In the last quarter of our fiscal year, which ended on March 31, that meant announcing the availability of Stack Overflow for Teams in the Microsoft Azure marketplace while launching Topic Collectives and Staging Ground Beta 2 on our public platform. But most significantly, we accelerated our AI efforts internally and look forward to sharing more this summer. I’m excited to see how we leverage our domain focus and special community-driven blend of trust, recognition, and accuracy to GenAI.

Profitable growth is the new mantra 

Stack Overflow, and Stack Overflow for Teams, in particular, is well-suited to the industry-wide shift from “growth-at-all-costs” to profitable, sustainable expansion I mention above. 

We continue to evolve as an organization, focusing on a path to profitability in addition to navigating a dynamic external market. Part of this evolution led us to make the difficult decision to reduce our headcount by 10% last month. Through these changes, I remain grateful for our community, which is the basis of everything we do, and for the many Stackers who demonstrate great resilience and live our mission and values each day. 

Every organization is incentivized to add new products and revenue streams using incremental capital. This is a rational approach when top line growth is all that matters and additional investment is widely available. However, in the new world of profitable growth, incremental resources are no longer cheap and accessible. As a result, productivity and efficiency are critical. To continue growing, every company needs to do more with the resources it has, and every employee (not just those in Sales) must understand that their actions impact revenue. 

This is especially important for developers. Often, a new feature or product is the difference between closing a new customer/growing an existing one and seeing deals slip to the next quarter or fall out of the pipeline entirely. In fact, research from McKinsey shows that companies who innovate through crises not only outperform the market by 10% during the crisis but also realize a 30% average long-term gain. 

A company whose innovation strategy I’ve long admired is NI (National Instruments). The company has been developing cutting edge technologies and products since it was founded in the mid 1970s. Today, given the pace of change, that means taking a technology they’ve been developing for a number of years and bringing it to a new tech stack—whether third party or open source—to enable their product development goals.

Since the company adopted Stack Overflow for Teams, as showcased in the video case study below, technologists within NI spend less time waiting for answers and guidance and now have a channel for the “cultural value of collaboration.”

“They are creating this culture on Stack Overflow where it’s become a really safe place to ask a question, a safe place to provide an answer, and try to get people closer to their solution, and I think that’s part of what’s made it really successful and where we found a lot of value.”

In a dynamic world, innovation is a powerful way to grow, yet it has to happen via an increase in productivity, not an increase in spending overall. That makes Stack Overflow for Teams a critical tool for all organizations; we know it accelerates innovation by increasing developer productivity and overall engineering capacity. 

Looking forward to growth and the impact of community on AI

When I think about Stack Overflow’s future, what makes me most excited is how we are innovating, and that’s largely based around the work that we’re doing to incorporate GenAI into our products. 

Part of innovation is exposure to how things could be done differently. If there’s no exposure to how it could be done differently, there’s no learning/experiencing alternative techniques, there’s no innovation. As with the rise of remote and hybrid work at the beginning of the pandemic, those companies who embrace opportunities to leverage generative AI and automation in their everyday work flows in intentional ways that assist the productivity of their workers will be the most successful in this next phase of the modern workplace. Our vision for community and AI coming together means the rise of GenAI is a big opportunity for Stack. Approximately 10% of our company is working on features and applications leveraging GenAI that have the potential to increase engagement within our public community and add value to customers of our SaaS product, Stack Overflow for Teams.  We believe that the developer community can play a crucial role in how AI accelerates, ultimately helping with the quality coming out of GenAI offerings—and in that, further improving the modern workplace as we know it. 

Stack Overflow for Teams is uniquely positioned for this moment. But beyond this clear value prop, what really sets us apart is the strength of the community. The community is often our biggest champion in the enterprise; its members want to use a tool they know and trust to manage their proprietary information and collaborate with peers who are likely familiar with Stack Overflow as well. Community is our competitive advantage and a key reason we remain insulated from the worst of the business cycle’s ups-and-downs. 

We believe GenAI can be a similar competitive advantage for Stack Overflow. We have the domain focus and community trust to responsibly deploy generative AI to improve our existing suite of products and lead to new solutions and revenue streams. An example of where we have already begin to experiment in order to improve the platform is our generative AI tool to suggest better question titles. As our VP of Community points out, the this tool serves three purposes. First, question askers spend less time crafting the perfect title for their questions, and instead can focus on the content of the question. Second, question reviewers are able to better understand the content of the question, making it easier to suggest edits or improve the post. Finally, end users of Stack Overflow can more easily understand if the question is relevant to their needs. This tool is one of many that we are launching in coming weeks.

Our community has given us feedback through the evolution of this tool, and their feedback is critical to how it scales. As the AI landscape continues to evolve, the need for communities that can nurture, inform, and challenge these technologies becomes paramount. These platforms will not only offer the necessary guidance to refine AI algorithms and models but also serve as a space for healthy debate and exchange of ideas, fostering the spirit of innovation and pushing the boundaries of what AI can accomplish.

