The Journey to 80,000 Users: The Dynatrace Community growth, the leader behind it, and her career lessons

Karolina Linda is the Software Development Director and Organizational Lead in Gdańsk, Poland. She takes us behind the scenes of the incredible transformation of the Dynatrace Community—from a single Q&A forum to an community with 18 topic-focused forums, 5 engagement programs, and over 80,000 users worldwide.  

 Karolina shares her unique career journey of 15 years, from starting as an Information Developer to leading multiple global teams now. Hear how she took on opportunities that pushed her out of her comfort zone, how collaboration and sparring partners have shaped her career, and her advice for overcoming imposter syndrome to seize new challenges.  

Key Takeaways:  

• The insights into scaling a Q&A forum into a global, customer-centric community.  
• How to take the leap and grow beyond self-doubt in your career.  
• Why having supportive “sparring partners” is crucial for success.  

Tune in now to learn how you can apply her lessons to your own career.

Where to find us:    

• Connect with Sue Quackenbush on LinkedIn
• Connect with Karolina Linda on LinkedIn

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

Transcript

Sue

Hi, this is Sue Quackenbush, Chief People Officer at Dynatrace. And welcome to our next episode of Real Talks. In today's episode, I will be speaking with Karolina Linda, who is our Software Development Director and Organizational lead in our Gdansk, Poland office. Welcome, Karolina.

Karolina

Hi, Sue, it's great to be here.

Sue

I am so excited to speak with you today, and one of the areas I'd love to learn more about is your spearheading the growth of our customer-centric Dynatrace Community. And what I would love to understand is what the heck is a customer centric Dynatrace Community? How did you start it? What is it?

Karolina

So our Dynatrace Community is actually a space, a thriving space where our customers, partners, employees, but also prospects can learn, can gain knowledge about the product, and can also post product ideas. For example, we create a new app, let's say for host monitoring. And our Product Manager, instead of thinking of a future that he thinks will address customer use cases, goes to the Dynatrace Community, creates a thread telling customers, hey, we are planning to do this or that, even providing some mockups, and then customers can comment on that. They can provide their use cases. Hey, actually use case number three doesn't make any sense. No one will use it. Please do this or that instead. And this is where also developers can see that feedback developers can assess. Is it a quick win or is it something that doesn't pay off because this will be just for one customer? So there are so many ways how customers contribute to product development, and how Dynatrace orders use customers and partners and their engagement to create a better product.

Sue

So, how did you start this?

Karolina

Oh, so that was a real twist in my career at Dynatrace, because I began as an information developer in the documentation team back in 2009. So over 15 years ago, but then when I came back from my second maternity leave, I was actually offered to take on the global Dynatrace Community. And I thought, oh my, like, who am I? Just the Community manager, you know, from Gdansk, from Poland, in such a global company? But I was really surrounded by very supportive people, and I decided to go for it because I really, I really see value in building such relations and such connections.

Sue

That's wonderful. And, Karolina, I think your your story on how you got involved is really interesting because I love the idea of, you know, just having an opportunity come across, you come across and you really taking a hard look at that opportunity to step out of your comfort zone and try something new and be able to grow in probably ways that you didn't even anticipate. So, you know, the thought of, hey, anyone can do amazing things and anyone has the opportunity or can have the opportunity to really expand. Um, but you have to take that leap of faith. You have to take that risk. So I give you a lot of credit for making that move, to take that chance and to really make something happen. And when you think about this customer-centric Community, what are the goals of the Community?

Karolina

Currently, our main goal is to basically create a thriving ecosystem where people can connect, where they can learn, where they can share support, resources, and where we facilitate those discussions. So in the last three years, basically, we came from just one open Q&A forum for Dynatrace to 18 different topic-oriented forums from just two engagement programs into five. So the growth is just amazing. We doubled our user base. So three years ago it was around like 40 K. So now we have 81,000, users there, which is amazing. So they have support 24 seven. But what is really most valuable I think are connections that people made there.

