Defining the Cloud Foundry User Journey and the Developer Persona with Pivotal’s Dormain Drewitz

Cloud Foundry sponsored this podcast.

The user journey evolves at many levels, says Pivotal Software Senior Director of Product Marketing Dormain Drewitz. “There’s a couple of different user journeys that are really happening. You’ve got user journeys at the developer level, you have user journeys at more of the platform, engineering level, and the teams that are operating and building the platforms, and you have user journeys kind of at the business level and what does that mean for lines of business and their whole relationship to software?”

User Journey & Developer Persona, with Dormain Drewitz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Pivotal

During a podcast recording with TNS founder and editor-in-chief Alex Williams at Cloud Foundry Summit Europe, Drewitz discussed not only the user journey but the evolution of the developer persona itself. In particular, how developers can learn from those that came before them.

“Nothing exists in a vacuum. You can’t just plunk this down and we’re done,” Drewitz said, going on to explain that developers incorporating cf-push with their incorporation of CI/CD tooling, engage much earlier in a CI/CD pipeline that includes tools included for regulated industry, and may not ever interact with the cf-push command as a result. “That entire experience is a part of what the air quotes ‘platform experience’ is at that enterprise and so the teams that I think are benefiting from the learnings of earlier adopters are, ‘OK, this is what we need to take on and own, and this is the experience that we need to manage for our developers,’ now developers, the kind of things they’re focused on, their concerns have always been different than the platform builders.”

Drewitz then added that modernization and embracing modernization of core applications as a primary initiative is key to figuring out the future of some .NET and Java core applications that rely on Windows 2008, which goes out of support next year.

“I think a journey that lines of businesses need to be on is, ‘How is this actually going to drive revenue for us? How do we bring all of this change and transformation at the technology layer into the core business and it’s not just someone’s shiny promotion project off on the side?’ Cool, so you built some IoT event-driven serverless mobile experience, but none of it talks to any of our core back end systems and it’s not driving any revenue. Someone might have gotten a nice title promotion out of that, but has anything changed?”

In this Edition:

1:23: How do you define the user journey today? Has it adapted, or has it remained fundamentally the same?
6:22: Who’s the third user persona?
11:32: How do they do that? What’s your recommendation? What works, and what doesn’t work?
13:11: What are you explaining? What are you helping people understand more than just marketing your skillsets?
17:40: So, how are underrepresented minorities in tech moving into these spaces? What are the things people that are hiring should be aware of too?
21:19: What does Cloud Foundry have to do to continue its momentum, and with that user journey as a context?