We want to be able to continue to invest back into our community, and that’s why we’re also exploring what data monetization looks like in the future. LLMs are trained off Stack Overflow data, which our massive community has contributed to for nearly 15 years. We should be compensated for that data so we can continue to invest back in our community. This also boils down to proper attribution. Our data represents significant effort and hard work stored across our site and LLMs are taking those insights and not attributing to the source of that knowledge.  This is about protecting the interest in the content that our users have created as much as it is the fight for data quality and AI advancement. 

Our thesis on community as the center of a safe, productive, and open future for AI also offers some exciting prospects for our business. Stack Overflow for Teams, our enterprise, private version of Stack Overflow, helps to power a community-driven knowledge base inside of 15K+ organizations like Box, Microsoft, and Liberty Mutual. Decades of institutional knowledge, shaped and curated by subject matter experts and experienced teams, allows the employees at these organizations to more easily collaborate, improving productivity and trust.

There is no doubt that code will be created more quickly and the volume is likely to explode with code completion tools and the need for trust will increase. Stack Overflow for Teams is essential for keeping up with the pace of change. It allows SMEs to review complex code, warn of risks and cascade and ensure adherence to company standards and policies. With the community as our foundation, Stack Overflow for Teams as our growth engine, and GenAI as our accelerator of the future, we are well-positioned to grow no matter the environment around us. 

Stack Overflow for Teams now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Despite our focus on the future, we accomplished a lot over the last several months. High on that list of accomplishments is our partnership with Microsoft, which is making our SaaS solution more easily accessible than ever before. The addition of Stack Overflow for Teams in the Azure Marketplace is the latest expansion of our relationship with Microsoft and follows the launch of the Microsoft Azure Collective on Stack Overflow. 

With Stack Overflow for Teams in the Azure Marketplace, Stack Overflow customers can now take advantage of the scalability, high availability, and security of Azure while streamlining deployment and management. That means developers and technologists can access the institutional knowledge they need while having the ability and digital space to collaborate and build innovative features quickly—rather than wasting countless hours searching for an answer to or expert on a problem that was seconds away from their fingertips.

After the launch of the Azure Collective on Stack Overflow and the existing integration between Microsoft Teams and Stack Overflow for Teams, our availability in the Azure Marketplace was an exciting and logical next step.

Staging Ground Beta 2 and finding your sub-community

In addition to making it easier for customers to deploy Stack Overflow for Teams, we’re also working to make it easier for individuals to join the Stack Overflow community and find their place within it. 

Staging Ground is a key part of this effort, and I discussed it briefly in my last blog post. Since then, this new public platform feature, which allows new askers to receive guidance from more experienced community members before posting their first questions publicly, has completed Beta 1 and entered Beta 2. 

Beta 2 expands on the success of Beta 1 with a wider release, comment templates and guidelines for reviewers, and a new UI, among other improvements. We hope to confirm our findings from Beta 1, which found—among other things—that questions approved in Staging Ground had an 85% greater success rate than their non-Staging Ground counterparts. 

Perhaps most importantly, we hope that Staging Ground can help us welcome and grow the next-generation of technologists by exposing them to mentorship from more experienced users and moderators. One community member summed up our ambitions nicely when they said, “I found it surprisingly satisfying to help a new asker learn how to turn a poorly-asked question into a well-asked one.” 

I’m excited for Staging Ground Beta 2 to continue our progress making it simple and efficient to access the wealth of knowledge and experience the Stack Overflow community contains. 

The launch of Topic Collectives: R and CI/CD

Topic Collectives also seek to make knowledge and expertise more easily accessible. They build on the success of Company Collectives and have a similar goal: to serve as a dedicated space where developers and technologists can find content organized around a specific area of interest. 

In my January post, I highlighted Collectives for each of the big three cloud providers—AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Now, I’m excited to announce our first two Topic Collectives: R and CI/CD. As we expand the number of Collectives on Stack Overflow, our belief is they will serve as a vehicle through which every member of the larger community can find smaller sub-communities best suited to their needs and interests. 

A healthy community is essential to our company mission and higher purpose of empowering the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. We will never lose sight of how important, impactful, and unique it is. The trust of our community is as essential as the trust in the data it produces. Whether it is the shared passion for a given topic or the shared knowledge of a given specialty, Stack Overflow remains a destination for developers and technologists to solve problems. The problems we solved back in 2008 are not the ones we solve in 2023. Our evolution in offerings is what keeps our users coming back—and keeps us a go-to resource. I continue to be excited about our future and what we’ll share with you in the coming months.  Until then, I continue to be thankful for our customers and community members that help us in our mission to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge.

The post CEO Update: Paving the road forward with AI and community at the center appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

First and foremost, I want to recognize the impact this decision has on employees who are directly affected. This is painful for them, and we are supporting those employees through this transition with severance packages, extensions of healthcare benefits, and outplacement services. As CEO I take full ownership of this decision and it weighs heavily on me. To those of you affected, I want to extend my deepest gratitude for your contributions to the company and for all of your hard work.

Our focus for this fiscal year is on profitability and that, along with macroeconomic pressures, led to today’s changes. They were also the result of taking a hard look at our strategic priorities for this fiscal year as well as our organizational structure as we invest in the continued growth of Stack Overflow for Teams and pursue agility and flexibility as we launch AI/ML-focused offerings in the months ahead. Our commitment is to continue to provide our customers with the level of service they expect and to the users of our public platform—the knowledge they’ve been seeking from Stack Overflow for nearly 15 years.

