DevRel KPI: Community Responsiveness to reduce product struggle and leave users happy

I’m Albert, and I’m Head of Community and Developer Relations at CelerData. CelerData is a $60 million VC-funded startup that is building StarRocks, an open-source replacement for Snowflake, Big Query, and RedShift.

As the DevRel person, one KPI that I highly monitor and optimize is Community Responsiveness. We use Common Room as our monitoring tool and Common Room defines it as what percentage of members will respond to another (more at https://docs.commonroom.io/using-common-room/reporting-page/community-responsiveness). We specifically monitor Community Responsivesness WITHOUT a team member on that messaging thread.

Most people join our community properties for project help, specifically to ask a question. High Community Responsivesness WITHOUT a team member means one of several items:

• Our documentation isn’t comprehensive enough, and the documentation search is “not helpful.”
• There are too many unanswered questions on our community properties, which leaves a thin knowledge base.
• The (Slack and Discourse) search capability stinks across our knowledge base.
• Our product is difficult to understand and use.
• Our content, such as tutorials, articles, discourse threads, and slack messages, somehow isn’t being indexed by Google, so they can’t find their answer through their “usual” Q&A methods.
• Our marketing is attracting the wrong user base.

This means:

1. Users may, over time, build up too much product struggle and eventually quit.
2. I have to staff our community support channels with more people ($$$) to answer questions and build the knowledge base. Have those people also enhance our documentation, educate fellow community users, create articles to fill the gap and/or work with our committers to make enhancements to the product.***

There is more to it*** (tried a bunch of different tools*** and processes***, and Common Room has some issues***), but if I’ve done my work well, instead of very expensive developers answering questions 100% of the time, most of the answers will come from other members of the community, and I can redirect investments into growth and engagement.