The Secrets to Building a Great Platform (So Your Developers Don’t Have To) | Xero

Of developer experience at Xero. And with me is my colleague Grace Benedict Rooney, who leads our Developer Evangelism team. So Grace and I will do a bit of a to and fro today, so you'll have the pleasure of hearing from both of us throughout the presentation. And we have carved out some time at the end to answer your questions, so feel free to fire them into the chat box throughout the session. Good man. Alan will bring those up a little bit later. So, for those who aren't familiar with who Xero is, we're a cloud based accounting software product turned small business platform and serving over 2.7 million customers globally. Why is the Xero story interesting? Because we were founded in New Zealand in 2006, you might tell by my accent. And we launched the world's first public cloud accounting API in 2009 and now we're everywhere. So coming from a small country at the other end of the earth, we quickly realized that in order to scale, we needed to leverage the developer community to help us build out and expand our platform through better tools, information and connections. And today we have more than 70,000 users of our public API and and over 1,000 connected apps in our ecosystem. Last month we launched the new Xero App Store, a new opportunity for us to work closely with our developer ecosystem to leverage our API to create innovative new tools to support small businesses globally. But forget the requisite marketing and PR stuff onto why I got up at 6am this morning. So what lessons, both good and bad, did we learn from our open API experience over the years? And how does it help bringing your developer community along with you help extend your platform as a whole? And what did we learn as a relatively small newcomer about setting up an App store? So there are a lot of ways to define a tech platform, but I really like sort of starting with how Bill Gates sees it. So he sees it as a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. And I think what he's really describing here is a marketplace of shared value based on open standards of connections and transactions. APIs have enabled the rise of such platforms by disrupting the traditional supply chain, providing things third party access, governance and transactions. It kind of seems obvious now, right? But it wasn't always the case even for us. And this is true like all the way from product platforms like Slack to pure marketplaces such as Airbnb. Airbnb don't even sell anything. They're merely facilitators of accommodation transactions. But imagine Trying to get a sweet pad in New York City for three nights without it. So much like the Double Royale with cheese. We want to double down on developers and so should you. They are your customers, they're just as important as the end users of your product. They grow your product, they shape it, they take your value prop places you didn't even imagine. And that's something that we really focus on encouraging. But it's not enough to just have a platform that enables third parties to integrate. Frankly, that's just table stakes. So in our experience, platform growth comes down to getting four things right. Firstly, make it easy to innovate on your platform, make the proposition attractive and make it fun. So what's your secret sauce, right? Is it access to a unique customer base? Does it provide unique access to data driven insights about the use of the platform? Are both of these things easy to access? And is your platform a chore to use or something intuitive and fun to tinker with? Is your dev support team a pleasure to work with or impossible to get hold of? Is your API clean and easy to use or a bug riddled mess full of breaking changes? Hopefully not. But if you get these aspects right, innovation occurs relatively well on its own. You'll not only attract new builders to your platform, but you'll continue to engage or retain existing players. Next one, strike that balance between your base and new prospects. This is one of the biggest challenges of running a developer ecosystem. How can you attract the new dev superstars to your platforms with new features, but also not pushing too hard that your mainstay supporters feel alienated? Number three, understand that you are one of many choices. This is so, so important when it comes to folks integrating with you because a lot of the time they build to your platform and then boom, they move on to the next project and forget about you. Yesterday's news.

So.

