Tori Wieldt

Introducing Tori Wieldt

Tori Wieldt is a developer advocate for the New Relic Digital Intelligence Platform. She writes blog posts, speaks at New Relic User Groups and conferences, and works to empower and educate the New Relic developer community. She has had experience as a system administrator, technical writer, and marketing leader. Tori’s style and inclusive approach make her writing and presentations both educational and engaging. Find Tori on Twitter: @ToriWieldt.

Geertjan Wielenga: What are you doing right now with developer advocacy?

Tori Wieldt: I'm about 40% a developer advocate. Where the slider is for me depends on how much pure marketing I'm doing.

Tori's day-to-day work

At the minute, what I'm tasked with doing for my organization, New Relic, is the messaging around DevOps for marketing. That's creating messaging docs and presentations, and training the salespeople on how to talk about DevOps to people who are interested in our software. The rest of the time, I do things that are more classically considered evangelism, which means going to conferences, giving presentations, talking to developers, gathering up information to take back to my company, and so on.

Geertjan Wielenga: How are you not a developer advocate, then? That entire breadth of activities is what many people would see as advocacy.

Tori Wieldt: The difference, for me, is that I'm not a coder, so I don't know if that breaks the mold or not. I don't build sample apps; I have people to do it for me. I do feel that I bring value to my company, though.

Developers are allergic to marketing, so you have to have a measure of respect for the person you're talking to. Developers at my organization say, "I just created this new feature."

I get to say, "So what? The feature by itself has no meaning: you have to provide context. Why would anybody care about this?" Developers (our customers) are really good at sniffing out fluff, so you don't want to waste their time.

It helps to understand what developers deal with on a daily basis. Then you can say, "Here's a thing that'll help to make your work life better or maybe even your home life better if it can get you home sooner."

Geertjan Wielenga: What is your job description, then, at New Relic?

Tori Wieldt: They want to call me a "solutions manager." My role has been through some evolutions during my time with my company. When I came on board, the title was "developer advocate" and then I was a "community manager." It does feel like a slider, depending on what the focus is and how much I adjust what I'm doing.

Geertjan Wielenga: How did you get to where you are now? What's your story?

Tori Wieldt: I have to be honest here and say that I do have a lot of experience, but you have to be careful in this industry when talking about how old you are. I've felt that in my current environment.

I have a degree in cinematography and I was planning to be a director of feature films. When I graduated, there were no jobs in that field, so I got a job as a media specialist for a school district. In that role, I helped to deliver films to schools.

When the schools got 100 Apple IIe computers delivered, I was told, "They aren't books, which must mean they're in the 'media' category. You need to figure out how to use them."

I installed the first computers for the school district, then I started looking at and recommending software for teachers. That got me into the world of computing. I loved it and thought it was fascinating.

Next, I got a job at a phone company as a sysadmin. That included running some really old microcomputers that were the size of large rooms. I had to pull up sections of floor and pull cables. In that role, I learned Unix, which was really invaluable at the time. I came out to California for a Unix conference, which made me want to move to California. I've been in tech ever since.

I worked at Sun Microsystems as a tech writer, then I started managing the team that took care of the website and most of that was a delivery mechanism for software.

It took the whole team to make that happen. When Sun Microsystems got acquired by Oracle, I moved from developer tools—NetBeans, which I adored—to being a community manager for the Java community.

Mostly, I was actually trying to explain to Oracle how things worked in the Java community. I felt that was a good way to be an advocate for developers. Oracle was very used to a hierarchical way of running user groups. It was all about who was in charge of the user groups and what the rules were. The Java community has a very different mindset to that, so I was responsible for bridging those two worlds.

I had a really good manager at Oracle who explained, "Much of your job will be saying no to marketing people." The marketing team wanted to fill all our social media channels with things that weren't relevant to our audience. They were just trying to broadcast everywhere. What we needed to be doing was building trust with our users. The reality is that every time you send an advert—especially an advert for a webinar that has nothing to do with that audience—you chip away at that trust.

"Acknowledging that we needed to push back against marketing meant that we were empowered to do the right thing."

—Tori Wieldt

Acknowledging that we needed to push back against marketing meant that we were empowered to do the right thing. My newsletter contained topics of interest to Java developers and even topics that were outside the sphere of the company.

I would point to a good article because it was a good article, not because it pushed a particular product. That's important.

I left Oracle and came to New Relic, and it's been a great ride. New Relic is a company that's growing really well and you get the opportunity to build out a process as you're using it. You're creating the work and deciding how to do the work at the same time.

