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11 min read

How to build a powerful developer community

Membership content | Leadership | Developer marketing

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 the 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

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.

This post was a collaboration between

Jeana Jorgensen, Steve Francia

  • Jeana Jorgensen

    Jeana Jorgensen

    Jeana Jorgensen is the Senior Director of Cloud Product Marketing and Sustainability at Google.

    More posts by Jeana Jorgensen.

    Jeana Jorgensen
  • Steve Francia

    Steve Francia

    Steve Francia, was the Product and Strategy Lead for Go Language and is now Managing Director at Two Sigma.

    More posts by Steve Francia.

    Steve Francia
How to build a powerful developer community