So how do you make it attractive enough for them to stay engaged, not only to keep updating and improving their integrations, but really looking at taking a risk or two developing a completely new implementation? Who are the people creating your killer app and how can you create dozens more like them? Now, I've worked with developers for over a decade now and I gotta tell you, pleasing them is tough. So fourth, and perhaps most important, my advice is to build the hard things so your developers don't have to. Any shortcuts or leg ups you can give them really helps. They'll love you for it and they'll pay you back in kind. And it's actually when you think about it, it's insane what the cloud has done for our industry in such a short period of time. You might remember that years ago it cost millions of dollars to bring a high quality product to market. That's why the industry was dominated by the biggest players, right? Well, that's changed forever and we've proven it. Xero have proven that by going global from a country that couldn't be further away from Silicon Valley. APIs are your passport to global markets and to world domination. And nowadays you can utilize services such as AWS for infrastructure, Google for identity, Stripe for billing, Salesforce, all of that, and then a myriad of different APIs that help you to monetize your data, forge profitable partnerships and just really lower the barriers to entry, I think. And with this ubiquitous access to cheap, reliable and globe spanning tech, developers can now really double down on their niche. Or as Stripe puts it, focus on the last mile of UX. Love that one. So open APIs are so, so important to how we achieved all of this. And we learned some hard lessons along the way. This typically happens when you're the first mover in your industry, as many of you in the room will know that. So for starters, and don't underestimate it, it's tough to justify an API development program. It was back in 2008 and it's still painful having to justify it now. Anyone in the audience who's been through this process can no doubt relate. And we were super lucky. We had a geek CEO in Rod Drury who had this vision of opening up our platform to extend the potential of our product. This opened the door to customers with more advanced needs. So we're capable. They built their own feature sets. But you need that initial phase. So the key lesson here, you need people believing that there's value in publishing your API, even if you cannot show that on a spreadsheet. Next one, make sure you get to market quickly and make changes while you still can. Because it gets a lot harder as the platform matures. And any breaking changes that you need to make take months and months to implement. Like, even with strong comms and execution plans, migration takes forever. Literally. We're in the middle of a two year migration right now. It's nuts. Now, we didn't get everything right from day one. No Siri, but we had to own it. So an example is where we implemented the methods and standards used to create and update data via our API. So in the opposite way to everyone else, man. But we did make up for it with solid documentation and code samples that are super clear. And consistent. So everyone knows how to use your API. The key lesson with this one? Stick with it even if you don't love what you've done, because consistency is so, so important now, your API will be used in ways that you never thought possible. So build and test with this in mind and take all feedback seriously. Be comfortable with the fact that you're going to be disappointing some customers constantly, probably, but be transparent and proactive about what you are doing and don't let their feedback fall into a black hole, which can often happen. Finally, bear in mind that it may take time and patience before you see real commercial outcomes, unless your API is your company product, which for us it's not. So the lesson here invest incrementally. An example for us at least, is that when we built out our developer relations capability, which is a great example, so now anybody building APIs at our company can really take advantage of that incremental spend. So, speaking of developer relations, it is my pleasure to pass the baton on to Developer Evangelism manager Grace Benedict Rooney to talk more about how we give developers the best possible experience. Over to you, Gracie.