Next week I’ll share another blog post on the business looking at fiscal year Q4 in review and the road ahead. I appreciate your patience and kindness as we navigate through this difficult time.

The post A Message from Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO Stack Overflow appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Over nearly 15 years, Stack Overflow has built the largest online community for coders to exchange knowledge, a place where anyone with an internet connection can ask or answer questions, free of charge, and learn from their peers. Stack Overflow for Teams, our enterprise SaaS product, is trusted by over 15,000 organizations to serve as their internal knowledge bases. With the recent advent of dramatically improved artificial intelligence, many industries are wondering how technologies like ChatGPT will change their business. For software development, the answer seems more immediate than most. Even before the latest wave of AI, a third of the code being written on popular code repositories was authored by an AI assistant. 

Today, sophisticated chatbots, built on top of cutting edge large language models (LLM), can write functional code for a website based on nothing more than a photo of a rough sketch drawn on a napkin. They can answer complex queries about how to build apps, help users to debug errors, and translate between different languages and frameworks in minutes. At Stack Overflow, we’ve had to sit down and ask ourselves some hard questions. What role do we have in the software community when users can ask a chatbot for help as easily as they can another person? How can our business adapt so that we continue to empower technologists to learn, share, and grow?

It’s worth reflecting on an important property of technological progress. The Jevons Paradox shows us that, as innovation allows us to do more, we settle on a new normal, moving the goal posts for what we expect of people and organizations, then competing to see who can find new ways to pull ahead of the pack. For knowledge work, as the cost of an action diminishes, we often do more of it. Abstracting away repetitive or tedious tasks frees technologists up to make new discoveries or progress innovation.

If new AI systems make it possible to create software simply by chatting with a computer, my prediction is that, far from the job of programmer disappearing, we’ll end up with millions of new software developers, as workers from fields like finance, education, and art begin making use of AI-powered tools that were previously inaccessible to them. We are enthusiastic about welcoming this next generation of developers and technologists, providing them with a community and with solutions, just as we have for the last 15 years. We’ve got a dedicated team working on adding GenAI to Stack Overflow and Stack Overflow for Teams and will have some exciting news to share this summer.

I’m not alone in thinking AI might lead to an explosion of new developers. I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed recently by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, by Geoff Hinton, the godfather of the neural network approach that produced today’s AI revolution, and by Stephen Wolfram, a pioneer across computer science and mathematics. Each sees in today’s AI the potential for the loss of certain jobs, yes, but also, if history is a guide, a future in which a great variety of more highly skilled work becomes available to an even larger group of people. Just as tractors made farmers more productive, we believe these new generative AI tools are something all developers will need to use if they want to remain competitive. Given that, we want to help democratize knowledge about these new AI technologies, ensuring that they are accessible to all, so that no developers are left behind. 

I talk to developers of varying experience levels all of the time, and I’ve been hearing anecdotes of novice programmers building simple web apps with the help of AI. Most of these stories, however, don’t begin and end with an AI prompt. Rather, the AI provides a starting point and some initial momentum, and the human does additional research and learning to finish the job. The AI can debug some errors, but is stymied by others. It can suggest a good backend service, but often can’t solve all the points of friction that arise when integrating different services. And of course, when a problem is the result not of instructions from a machine, but human error, the best answers come from other people who have experienced the same issues. 

For more experienced programmers, AI will be an amplifier of their existing skill, making them more ambitious in their projects. The result, as Jevons would predict, is that they spend more time with AI, but also more time creating new ideas, researching new topics, and asking new questions that had not occurred to them before. They feel empowered to reach farther beyond their traditional skillset and to push the boundaries in terms of the kind of work they want to take on.

We are excited about what we can bring to the fast moving arena of generative AI. One problem with modern LLM systems is that they will provide incorrect answers with the same confidence as correct ones, and will “hallucinate” facts and figures if they feel it fits the pattern of the answer a user seeks. Grounding our responses in the knowledge base of over 50 million asked and answered questions on Stack Overflow (and proprietary knowledge within Stack Overflow for Teams) helps users to understand the provenance of the code they hope to use. We want to help coders stay in the flow state, allowing them to create with the latest tools with the confidence that they will be able to document and understand the provenance, source, and context of the code being generated. 

Community and reputation will also continue to be core to our efforts. If AI models are powerful because they were trained on open source or publicly available code, we want to craft models that reward the users who contribute and keep the knowledge base we all rely on open and growing, ensuring we remain the top destination for knowledge on new technologies in the future.

AI systems are, at their core, built upon the vast wealth of human knowledge and experiences. They learn by training on data – for example open-source code and Stack Overflow Q&A. It is precisely this symbiotic relationship between humans and AI that ensures the ongoing relevance of community-driven platforms like Stack Overflow. Allowing AI models to train on the data developers have created over the years, but not sharing the data and learnings from those models with the public in return, would lead to a tragedy of the commons. It might be in the self-interest of each developer to simply turn to the AI for a quick answer, but unless we all continue contributing knowledge back to a shared, public platform, we risk a world in which knowledge is centralized inside the black box of AI models that require users to pay in order to access their services. 