Right now, the world is getting eaten by software. New Relic is very much at the heart of helping companies to make that transition, including moving to the cloud, moving to doing DevOps, and understanding that your user experience is literally determining whether you're going to stay in business or not. It's a really interesting space.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you feel that the demand for the kind of function that you describe is just going to increase?

Knowing your audience

Tori Wieldt: Yes, absolutely. The old notion used to be that the developer audience is very different from other audiences. You can't say that literally everybody's becoming a developer now, but consumers are much more sophisticated. You have to treat them with respect and understand where they're coming from. Why is your widget of value to them? You have to prove its usefulness within minutes.

This whole notion of a three-year sales cycle, with hundreds of people involved in terms of purchasing software, is out the window. I feel good about that because it enables choice for consumers.

Although, I do feel for legacy companies that have the monolith. In order to stay in business, they're really going to have to flip the table.

Who would look at a features and benefits table right now? That's classic marketing but it's not specific enough. I don't think that kind of marketing is useful anymore. Maybe it never was useful, but the feedback loop was so long that you could never prove or disprove it.

The phrase in tech writing was "easy reading comes from hard writing." Easy consumption of an app comes from really hard work on the backend. Our expectations for how an app should work on our phone are based on the last best experience that we had.

"The reality is that if you're not doing it, your competition is."

—Tori Wieldt

I was doing a presentation yesterday. A guy wanted to know about site reliability engineering (SRE) and how you can start getting your teams out of their silos. He asked, "How do you get support from management for this?" The answer was a little bit brutal because the reality is that if you're not doing it, your competition is. It's very easy for consumers to jump from one app to another.

When I was at Sun Microsystems, the first product I worked on as a tech writer was Sun WorkShop TeamWare. I begged for customer feedback and finally, I was able to go to the support room and eavesdrop on phone calls from customers.

80% of the calls were about installation. That totally blew my mind because there I was, working really hard on a manual that helped people to walk through features that often, they weren't even getting to. That would just not happen today. You pivot your entire organization to make sure that installation is easy and as frictionless as possible.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you work from home or at the office?

Tori Wieldt: I'm primarily based in the office. Our headquarters are in San Francisco. Most of our engineering work is based in Portland, so I go up there on a regular basis too.

Otherwise, I'm on the road, training salespeople or speaking at conferences. I have the best of both worlds because I'm not a complete road warrior, but it is important to get out and hear what people are talking about.

Geertjan Wielenga: What percentage of the time are you on the road?

Tori Wieldt: I travel about 25% of the time. That feels like a good amount to me. If you don't see what's happening on the ground, you can be blinded by the online clickbait discussions. I think you need to be grounded in the reality of what developers have to deal with. It's about meeting likeminded people as much as it is about the content. The network is your career.

I also meet with customers to talk to them about our DevOps story, giving them ideas about where to get started and ways we can help them. I really like the variety.

Geertjan Wielenga: What kind of personality, temperament, or characteristics fit very well with this kind of role?

The right personality

Tori Wieldt: You've got to like people, variety, and learning new stuff. I remember at Sun Microsystems, whenever somebody would use an acronym I'd never heard in a meeting, I'd decide that before the end of the day, I would figure out what that was.

Being able to read between the lines is really important. I'm a vendor but when I look at other vendors' information, I have to be able to determine how much of that is vaporware versus what's really out there. You've got to have a sense of curiosity.

"You must be able to deal with uncertainty."

—Tori Wieldt

Crucially, you must be able to deal with uncertainty. It's a rollercoaster being in this role. I keep seeing the word "uncertainty" in more and more job ads, which, at first, made me a little bit nervous. Then I thought about it one morning when I came into a conference and the booth was in the wrong place, so the demos weren't working. I had to go in there and do some firefighting. I thought, "This is actually great because if everything always worked as expected, I could be replaced by a bot."

I recommend this job for women. I think tech is a great place for women. I know it's challenging, there's sexism, and we certainly have to play the game at a higher level of difficulty than our male counterparts do, but I really think it's a fantastic area to be in. One of the things I'm particularly proud of is being able to get other women into tech.

Geertjan Wielenga: What's so good about working in tech, would you say?

Tori Wieldt: You get to meet smart people who are doing really interesting stuff and the money is good. Tech is not a typical "ghetto" for women; it's not like nursing. In the U.S., careers that are more typically done by women have salaries artificially deflated. The salaries in tech are better.

