and how much this experience has changed me. I definitely had fewer wrinkles, less pounds and no Delta Diamond status when I started. I will be forever grateful to Mitchell Hashimoto, Armon Dadgar and Kevin Fishner for giving me this opportunity, and for understanding the value of building community at an early stage.
When HashiCorp was just 10 people, I was brought on as a contractor in charge of organizing HashiCorp’s first community conference, HashiConf 2015 (raise your hand if you were there!). Back then I didn’t fully understand the gravity of the tools we were building, and I didn’t realize the caliber of people I would soon be working with as the company grew. I just wanted to create a great experience for the community and give HashiCorp a platform to connect with their growing base of users.
During my time at HashiCorp, my team and I have worn many hats related to building and engaging with our ever growing community. We have been responsible for building out our global community conference programs (HashiConfs, HashiDays), launching HashiBits (HashiCorp’s newsletter), organizing internal offsites and employee summits, experiential and spatial design, the webinar program, social media, the HashiCorp User Group (HUG) program, creating HashiSwag, regional marketing, the trade shows program, and anything else colleagues need help with.
I’ve seen us grow from 10 to 800 employees, seen our OSS tools reach millions of downloads, and watched first-hand as the company developed 5 commercial products and started generating millions in revenue.
I’ve also learned a lot. But how do you sum up 4 years of learnings in a single post? I’m going to focus on the things I deeply care about which are community building, in-person experiences, design, and leadership.
Community Building
HashiCorp wouldn’t exist as a company without our community. Period. How we connect, communicate and interact with our community has been written into our DNA from the beginning.
Here are some lessons I learn: Community shouldn’t be treated like a lead generation tool. You can’t expect to see ROI right away based on a few programs you launched. You can’t force people to want to be a part of your community. You need to understand who they are, what their pain points are, how you can solve them and give them reasons to want to engage with you. You need to communicate with them in the way they want to be communicated. Keep your documentation up to date. Provide lots of education and training. Create a forum for people to be able to communicate and support each other. Document how employees should communicate with your community through the different communication avenues such as social media, email, web, support forums, etc. Communicate with people like they are real humans. I’ve spoken to lots of community managers that struggle to communicate these lessons internally. That mindset hinders their abilities to build strong, highly-engaged communities. Keep in mind it takes years to build community.
Creating In-Person Experiences
In-person events are one of the best ways to engage with your community. But why do people decide to attend your events? And more importantly, why would they keep coming back year after year? The key to organizing a successful event is more than renting a conference room, scheduling talks, and throwing a party. It’s about value. For us, it’s about deepening their understanding of the tools, and strengthening people’s connection to the company and to each other. This is something I learned very early on from the founders. While preparing for the first HashiConf, we spent weeks reviewing talk proposals and creating a technical, highly-relevant speaker lineup. I specifically remember Mitchell saying that we needed to make sure the audio visual set up in both tracks worked without issues. Audio visual was what we should spend most of the budget on and everything else we add should be considered a bonus.
We took these learnings from early on and defined a set of 4 key building blocks that are the foundation of every experience we create for our community. We use those building blocks to decide everything from how we place furniture, type of keynote speakers we select, how much money we should spend on audio visual vs other things, what programs to add, and why we will never have a ball pit at HashiConf.
“All of these details matter, in an industry crowded with tech events. Create lovely experiences, with plenty of breaks, and crisp story-telling, and you definitely stand out.” — James Governor, RedMonk
If you would like to learn more about how we create memorable experiences for our community, you can watch a talk Cris Dobbins and I gave on this topic. I also published a blog post about how we realized that we weren’t event planners, but rather experiential marketers. There is a major shift happening in the industry around technology conferences, and the way small and large-scale events are prioritized in a marketing organization, and then produced, and I’m happy I was able to learn this organically through my work at HashiCorp.
Design
Design, more specifically designing with empathy, is deeply integrated into everything my team does. We have a detailed 40-page brand guide for our upcoming 2020 events. The guide documents everything from the visual look and feel to logo usage, vibe, tone, audience, messaging, satellite program details, etc. As our events scale and we bring on more agencies and vendors to support us, we need to ensure quality, consistency, and a human-centered design approach.
The event experience needs to start from the moment you announce your events. That means our brand guide for the following year needs to be finished at the beginning of the previous year. The guide is then used to design and build websites, design promotional campaigns, email templates, determines how we communicate, and everything leading up to and during the events. It informs every decision we make at the conference. This includes everything from lighting design, music selection, furniture selection, floor planning, wayfinding, food, decor, plants, etc. You will find that everything we do has a purpose.
What do we want people to feel? What do we want people to experience? Are the chairs they have to sit on comfortable? Do they have enough places to get good coffee? Can they see the screens properly? Can they find their way? Are there enough breaks? What vibe is the music creating? These are the type of questions you should constantly be asking yourself as you’re designing experiences for your community.
Leadership
I’ve been lucky at HashiCorp for many reasons. One of the things I’m most grateful for is they have allowed me to grow as a leader. This job has empowered me and strengthened me at my core. I’m never scared to speak up in meetings. I’m not afraid to fight for things I strongly believe in from having opinions on the direction of the corporate website to advocating for raises for my team. I’ve stopped making myself small (I think everyone at HashiCorp knows my name), and I’m no longer afraid to be myself. Through support, respect, and trust, I’ve been able to grow into a leader I knew I had the potential to be but until now never had the opportunity to become.
While growing as a leader, HashiCorp allowed me to build out a team in a way I haven’t seen other “event teams” set up. I made the decision early on to hire people that are experts at what they do instead of hiring program leads and having them work in silos. The core team consists of myself, Cris Dobbins (creative director, 15 years of experience with spatial & experiential design), Amanda Perino (communications, 10 years of marketing and comms experience), Faranak Medrano (project manager, 10 years of experience), Grace Stillar (experiential event manager, 8 years of events and operations experience) and Britt Ivy (experiential event manager, 8 years of finance, logistics, and PM experience). We work collaboratively as a team across each event with the support of a small events agency, Magnify Communications, and a few contractors. I have no problem admitting that each one of these fantastic humans is smarter and better at their roles than me, but I believe that’s what makes us such an impressive, powerful team. There’s a deep level of trust and respect that we have for each other. It’s one of the most collaborative, supportive, and enjoyable teams I’ve ever been a part of. I think this is the thing I’m most proud of. ❤
In these four years, the company has grown from a scrappy start-up to the fastest growing company in Forbes Cloud 100 list (peaking at number 4!). We are now close to reaching 800 employees worldwide and while a lot of things have changed since I started, at our core we are still the same; we deeply care about community, we deeply care about building tools and products that people see the value in, and we still live by the principles that built the foundations of HashiCorp.
I’m really excited for this next phase we are heading in and what more I will get to learn. We recently hired Adam FitzGerald to run our developer relations org which my team and I are now a part of. This move validates our commitment to the OSS community. Expect more in-person experiences, technical content, training, and more love for the community over the coming years.