As the AI landscape continues to evolve, the need for communities that can nurture, inform, and challenge these technologies becomes paramount. These platforms will not only offer the necessary guidance to refine AI algorithms and models but also serve as a space for healthy debate and exchange of ideas, fostering the spirit of innovation and pushing the boundaries of what AI can accomplish.

Our thesis on community as the center of a safe, productive, and open future for AI also offers some exciting prospects for our business. Stack Overflow for Teams, our enterprise, private version of Stack Overflow, helps to power a community-driven knowledge base inside of 15K+ organizations like Box, Microsoft, and Liberty Mutual. Decades of institutional knowledge, shaped and curated by subject matter experts and experienced teams, allows the employees at these organizations to more easily collaborate, improving productivity and trust. 

Incorporating generative AI technologies into the organizations using Stack Overflow for Teams will allow us to layer a conversational interface on top of this wealth of information. We believe this could lead to tremendous productivity gains: from new hires being able to onboard more quickly, to speed up developer workflows, as users are able to quickly ask questions and retrieve answers tapping into the company’s history, documentation and Q&A.

The example above is just one of many possible applications of GenAI to our Stack Overflow public platform and Stack Overflow for Teams, and they have energized everyone at our company. We’ll be working closely with our customers and community to find the right approach to this burgeoning new field and I’ve tasked a dedicated team to work full time on such GenAI applications. I’ll continue to share updates through channels such as my quarterly CEO blog, but I’ll be back in touch soon to announce something big on this topic. In the meantime, thank you to our community and customers for continuing to help us on our mission to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge.

The post Community is the future of AI appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Overall, it was a busy and successful quarter, so although my first update of 2023 takes place in a fundamentally different environment than my first of 2022, my optimism for the future has not changed. It’s simply joined by a dose of pragmatism. 

Productivity and efficiency: Twin themes of the new year

In today’s economic environment, productivity and efficiency are more important than ever. For many companies, these are the themes of the new year, and our goal is to provide productivity and efficiency to customers through Stack Overflow for Teams, to technologists through our public platform, and to our employees through smarter processes and ways of working. 

At a recent dinner with senior technology executives in San Francisco, it was clear this focus on productivity is widely shared. Every CIO and CTO present spoke of their need to increase productivity, and most rightly view developer experience as a key lever in that effort.

When it comes to dev experience, few initiatives are more impactful than those that encourage cross-org information sharing and reduce toil — the manual, repetitive administrative work that hampers creativity and innovation.  

One Stack Overflow for Teams customer in the retail space, for example, estimates that its cloud team could free up 20-30% of its time by eliminating the need to answer duplicative questions. This customer recently went through a complex merger and said Stack Overflow for Teams connected employees from the less technologically transformed part of the organization with their new, more tech-savvy peers. Ultimately, more efficient knowledge reuse helped it save nearly 10,500 hours over the last 12 months and drove meaningful progress in unifying and codifying critical institutional knowledge. 

That’s an enormous boost to developer productivity, which we know drives developer happiness and retention in turn. In fact, happiness and productivity are inextricably linked; our data shows that feeling unproductive is the top driver of developer unhappiness at work — and currently, a team of 50 devs loses between 333 and 651 hours per week on average searching for answers and solutions. 

Stack Overflow for Teams — “A revolution to IT” 

As I reflect on the quarter behind us and look forward to what’s likely to be a volatile year ahead, I firmly believe developer experience is one of the most effective ways for organizations to accelerate tech modernization while dealing with tighter budgets, scarcer resources, and greater scrutiny on investments. Anecdotally, it seems technology leaders agree.

I am excited about this growing realization and about the many organizations who are using Stack Overflow for Teams as the basis of that experience. With Stack Overflow for Teams, companies are onboarding developers faster. Their employees are avoiding roadblocks by more efficiently finding the answers they need when they need them. And overall, companies that leverage Stack Overflow for Teams are reducing toil and driving innovation by minimizing interruptions and ensuring common problems only have to be solved once. 

The importance of these attributes cannot be overstated. They’re why Stack Overflow for Teams was recently recognized in G2’s Winter 2023 report as a Leader in the Knowledge Management, Q&A Platforms, and Knowledge Base categories. 

I’m proud of the Stack Overflow team for their continued impact and grateful they’re being recognized for it. I especially love browsing our G2 review page and hearing from people like Mahbub who called Stack Overflow for Teams “a revolution to the IT world.” 

More efficiently find the cloud resources you need

Our work with Stack Overflow for Teams is one part of our overall vision to become the most valuable destination for the world’s current and next generation of technologists. Our public platform is the other key piece of this vision. In the last quarter, we redoubled our efforts here, with a particular focus on bringing to life our core values of Learn, Share, Grow; Keep Community at Our Center; and Be Flexible and Inclusive. 

First, we expanded our relationship with the big three cloud providers. Today, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud all have Collectives on Stack Overflow. This is an important step in our long-term evolution to allow users to self-select into smaller communities of practice that can more efficiently learn, share, and grow together. 

