I think the biggest takeaway I’ve learned in my first week at IBM is that many times its not the superior technology that ends up being successful in the market, its a combination of a lot of other things. Technology is definitely a major factor, but if you aren’t listening to your customers - you aren’t going out of your way to talk to them and get their thoughts.
As part of this approach IBM has created developer advocacy teams. Developer Advocates aren’t selling things to people — their job is to host meetups and events to build a community. This allows developers to come in and just learn without any pressure to buy. Over time these same Developer Advocates are able to hear the compliments and criticisms of IBM's technology and are able to pass those on to program managers (offering managers at IBM) to fuel future changes.
As part of this process, this week I had the amazing experience of working with Lisa Jung to host a Lunch and Learn meetup on BlockChain led by IBM’s Lennart Frantzell. Besides the amazing food (the best bahn mi sandwiches like ever), I had a great time helping some new developers get set up with the prerequisite software (node, docker, etc). As I was helping out I was able to strike up conversations with many of the developers who were in attendance. Their skill and experience ranged from first time coders, to CTO’s looking for a blockchain platform for their next product.
I think overall it was a great way to bring developers in and just talk to them. I interacted and had some pretty deep and meaningful conversations with about a dozen different developers. I even spent an extra hour after the event listening to the concerns of a frustrated developer who was comparing IBM’s Blockchain offerings to that of Microsoft.
Overall here are the top 3 complaints that I passed onto my higher ups:
Problems with the free trial system for Block Chain in specific - some deployment features that would be nice to test run are not free
Specific issues with the UI/UX ex: some developers weren’t sure if they were actually interacting with the smart contract or not in VSCode
Issue with the accessibility of tutorials: IBM has the documentation and tutorials for BlockChain split between 3 different locations which made it hard for some first timers
But overall after just asking what the developers thought of the platform most of them admitted that it was pretty amazing that IBM’s BlockChain framework was agnostic on the deployment. Meaning that, according to Lennart Frantzell, on the updated 2.0 Block Chain IBM was releasing even if you don’t choose to host the Block Chain with IBM’s cloud, you can still use their extensive developer resources.