Sue

That is amazing. I mean, just listening to the growth of the events and the number of, um, participates in the Community is tremendous. How do people find out about the Community.

Karolina

Oh different ways. I would say, because most of the traffic to our Community, of course, comes from Google, because people look for solutions to their problems, to look for answers to their questions. So in many cases, when they look for something related to Dynatrace, they end up reading the Community content. Also, our customers learn about the Dynatrace Community through their onboarding process. Everyone that is actually trying out our free trial can also create an account in the Community. So I would say there are many ways of learning about this.

Sue

That's amazing. And then what about the team? Because when you said in the beginning you started with a team of one yourself. How big is your team today?

Karolina

I have actually four different teams reporting to me right now. So team number one writes our product documentation. These are information developers who are responsible for our official documentation that is out there searchable in Google; team number two. So the Community team is responsible for driving our global forums, our official product forums. They are responsible for the Community basically end to end, from moderation to running and engagement programs. Um, team number three is a team of software engineers. So I do have an engineering team that is responsible for maintaining a crazy number of various platforms and services on which our support resources run. So they maintain the documentation platform, the Community Platform, enterprise Search Redirect service, developer portal, and team number four is the App Dev Advocacy team. And this is a team of developer advocates that actually go there and support developers how to build apps on the Dynatrace platform. So they create content, they do workshops, they create video materials. They do everything to enable developers to create apps on our fantastic platform.

Sue

That's great. And what an amazing growth story. Um, so I'm going to switch now subjects and focus. And when you think about your career, what drives you to embrace this change in these challenges?

Karolina

So I love working with people. I always so value in the Dynatrace Community, for example. Now I'm responsible for other support resources. So also for our global documentation team or our global Supportability tooling team developer advocates. So seeing the value, knowing that what you do, is meaningful to someone, that it actually helps our customers, our partners. This is what makes me wake up every morning.

Sue

Hey. That's wonderful. And you've grown a lot, right? So how has this accelerated your personal growth?

Karolina

I probably became a little bit more confident, so stepping out of a comfort zone is slightly easier than it was some years agoб although this podcast is, for example, a really big step for me out of my comfort zone because I really don't like videos, nor audio recordingsж so just a disclaimer here, but yeah, I think it comes with experience. It comes with different roles. So the more you learn, I think the more confident also you become.

Sue

What advice would you give to someone who's hesitant?

Karolina

I would say find a good sparring partner. So I used to have fantastic sparring partners throughout the years,, with whom I could actually discuss the most crazy ideas, the most challenging opportunities that were there on the plate, who could also provide very honest feedback and who could help me set the direction, maybe set the focus better. So having such a sparring partner, you can call it a mentor. I prefer calling it a sparring partner, because I love to have a person through whom I can really throw my ideas. Discuss challenges. Discuss opportunities, and hear that honest feedback.

Sue

That's wonderful. Thank you. And then when you think about, you know, what can listeners learn from your experience in stretching their own boundaries in their careers and beyond?

Karolina

I would say, don't overthink and don't think that you are not suited for this or that job. If people tell you that you have the skills, that you have the competencies there, believe them. Because, from my experience, and speaking for myself, we tend to be sometimes too modest, sometimes we have this impostor sydrome that is teliing us: no, you are not ready, you need more experience, so wait a bit there are better people for that role... So make sure that you have those [supportive] people around you that can sometimes give you that push or that kick to push you forward.

Sue

What I'm hearing is: Go for it. Don't overthink. Take the risk. Be open. And just keep moving forward. So Karolina, thank you so much for this wonderful discussion. It wa great to lelarn how you were able to establish such a large, global community within Dynatrace. I wanna thank you for your time and have a beautiful day.

Karolina

Thank you very much.

Sue

Thank you everyone for tuning into today's podcast, if you would like to follow usm please do so on Apple and Spotify.