It’s an important moment for our customers, too. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud (in addition to our other Collectives clients) can now meet their customers where they already are and build a trusted, bilateral connection through which to share accurate, cutting-edge information and updates. That includes announcing new releases, offering direct customer support, endorsing answers to user questions, and reviewing product feedback from the community. 

Combined, Stack Overflow already has 1.6 million AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud related questions and answers. We’re excited to see that number grow with the new Collectives. 

Learn and grow via Stack Overflow’s new Online Learning partners

With Collectives, we’re making it more efficient for users to find the support and knowledge they need. Today’s launch of Online Course Recommendations has a similar goal. 

Stack Overflow research found the first and often most difficult challenge in a technologist’s learning journey is figuring out where to start. Our Chief Product Officer, Teresa Dietrich, spoke about this challenge in depth during her Flow State talk, and as Stack Overflow evolves the platform to empower technical communities to learn, share, and grow together, we wanted to prioritize this important community need. 

With today’s Online Course Recommendations launch, you’ll begin to see relevant courses from two popular online learning platforms, Udemy® and Pluralsight®. These course recommendations will appear as an ad module on the right-hand side of question pages on Stack Overflow. We hope this makes it easier for technologists — 70% of whom are learning a new technology at least once a year — to find appropriate, trusted resources. Udemy and Pluralsight were chosen as launch partners for exactly this reason; our 2022 Developer Survey found many respondents are already turning to these providers for their online learning needs.

Online Course Recommendations and our new Collectives are additional steps on our path to providing all the resources you need in one place. In the future, we may expand on them by helping the communities on Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network discover more trusted quality content and resources; find, build, and share learning paths; create even more focused, connected communities; and have access to hands-on learning opportunities.  

A year of continuous improvement

As we focus on driving productivity and efficiency with all our products, we are doing the same internally. The goal is continuous improvement in the year ahead, and we are constantly soliciting feedback across our public platform and paid products with that in mind. Based on user feedback and our own qualitative and quantitative research, we’re investing in areas where there’s a clear opportunity to solve developer and technology problems.

The Staging Ground is a great example. This new public platform feature (which will initially be found only on Stack Overflow)  will allow new askers to receive guidance from more experienced community members  before posting their first questions publicly. 

We believe Staging Ground will make our community more welcoming and inclusive by making it easier for first-timers to learn Stack Overflow’s norms and best practices. An expanded beta is coming soon and an MVP later this calendar year. 

In addition to Staging Ground, we’re also closely monitoring ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, and we’re thinking through their impact on the  community and products. Generative AI is evolving rapidly, and new use cases and risks appear each day. The community is certainly engaged on the issue; we saw a 20% year-over-year spike in questions and answers with AI-related tags following ChatGPT’s release, which reversed an overall AI-related tag decline of 12% YoY. 

We share the community and world’s excitement about the potential of generative AI. Our Product and Engineering teams are exploring all possibilities, and as usual, we will update and find opportunities to bring you into the conversation whenever possible. 

Stack Overflow has always been built by the community for the world. I want to take a moment to highlight the critical role of our moderators on big issues like ChatGPT and on countless smaller day-to-day occurrences. In 2022, our ten most active moderators (out of 600 total) responded to over 440,000 content flags (requests for moderator action) — and our most active moderator of that group dealt with 104,000 flags alone.

Stack Overflow’s success is in a large part due to their tireless contributions, and in this year’s edition of Stack Gives Back, we are pleased to donate over $54,000 on behalf of our moderators to Doctors Without Borders, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Girls Who Code, the International Rescue Committee, and UNICEF. 

Our path to profitability

The next 12 months will inevitably bring more surprises and disruptive innovations. However, we are well-positioned for FY2024 regardless of what happens in the world around us. The community is strong and growing; our Stack Overflow for Teams product is increasingly mission critical; our company surpassed 500 Stackers for the very first time; and our path to profitability is clear. 

In fact, at the Prosus and Naspers Capital Markets Day in December, I walked through that path and highlighted the key role of Stack Overflow for Teams on it. That’s not to say our Ads and Employee Branding businesses aren’t important. Rather, it’s a sign of how strong Stack Overflow for Teams’ performance has been. 

In the first half of FY23, more than 50% of Stack Overflow revenue came from Stack Overflow for Teams — a SaaS product that only launched in 2018. We believe Stack Overflow for Teams is a powerful, sustainable, and all-weather growth engine for this company. 

2022 was about investing in that engine and in the company as a whole. 2023 is about the pivot from growth towards becoming profitable again — just as we were in 2018, 2019, and 2020. 

Despite the economic volatility around us, there will always be a market for organizations who help customers succeed in their technology transformations. We look forward to driving productivity, efficiency, and transformation for our customers and users in the year ahead.

