#4 Building a fanbase through community engagement and advocacy with Andreas Grabner

Unlock the secrets of building a fan base that not just listens, but also advocates for your product and/or company. Get ready to be inspired and learn life-changing advocacy strategies from Andreas (Andi) Grabner. Andi is making waves on the world’s biggest stages as an advocate for Dynatrace and successfully built a community. 

Tune in to hear about his inspiring journey his values, and discover why his time on Boston’s dance floors led to more than just business success.

Episode links:

• Sue Quackenbush's LinkedIn
• Andi Grabner's Twitter Channel
• Connect with Andi Grabner on LinkedIn
• Pure Performance Podcast

Discover the opportunities at Dynatrace and take your career to the next level: careers.dynatrace.com

Transcript

Sue Quackenbush

Hi and welcome to Real Talks. I'm Sue Quackenbush, Chief People Officer at Dynatrace and your podcast host. I'm inviting Dynatracers from around the globe to have real conversations about their experiences shaping our vibrant global culture. Welcome to another episode of Real Talk. Today. I am super excited to be here with Andy Grabner, who is a DevOps activist at Dynatrace, an open source advocate and host of the Dynatrace Pure Performance podcast. And he travels around the globe, speaking on some of the largest stages to share knowledge with the community.

Andreas Grabner

Well, thank you so much, Sue, for the great introduction. It's it's been a long journey. I've been with Dynatrace for more than 15 years, believe it or not, and I've been in the industry since 1999. And so it's been a while.

Sue Quackenbush

It has been a while. And that's fantastic. And I'm excited to speak with you because, looking out, you have had so many opportunities to speak with so many wonderful people across the globe. I'd love to just get your thoughts on how did you become an advocate and what was your journey?

Andreas Grabner

So I think my journey started even before Dynatrace when I was put into a position to educate people because I showed them how to use the product that they bought in a better way. And this gave me a lot of great feedback and kind of like joy to help people with the software. And I think this is also what we do at Dynatrace. I started the podcast because we thought, or I thought back then, this is the right thing to do. I remember the early days when we built our community around Dynatrace and I always say I have a better term for it. I always like to say in my role I am building a fan base for Dynatrace. Why a fan base? Because fans are typically loyal. They are attached to an organization, to a product, to a brand, and I am just doing what I can do to use the great product that our colleagues are building and show it to people around the world and hope they will see the benefit it brings them and therefore convert them to fans so that they always want to come back and that they also become advocates for us.

Sue Quackenbush

So I love the term fan base. Has this journey and this support led to any impact on your personal life?

Andreas Grabner

I would say so and very much so, actually, because I was allowed to travel because I was allowed to actually switch countries. So I, I grew up here close to Linz where Dynatrace was founded, but I spent about eight years in the United States, in Boston. And first of all, one of the things that I learned in Boston pretty well, which I'm still very passionate about, is salsa dancing. This is something that some people know when I travel around the world, I always ask for the salsa places. But the best thing that happened to me personally is that I also met my wife actually on the dance floor in Boston, and I always keep telling the story that when I met her that she told me that she was working for a big bank and that she was actually working in the role that would have benefited from using Dynatrace. But they were using a competitive product, and back then I wasn't really sure I should ask for a date or should I ask her for a meeting. And in the end I got both. I got a date with her, and I got a meeting with her boss. So it was a win-win situation.

Sue Quackenbush

That is awesome. I love it. And on my bucket list is definitely to learn how to salsa dance. I'm always amazed at how graceful everyone is when they are dancing. So, when you think about flipping to community and fan base and networking, right. Can you share any tips or experiences on how to build a community, how to build this fan base?