Geertjan Wielenga: What should you do if you don't feel confident about your tech knowledge?

Having the confidence to get started

Tori Wieldt: Read the comments on an article, take a look at Twitter, or try out the software yourself. Even if you aren't really technical, everybody should be able to download and try software. More and more companies allow you to do that.

People tend to undercut their abilities. If you're starting a user group or you want to get people together online, just try a tech and write down the experience you've had. That is the great start of a presentation. You can say that you tried XYZ tech and what you learned. Explain what was easy, what was really frustrating, and the resources that got you going. That's really valuable information. If you're interested enough and willing to share your thoughts with other people, then do so.

Geertjan Wielenga: Do you need to know absolutely everything about the tech from your organization to be able to share knowledge with the salespeople and the community?

Tori Wieldt: Absolutely not and actually, that would be impossible. Tech is a Swiss Army knife: there are so many things you can do with it. I don't even think our CEO, who wrote the software to begin with, knows everything that our software does now.

The old tech writer mantra applies here: "Know your audience." I try to predict where customers will be coming into the software and what their questions will be. If I do a call with a customer and we've already done the basic introduction, then they want to go a little bit deeper, I make sure that there's a more technical person on the call who can do that. That seems to work really well.

Geertjan Wielenga: What do you do when you're running a session and someone asks a question that you don't know the answer to? Do you just wing it?

Tori Wieldt: I say that I don't know the answer and I'll get back to them. In my session yesterday, a couple of people asked questions. I said, "I don't know, but this is how we do it at my company. Do other people have answers?" That started a really great discussion about people who are at different levels on the path of this DevOps stuff. After the session, there were four or five people out in the hallway having a conversation about that. I always used to tell my tech writers that a manual is the start of a discussion.

Geertjan Wielenga: What do you do to stay current?

Tori Wieldt: I spend time on Twitter and I talk to the other people in my organization. I spend as much time as I can with the engineers too. They do unconferences regularly and I go to those.

Geertjan Wielenga: Are there any websites that you read?

Tori Wieldt: I go to Slashdot, but otherwise, I have enough of a network on Twitter that I can see what's going on. We get a weekly report that shows the new users for our software. I go to Twitter and start following them so I can understand what's important to them. We're all guilty of thinking our customers are sitting around waiting for us to deliver something to them. It's nice to have the reminder that we are a small percentage of a much broader world that they're looking at.

Geertjan Wielenga: What is the tone that you use when you talk to customers?

Tori Wieldt: I hope it's a helpful tone. I want to get across that our software can help them to accomplish XYZ. We're highly aware that it's the user experience that's key, so you have to really pay attention to that. We don't have all the answers, so my tone is respectful, reflecting that this is hard work. If it was easy or if a company could sell you DevOps in a box, we'd all be able to go home!

"The software can come and go, but we have to change people and processes."

—Tori Wieldt

This is hard work because we're changing people. The software can come and go, but we have to change people and processes. We're saying that our software is a lever that will help our customers, but they have to do the hard work too. We aren't fixing bugs for them: we're pointing bugs out to help them to get their job done.

When to talk about competitors

Geertjan Wielenga: In the area of ethical dilemmas, what if you're doing a presentation and you get a question, and you know that your competitor does the job better than your product does. How honest are you?

Tori Wieldt: It depends on the context. If I'm in front of a room of people, I'm not going to give any praise to my competitors. If I'm at happy hour having a beer, standing next to somebody, then that conversation will go a little bit differently. "Does it better" is also highly dependent on a user's situation.

Geertjan Wielenga: What if you know that there's a bug in the tech and you're doing a demo? Do you avoid that particular bug area without saying anything?

Tori Wieldt: I will skirt imperfections, although I would never lie knowingly. I've always been heartened by how intelligent and reasonable developers as customers are. You can just be upfront and say, "This is not the direction the company is going in." People can handle it. I have yet to have the reaction that I think we all fear so much.

Often people reply, "Okay, I just wanted to know." They're going to figure out how to do their job with the tools that are best for them, so I think honesty is the best policy.

In the presentation yesterday, I had a question: "It would be really great if your software did blah, blah, blah. Will that ever happen?"

I knew a lot about what he was asking about, but all I could say was "stay tuned." I gave a nice smile as I said that!

Geertjan Wielenga: What happens if the company you work for takes a direction that is completely against everything you stand for or you just disagree with it? If you're on the stage in a big room and everyone really wants to know about the controversial topic of the moment, how do you handle that?