The post CEO update: Eliminating obstacles to productivity, efficiency, and learning appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

As I mentioned, last month we hosted our first conference for technology leaders, Stack Overflow’s Flow State, in New York City and online. It was incredible to see so many people engaged in-person and virtually who are impacted by the work we are doing. Throughout the day, we heard from technology leaders at companies like Capgemini, Etsy, Indeed, and Salesforce about how they’re tackling major transformations, managing distributed environments, and empowering their developers and technologists to be more productive. Through multiple stories on stage, it was clear that creating easier ways for teams to onboard and learn as they work is just as critical on small teams as large teams. Stack Overflow’s suite of products, Stack Overflow for Teams, Stack Overflow Advertising, Stack Overflow Talent, and Collectives on Stack Overflow, are doing just that.

I started my opening keynote by discussing major industry challenges like the fact that global talent shortage is expected to reach 85.2 million by 2030. 

At a macro level, we need to empower non-traditional learning so that the talent pool can expand faster to meet growing market demand. We have an opportunity to help individuals just as much as we help businesses. The average cost for a top 10 computer science undergraduate degree is over $38,000 per year depending on where you live and what school you go to. Yet, the median household income in the U.S. is just under $68,000 per year. At Stack Overflow, we’ve always seen it as our responsibility to ensure technical learning resources are accessible to all. Breaking down the barriers of entry to learn is one of the core reasons I joined Stack Overflow three years ago last month. I truly believe that in times of change, accessible learning will create great opportunities for all.

Accessible learning is the birthplace of innovation

On the heels of my three year anniversary here at Stack Overflow, I can’t help but think about my career and how I got here. I often reflect back to when my father came home from a business trip decades ago with my first computer: a 286. Basic as it is compared to today’s standards, it represented limitless opportunities to me. It catalyzed my pursuit of a career in technology through exploration and learning. That desire to learn and contribute to something bigger exists in so many throughout the world, especially within aspiring technologists. In order to better our world, we must foster and not hamper that excitement.

Stack Overflow’s dedication to making technical resources accessible is one of the core reasons I joined the company. I only wish Stack Overflow existed when I was learning to code many years ago! Over the past year, we took that commitment a step further with Overflow Offline. Announced this month, Overflow Offline is a downloadable version of the public platform created in partnership with Kiwix as a resource for organizations that serve communities with limited access to the internet. We removed perhaps the biggest barrier of entry for technical learning—access to the internet. Whether it’s researchers in Antarctica, students that live in internet deserts, or courses for incarcerated individuals in the United States and the United Kingdom, Overflow Offline extends the impact of Stack Overflow to people previously without access to technical learning resources.

We also launched our first Student Ambassador program in partnership with Major League Hacking (MLH) to accelerate learning across the public platform, participate in challenges, earn rewards, and more. We’re on track to reach over 200 universities and connect with over 10,000 students this year.

For the 100 million people that already visit Stack Overflow every month, we introduced Saves this month. According to research we conducted in April 2022, we found that 62% of survey respondents use bookmarks to save content for future use. This includes saving a question so that they can reference it later, building a repository, and creating a collection of high-quality content about a specific topic. Beyond bookmarking answers, Saves allows users to create custom lists and private notes on saved posts.

Our vision is to become the most valuable destination for the world’s current and next generation of technologists. Breaking down barriers so that the community can grow, learn, and build innovative technologies faster is core to everything we do.

Creating opportunities to learn starts within your team

Just as developers and technologists are learning in their free time, they spend an incredible amount of time at work evolving their skills. That’s not always easy given a whopping 62% of developers spend over eight hours a month searching for answers, and 46% of developers spend over eight hours a month answering others’ questions. On top of all that, over 50% of devs encounter knowledge silos every week. Breaking down barriers for teams to learn from each other helps our customers scale and optimize so that developers are happy and stay in their flow state.

One of my favorite visuals of this is the chart I shared at Flow State (below). With Stack Overflow for Teams, Progressive saw saw two thirds of questions answered by folks in departments different from the person who asked the question. When you eliminate barriers between teams, you can unlock limitless cross-functional learning. You don’t need to have all the answers, and chances are you don’t, not even on a single team. You just need to know where to find the answers you need, when you need them. Sustaining that flow of knowledge between teams is where we focused much of our efforts over the last year. For example, monthly editing activity increased by over 600% in just 90 days among Stack Overflow for Teams customers using Content Health. Ensuring that knowledge remains resilient is the foundation of resilient teams.

Last month, we released a study we commissioned from Forrester, The Total Economic Impact of Stack Overflow for Teams. It found that with Stack Overflow for Teams, employees saw an overall reduction in interruptions, with 65-85% of employee questions already answered in Stack Overflow for Teams. Forrester’s research concluded that Stack Overflow delivered $14.42 million in benefits to the composite customer over three years and cost $4.95 million over the same time period. This puts the net present value (NPV) of Stack Overflow for Teams just shy of $9.5 million, with a return on investment (ROI) of 191%.

We recently shared that Stack Overflow is named as a Sample Vendor in the 2022 Gartner® Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps for Communities of Practice. This is a powerful step forward in enabling organizations of all sizes to build strong internal communities that foster collective learning.

Our customers continue to share their experiences on G2, leading to Stack Overflow for Teams being named as a leader by G2 in the Knowledge Management and Q&A Platform categories for the 15th consecutive quarter.