Andreas Grabner

And first of all, it's it's a long lasting effort that they need to put in. It's not something that you do, and then immediately you build a fan base unless you're really lucky. But the most important thing is you need to give people something that helps them because without giving them something, you cannot expect things in return. And so what I try to do is I try to in the beginning, this was even before we started with YouTube, I started to collect my learnings and wrote down blogs. I wrote blogs about how to build better software, how to detect certain problem patterns in software based on findings I saw with the customers we spoke with. And so with this, I shared something through the medium of blogs with a global audience that day and actually saw a benefit in it because they could avoid these mistakes that I have seen others do. So I gave them something that they could benefit from even without having to buy the product, because I shared learnings independent of which product you would actually use when you when you're using observability tools, which is the space obviously we are in. And I think when you give people something and they have it has a positive impact, they will then come back to you. They will also appreciate it. Got a lot of great responses, whether it's a blog post talks that I had at conferences, to YouTube videos. And based on this feedback, you then see, hey, this person is now really getting a benefit. And therefore I think there's going to be a long term relationship. I can I can also then ask them in the future for a favor, because if we give people something, not only are they grateful for this, but eventually you can call in a favor as well. And the favor would then be something like, Hey, can you share your story? Because I need another story for the next blog, for the next video. I think just the last podcast we recorded last week, it was around sustainability, sustainability engineering. So I, for instance, did not know that when you're running workloads in the cloud, every cloud vendor has different data centers and every data center has a different, let's say, sustainability code, or I'm not sure what it's called - like a label such as green energy, dark energy and something like this. And so you can move around your workload based on whether, at a particular time during the day, this data center uses more green energy than at a different time of the day. And so things like this I didn't know. I'm learning a lot, or things like how companies like Facebook and Google, which we have on the podcast as well, how they are running 100,000 hosts and managing them. And this was one of our early episodes with Garanca. She was a performance engineer at Facebook and she told us how they how she helped scale Facebook to more than 100,000 hosts. And these are just phenomenal learnings and those are phenomenal individuals to be that we got to know, and this is how you then build a community that's amazing.

Sue Quackenbush

And so, Andy, one of the things that we're always looking to do is attract great talent to Dynatrace and retain our great talent. And for those individuals who are looking for an opportunity and looking at Dynatrace, can you in simple terms just explain what Dynatrace does and how does that impact our daily lives?

Andreas Grabner

I think for me what it means is that the world needs software to run perfectly, and if the software doesn't run perfectly, simple things like, you know, going to the grocery store and paying with your credit card wouldn't work. Or give you another example that is also close to my heart. I had just bought a new car and my new fancy car now has an app and I can use the app to turn on the AC. I can use the app to open the car doors or close it. So the thing is, when I click, when I open up the app and click on that button, a lot of things happen from the app sending the signal to the Beacon servers, the car picking up this signal and then doing my action. I if I stand in front of the car and try to open it and it doesn't open in a second and five intended never opens, then I'm not happy, then software doesn't run perfectly. So what we do at Dynatrace, we ensure that any software we interact with, whether it's directly with the human interaction or where the systems interact with each other, we want to make sure problems don't happen because in the end somebody will suffer from bad software.

Sue Quackenbush

Andy as you know, we've just rolled out new refreshed values for for Dynatrace and the importance of values that really help frame an organization. I'd love to understand where you got your values from and where you learned.

Andreas Grabner

I remember a big moment in my kind of life when I brought my dad on a trip to the US, and it was actually the first time I really had to spend time with him. I was ready in my mid-twenties. The reason being is because he was a farmer. I grew up on a farmhouse and he was always very busy because he was always on the fields. So we never really had time, at least for me, because he was going to work was more important. And I think this is, first of all, where the work ethic maybe comes in, maybe sometimes too much. But what he told me was a couple of life lessons. Don't hold yourself back by thinking somebody has an advantage over you. But because we all start with the same thing, you know, just be bold and you can do something. And don't just think you can't do it because you can't try at least. And then the other thing he said, you got to talk and listen to people because they will tell you what they need. And this is also where I believe some of the advocacy work comes in and building a community. Because if you listen to people and what they need, what their pains are, you can then better help them.

Sue Quackenbush

And so my dad is a farmer, and he still farms today as well as my brother is a farmer. So I totally understand the work ethic and that is so cool to bring your dad into the world that you, your profession, and where you work. Because, you know, my father has no idea what I do in a sense of understanding it. Cause it's so different, he is a small family farmer. And when you think back where you grew up, where I grew up - it's so critically important to rely on a community, to understand a community, to give back to a community. So thank you very much for sharing that. 

So, I want to thank you, Andy, very much for being here and for joining me today.

Andreas Grabner

Well, thank you Sue, for having me. and you know we talked a lot about advocacy today. I think we just advocated to your podcast about what we do at Dynatrace. I hope that people can listen to some of my episodes, to your episode. And in the end, I hope that you all now better understand what we do at Dynatrace and how we make sure that software runs perfectly. 

Sue Quackenbush

If you would like to dive deeper into what Andy is all about and what messages he's sharing, you can connect with him directly or check him out on PurePerformace Podcast. And you'll see tons and tons of information out there. And thank you very much, Andy, for joining me.