Tori Wieldt: In my many years doing this job, I've learned to "trust" the experts. If it's a PR issue, I let the PR people handle it. That said, I was at a community user conference and did an unconference session titled "Working at the Dark Star." It focused on how to be a community manager in a large company and that really resonated. Many people attended and were really honest about their challenges in those areas.

Geertjan Wielenga: What did you discuss in the session?

Disagreeing with your company

Tori Wieldt: How challenging it is to work for a big company that wants to be able to dictate things. In one of my roles, there was a bit of a culture shock after having gone from one company that was very lenient and open to a company that was not that way at all.

The company wanted to run every blog post through a legal organization. I was fighting hard and saying, "That's crazy! We need to be able to have comments on blogs. The whole point is engaging with people, which means they can say good and bad things about the company."

"You have got to learn not to freak out if one person says something about you that you don't like."

—Tori Wieldt

Modern companies have Twitterfall at their conferences. You have got to learn not to freak out if one person says something about you that you don't like. The arena has changed and it's a mindset shift. You have to let go of that control or the illusion that you ever had it. If there are conversations happening somewhere, I would rather they be out in the open where I can engage with them.

Geertjan Wielenga: You mentioned that you travel regularly in your role, so how do you avoid jet lag or do you not encounter it? Do you have any travel horror stories?

Tori Wieldt: I try and give myself a day to rest. I don't know how people step off a plane and go right to a meeting. I have just learned to accept that I'm going to be running at 75% when I'm traveling. I'm not going to be at 100% and that's okay. I'm a little afraid to say this out loud, in case the gods are listening, but I have yet to have a really horrible travel experience.

Geertjan Wielenga: What about the technical glitches that you can encounter when you arrive at these faraway destinations? What do you do in those situations?

Tori Wieldt: You try to take it in your stride and just remember that you're a human among humans: glitches happen to everyone.

I was at one conference and in every room, there was a big red button. If there was anything wrong with my A/V, I could go to my room early and press the button. Just knowing that was there was so cool.

I've been lucky when using adapters. Usually people carry stuff that they can help you with. Sometimes the software is down. We're a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company and sometimes the response time on the service is not as snappy as we'd like it to be. You get pretty good at talking about stuff while the page reloads.

Geertjan Wielenga: What about burnout? Have you been on the verge of that and how do you avoid it?

Tori Wieldt: You need to have an outlet. I love being on some of the Slack channels with the other community managers. We just talk about travel stories and recommend good airports, or suggest avoiding a particular airport at all costs.

One of the difficulties about this job is that people are naturally going to be jealous of you getting to fly to all these places. They don't realize that you're inside a hotel conference room. You have no idea what the weather is like because you don't go outside. Sometimes you get to explore the city and sometimes you don't; that's just how it rolls.

Geertjan Wielenga: What would the you in your 20s think about what you're doing with your life today, professionally speaking?

Tori Wieldt: I think I'd be really thrilled with it. I have had jobs that didn't exist when I was going to college, so even the best of schools wouldn't have been able to train me for them.

I loved being a tech writer and riding that wave. I also love doing developer stuff right now. I think if I met my younger self, we'd high five each other.

Geertjan Wielenga: It's hard not to go back to what you were saying earlier about age. What's the concern about age in this business?

Tori Wieldt: I don't want to start generational wars, but the assumption is that somebody who is older is not an up-to-date person and so isn't as valuable to the organization.

I don't feel like experience is valued much anymore. Maybe that's San Francisco-specific in Silicon Valley. All these companies are set up and run by young upstarts. Millennials just don't think we know anything as old folks. I don't necessarily want to bring up that I worked at that phone company and I had a pager!

"You don't want to lead with your age. I just think it's the reality of tech."

—Tori Wieldt

You don't want to lead with your age. I just think it's the reality of tech. Luckily, I look younger than I am and probably act younger than I am too.

Geertjan Wielenga: What is the professional trajectory for the kind of work that you're doing? Where can you go with your career?

Tori Wieldt: I think the world is your oyster. If you want to do an engineering role, you could go in that direction. If you want to go into marketing, you can do that.

When people start talking about API-first or API-everywhere, I think that just emphasizes how important it is to have developers who like your products and want to help to build your ecosystem.

I can't imagine a company out there that won't eventually have a developer program. If you think setting up a forum and walking away counts as a developer program, you're going to be sorely disappointed. It's all about human-to-human connections and you need people to make that happen.

Geertjan Wielenga: Thank you, Tori Wieldt.