Thanks for that, Dan. I want to pick up on that theme of developer first and discuss how we listen and engage, listen to and value all feedback from your customers, especially from the people who are building new capabilities that your commercial customers will be using. Ensure you get in front of them as much as possible. Remember they are shaping the experience with your platform, so keep those feedback loops open. I know that that can be especially hard at the moment during a pandemic, but we have the technology get in front of them virtually, run a webinar, get on camera, do a podcast, or look at a new medium of communication like TikTok, although I'm really not sure that's the one for me. The point is have a clearly articulated value proposition. I want you to really think about it. What is it about your ecosystem that no one else has? And double down on it. As Dan has indicated, developers have always got another platform they can develop for. Why should they work with you and what's in it for them now? Challenging the big app platforms of the world is no small feat. So we knew we needed to offer our developer partners the opportunity to to grow with us. As part of our process of engagement, we performed a survey of our entire ecosystem community and wow, look at what the data told us. For small businesses where the margins can be so small, we could see the real positive impact of connecting an app. On the developer side, the top three goals all pointed towards one thing, growth. One of the goals was about wanting to expand into new markets. This is particularly key for our app developer partners. While we're a strong brand in Australia and New Zealand and quickly growing in the UK and Asia, we are still a challenger brand in the Americas. Our competitive differentiator for our app developer community, which are predominantly based in these smaller markets, is to help them go global to crack Asia and the US where they can grow exponentially and earn that killer app status we mentioned before. The platforms you build need to truly help your partners shine and attract business. I don't just mean things like marketing and advertising that every platform offers. Developers expect more. You need to be looking at how you can share data with them and produce actionable insights to help them grow their business. We like to use the term matchmaker. How do we get better at putting the right apps in front of the end user? And how do we feed data around what apps are being consumed or what market areas are lacking to our app partners so that they can take advantage? Or in other words, how do we better facilitate supply to meet demand? This is the old model everyone remembers these marketplaces that were more like looking through a phone book for a plumber. A raw information dump with limited tools to help you sift out the dodgy plumbers from the good ones, a poor search experience combined with non curated app listings and certainly no data driven insights or lead generation for partners. Overall, a rather poor quality experience. Where you end up is here, the modern App Store, a superior ux, a search engine powered by machine learning which utilizes customer data to surface the right apps based upon their business profile. It provides actionable insights from that usage data to produce solid lead Gen for app developers, curated app listings and spam free reviews which give purchase confidence to the user. It should also have decent sales conversion tools such as single click, sign in or purchasing subscription models and even app trials. Meet servicemate, an example of one of our beta partners. They're an Aussie based startup that provides smart job management for trades and services. These are the kinds of partners we're attracting as we move away from being a pure accounting play and more into a complete small business platform. The stats here speak for themselves, but can you believe it? A 45% higher lead conversion. It's a pretty cool story to be able to share with you today. And with that, back to you Dan.

Awesome grace, fantastic insights there. I really enjoyed that and learned a lot as well. So let me just leave you with a couple of thoughts before we take your questions. We are running a little bit over time. But in addition to everything that we've covered today, make sure you're staunch on your values. Like walk the talk, let them guide everything that you do, and at least your community will know what to expect. Expect anyway. But the two that I hold myself and my team to first, one, be open as possible. The lower the barriers to entry, the more likely developers will be able to build cool stuff. And the second, always put the developer first. Build the ecosystem of innovation, then let them decide what best suits them. And in some cases, regardless of whether the app competes with you in some way, go controversial. Am I right? So thanks everyone for listening. You've been a stellar audience even though I can't see anybody. But please find us on Twitter, eathclock66 and graceybr. Check out 0 API handle and 0 developer YouTube channel if you want to learn a bit more about how we approach our developer engagement. So I believe we have some Q and A.

Excellent. Thank you both so much. Those were great presentations. And yes, we have some questions coming in from the audience. Ryan asks Dan, can you talk about what it means to be the general manager of the developer platform and share some best practices on how to organize for platform success?

Yeah. What does it mean to be general manager? When I get asked this question, what I do for a living, I am generally managing all the time. I have my fingers in every pie that I can. So how do you set yourself up for success? I guess one of the things that we've kind of learned is that you actually, from the beginning, you need to hustle, right? You need to hustle. You need to leave your title at the door when you walk into a meeting room or you're, you know, part of a sprint with a, with one of your teams, you've just got to get stuff done and doesn't matter kind of, kind of who you are. If documentation needs to be written or something needs to be tested, just get in there and hustle from the beginning. And once you've kind of proven that, then you can kind of scale your team and you no longer need to compromise in those roles. So we're kind of in the middle of scaling quite a lot, so now we can get all of those supporting roles. So it's really just about getting shit done at the beginning. And then once you've proven yourself, you can just really scale it out and maybe not do 16 hour days anymore.

Wonderful. Thanks Dan. We have another one here that says your strategy with open APIs was quite different to others in the market. Can you tell us a little bit about how that's changed over time?

Yeah, I guess from the beginning it was like the Amazing Race. We were racing to get our API at parity with our product. That was what all of our third party developers wanted. Wanted to access the same thing that our customers could access in the ui. Once we got that to a certain level, we decided to focus more on how do we make it easy, all of the developer tools, the developer website and things like that. And now we've sort of pushed the creation of APIs onto the actual product teams at Xero. It's sometimes pushing shit uphill a little bit with that, but we constantly evangelizing that. But the supply.