To continue powering the flow state, we’ve always allowed people to leverage Stack Overflow’s API to embed tailored access directly into workflows. That also extends to Stack Overflow for Teams, which helps organizations like Spotify and their open source initiative, Backstage. They use the API to deeply integrate Stack Overflow into Backstage to allow both active searching of public and team-only Stack Overflow answers, alongside information held only in Backstage. Stack Overflow for Teams won an API Award for the Communications API category for innovation, adoption, and reception by the developer community. Just another way breaking down barriers leads to innovative solutions for all.

Looking ahead

We accomplished a lot in the past few months, and we will continue building on recent momentum as we head towards the end of the calendar year. I find it so energizing to see some of these initiatives come to life. Meeting so many users, customers, and technology leaders at Flow State, seeing Student Ambassadors engage through our programs, and hearing about the impact of Overflow Offline are all powerful ways we’re continuing to make an impact.

Of course, we cannot stress enough the importance of breaking down barriers to learn without examining how we are doing the same here at Stack Overflow. This month we’re rolling out what we call, “Learn, Share, Grow Days” (LSG Days) so that Stackers have the space and time to learn apart from their daily job tasks. This becomes even more important as we continue to hire across the globe. We accelerated growth during the summer months (summer here in the U.S., I should say), surpassing 200 Stackers hired in the last six months and surpassing over 500 employees for the first time in company history.

Thanks to feedback from Stackers, Comparably listed Stack Overflow among the top companies in four categories: Happiest Employees, Compensation, Work-Life Balance, and Perks & Benefits. We’re continuing to hire in core areas. If you’re interested in joining us, check out our careers page!

The post CEO update: Breaking down barriers to unlock innovation appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

It’s been a busy quarter for the company, too. We celebrated a handful of big milestones over the last three months. We added a new Chief Technology Officer, Jody Bailey, to our leadership team, announced Stack Overflow for Teams entering the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, launched exciting initiatives like Staging Ground, and released insights from this year’s Developer Survey. In our annual survey, we turn to the developer community to learn about what is important to them, what they want to learn, and what trends will impact the future of tech. This year, we compiled responses from over 73,000 developers all over the world. A huge thank you to everyone who shared their experience with us. I learned a lot from this year’s survey results, some of which I unpack below.

Context is key

This year’s Developer Survey insights included some surprising findings. Median salaries increased about 23% between 2021 and 2022. Interestingly enough, some of the oldest languages command the highest salaries. Why? Context is key. Some of the world’s largest organizations, from financial institutions to NASA, rely heavily on older languages because they still serve as foundational infrastructure.

As people get jobs at large organizations, learning older languages will provide them the context they need to code, evolve, and innovate in those environments. This all got me thinking about the low-code, no-code movement, and particularly AI-powered programming assistants like GitHub’s Copilot. There are lots of benefits to low-code platforms. More specifically, it makes building technology more accessible to so many people. As we look towards the future, we’ll see more people developing technology than ever before, but the need for context will undoubtedly remain consistent.

No-code tools aren’t actually without code, code is just not required to use it. People learn coding languages and frameworks as they build, because without context, technology will break. Similarly, code suggestion tools, trained on billions of lines of code, will still always require verification and confirmation (just like copying and pasting code found online). At some point, not learning the fundamentals is going to catch up with developers relying on shortcuts. Developers that make the choice to learn will rise to the top.

Fueling the next generation of coders

Just as the ways people build technology are transforming, the way everyone is learning is shifting as well. Over 70% of developers learn to code from online resources, up 10% from 2021. With more people learning as they build, it’s even more essential to make learning resources accessible at every stage of someone’s learning journey. Getting people the answers they need when they need them. At Stack Overflow, we call it real-time or just-in-time learning.

As we welcome hundreds of thousands of people to Stack Overflow’s public platform every month, we recognize we have to continue to invest in making it welcoming and inclusive. Over the last few months, we started working on new projects like Staging Ground to improve the onboarding experience for those new to the public platform and increase the quality of first questions. Testing and research is showing positive signs that this will help coach new users in how to ask great questions while also ensuring that other members of the community taking on some of the burden of coaching and onboarding new members have the tools to do so.

It’s been almost a year since we launched Collectives on Stack Overflow, which connects developers with technology maintainers and experts to get verified answers. One year later, engagement for users that join a Collective increased about 30% across associated tags. The latest Collective, WSO2, launched in June.

Learning at work

Opportunities to learn and grow are critical to retaining talent. Over 50% of developers say opportunities to learn are important to them when evaluating current and future employers. This is one of the reasons we have a Learning & Development budget for every single Stack employee that can be used for everything from online courses to in-person conferences. (We’re hiring, too.) The Developer Survey also revealed that nearly half of all respondents report that knowledge silos prevent them from getting ideas from across the organization and that waiting for answers to questions often causes interruptions and disrupts their workflow.

One of the costs of lots of questions is that nearly half of respondents spend more than 30 minutes a day answering questions, some more than an hour a day. Frequently, these are questions already asked and answered previously. For a team of 50 developers, that can add up to 278-568 hours of time just answering questions per week.

