Going big - Scaling with developers (w/ Transcript)
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This talk describes 5 essential tips that will help you work with developers to scale and automate your search marketing efforts. When should you reach out to developers? What do developers need from search marketers? How do you ensure that scaling doesn't hurt quality? How can you estimate how long the project will take? This talk was given by Chris Le who has been working as a developer in the marketing industry for the past several years. Recently, he has worked with inbound marketers. A transcript is included in the presenter notes.
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Going big - Scaling with developers (w/ Transcript)
- 3. IF I COULD AUTOMATE I COULD SCALE ACROSS ALL MY CLIENTS
- 6. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE… WITH ENOUGH TIME AND MONEY
- 9. NOT EVERYTHING SCALES EASILY
- 10. HARD: AUTOMATED LINK BUILDING CLIENTS ARE UNIQUE
- 11. EASY: REPETATIVE BUSINESS TASKS DONE W/ EVERY CLIENT
- 13. IMAGINE: GOING ON VACATION!
- 14. STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS THAT DOESN’T NEED YOUR APPROVAL OR FEEDBACK
- 16. WHAT SCARES DEVELOPERS ARE STEPS THAT USE THE WORD SOMETIMES
- 17. STEPS THAT HAVE LOTS OF VARIABILITY IS WHERE WE FIND ERRORS IN THE CODE
- 18. VARIABILITY IS HARD TO CONTROL HARD TO SCALE
- 19. SIMPLIFY OR CUT OUT WHERE ADDING VARIABILITY DOESN’T ADD VALUE
- 20. WHERE STEPS ADD VALUE WORK CLOSELY WITH DEVELOPERS
- 22. DEVELOPERS ESTIMATES ARE MORE ACCURATE WHEN WE SEE THE WHOLE PICTURE
- 24. REALISTIC TIME ESTIMATE = (WHAT I THINK) x ( ) (APPROX. 3x) π
- 29. ADD EXTRA TIME (MULTIPLY BY )π
Editor's Notes
- Ok. Tell me if this sounds familiar to you: You’ve worked hard coming up with a link building strategy. You’ve pitched it to your client. You got the approval. You ran the campaign and it went big. You’ve nailed it.
- Now, you’re sitting back at your office. You want to do it for all your clients. You think, “If I could automate some part of it, it could scale.”
- Who wants to do all that copy / pasting and data crunching in Excel? Ain’t nobody got time for dat! So you hit up a developer:
- “Hey. Can you help me automate this? Is this possible?”
- Then I’m like: “Dude! Anything is possible… with enough time and money. So. How much money you got?” Cause you know if you’ve ever worked with developers, they aren’t cheap. Especially me.
- So before spending your money on developers, let’s talk about what you can do to maximize your spend and get stuff done.
- Before reaching out to developers use the process multiple times. In my experience it’s better when you’ve done this process multiple times with different clients.
- You see doing it a few times across different clients will bring out parts that won’t scale. Example: We did this interactive infographic thing. The idea was you could reuse the code and just swap out graphics and the data. Boom! New infographic! So scalable!The thing was - it worked well for some clients. It didn’t work for clients with serious technical issues.Not everything scales. Test your process with multiple clients before meeting a developer. You’ll find what scales and what doesn’t.
- But let me save you a little time: In my experience link building processes is hard to scale because each client is so unique.
- Now, business processes? That scales! It’s the stuff you repeat over and over for all your clients.
- I’ll give you an example: At another company I worked for I had to scale up an old process. Every time a client was on-boarded there was some basic stuff you had to do. Mainly typing clients into things like billing systems, Harvest, Basecamp, etc. Boring, time consuming, life crushing stuff. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a computer do that?Before I could write code – someone has to write down how to do it. Here’s how you should think about it:
- Imagine if you were going on vacation. For two years.
- You need to leave behind step-by-step instructions that someone could repeat over-and-over without needing you approval or feedback. Developers can turn step-by-step instructions into code. You’re delegating this over to a computer so you can do important things. Like go on vacations. You want the computer to do the right thing so you can do other stuff. Write down step-by-step instructions for developers.
- Ok. Does that delegating a big process to a computer scare you? I can understand that. As I see it - as scale goes up, quality goes down. Maybe that’s why hipsters like mom and pop shops and hate going to Walmart.
- What scares developers the most are steps in a process that involve the word “sometimes.” “After we send the client an invoice, sometimes the invoice goes to Larry but sometimes the invoice goes to Kristen.”
- Steps that involve variability is where most of the errors in the code happen.
- Now, I’m not saying that all variability is bad. In the right places like personalization, it’s very good. But bad variability is hard to control and hurts your ability to scale.
- Before working with developers - find the places in your process where variability doesn’t add any value. Simplify or cut them out. You don’t want us to find it for you. We’re expensive, remember?
- OK. So what do we do about the good variable steps? Those are steps that return the most value for you. This is where you want to work closely with us. Together we need to plan this part right.
- At this point, we need you to focus on the final outcome. What do you want this thing to look like when we’re done?Example: You’re going to get a CSV emailed to you. What is the exact order you want each column to be in?Which column should it be sorted by? Attention to detail is critical here.
- When you did everything manually, did you use spreadsheets? Do you have wireframes, mockups, old reports? Bring them all to the planning table. The more the better.Our estimates are more accurate when you bring everything on the table all at once.
- Ok. So finally, we need to leave some wiggle room. It might be administrative work, vacations, TPS reports… whatever. It’s just murphy’s law. Plan for that. When I estimated time, I had a silly rule:However long I thought it would take - I multiplied it by pi. Hey - It’s nerdy but it turned out to be pretty accurate!
- So. You’ve got a great process and you want to scale with automation.Test it with many clients
- Write it down step by step
- Simplify where variability doesn’t add value
- Focus on the final outcome
- And multiply time by pi.
- I’ll be around tonight for questions and I’m always on Twitter @iamchrisleGo big or go home. Thank you.