Similar to the public platform, we’re continuing to invest in ways to ensure we’re helping people get the answers they need when they need them at work. We saw a 229% increase in Microsoft Teams integrations within the Business tier of Stack Overflow for Teams in 2021. Today, 60% of professional developers are using Microsoft Teams or Slack. Our deep integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams, in addition to joining the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, reduce disruptions and help technologists stay in a flow state.

​​We also introduced an Enhanced Dashboard for Stack Overflow for Teams that gives users a more holistic view of how the knowledge sharing and collaboration platform is utilized within their organization. The new dashboard uncovers what tags are utilized most (or least), what questions and articles have been viewed the most, what this information means in terms of focus areas for your organization, and more. You can use these insights to understand where your organization has potential knowledge gaps, friction points, or opportunities to provide focused training.

Learning at Stack Overflow

Every three months, we take time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t work, where we need to double down, and where we need to focus as a company. While we’re incredibly fortunate to experience growth and success, it’s also a time for us to learn from others. We are continuing to grow our team and take advantage of available talent. As I mentioned earlier, if you’re interested in learning about any of our open roles, please visit our careers page.

As a company, we reserve time to reflect on how we’re empowering learning within our own organization. Learning, to us, is not limited to technologies and tools. Stackers, myself included, gathered for a guest talk from stress and self-care expert Alicia D. Reece, GLAAD board member and inclusion expert Ashley T. Brundage, as well as panels featuring our own Stackers on the topics of allyship, the Asian and Pacific Islander experience, and more. Hearing stories from Stackers and external guests helps us continually learn from those around us and better position us to create tools and features that are inclusive and accessible to all.

There is so much work to do, and we have an enormous opportunity at Stack Overflow to influence a more inclusive and diverse tech industry. The way the public platform is democratizing knowledge and Stack Overflow for Teams is doing the same within companies is just the beginning. Scaling subject matter experts across organizations and the broader internet while removing barriers of entry for technical learning is how we’ll win, together.

The post Always learning appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

We aim to build trust within the developer community, with Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, and Collectives, and across organizations with Stack Overflow for Teams. That includes creating a psychologically safe place for people to learn whether they are working or not.

Creating a more inclusive place to learn

I spoke on a panel about community-based learning earlier this month at one of the world’s largest edtech conferences, ASU + GSV Summit in San Diego. One of the core topics we discussed was the importance of peer-to-peer learning. More than 50% of developers are looking for opportunities to learn at work, and 50% of developers say that growth opportunities contribute to happiness at work. With so many teams faced with talent shortages, it is becoming even more critical for leaders to provide opportunities to learn at work and expand the talent pool to folks from non-traditional educational backgrounds.

If we have any hope of making technology more diverse and inclusive, we have to make technical learning resources accessible to all. We need to change the barrier of entry for the tech community whether that’s through publicly available resources or within the workplace.

A key learning from growing one of the largest developer communities on the internet is that it can be intimidating for new users, even if they are experienced developers. To address that feedback and help make Stack Overflow more welcoming, we rolled out A/B testing for the beta version of our new question wizard on the public platform. The question wizard makes suggestions and provides helpful tips to new users asking their first question to the community. This helps not only ensure the quality of questions on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sites, it also helps increase positive experiences for new users. Since rolling out the question wizard, we saw an 11% decrease in the number of questions that were immediately deleted and a nearly 5% increase in questions closed but not deleted. This is a win for new users and learners, for content quality, and for the knowledge repository overall.

Following the launch of our newest Collective on Stack Overflow with Twilio, we also released new features and resources to help Collective customers more easily invite and onboard users as Recognized Members. This ultimately helps scale technology-specific expertise across the platform by spotlighting power users, empowering them to share what they know with others, and building trust in answers for users across the broader community.

Trusted answers when you need them

The water cooler is long gone and so is shouting to colleagues the next desk pod over for answers to real-time questions. To be truly agile, teams need to find scalable ways to uncover subject matter experts across their organization. Stack Overflow for Teams customer Dropbox said it best:

“We picked Stack Overflow [for Teams] to grow that Q&A function,” Ju Shin, Product Manager at Dropbox, explained. “To bring conversations out of the various siloed channels where they had been taking place (email, Slack), which were crowded and full of noise, and put them in a form where knowledge was discoverable.”

Uncovering SMEs cross-functionally empowers teams to learn, share, and grow together. That must be why leading software marketplace G2 recognized Stack Overflow for Teams for the 13th consecutive quarter as a knowledge sharing and collaboration platform that customers trust as their go-to source of institutional knowledge.

If we can only move at the speed of trust, that starts with tackling one of the challenges that has plagued the knowledge management industry for decades–content reliability. Outdated and inaccurate content building up over time in knowledge management tools leads to declining usage and value. We introduced Content Health for Stack Overflow for Teams to eliminate the expiration date that comes with traditional knowledge management tools. It prompts teams to fix or archive inaccurate or outdated content. After 90 days, monthly editing activity increased by over 600 percent among Stack Overflow for Teams customers with the initial, limited release of Content Health. Traditional knowledge management tools have come with a sense of impending distrust for far too long. It’s time that changed.

Looking ahead

We added over 80 Stackers to the team last quarter, with even more open roles to hire in the months ahead. As we surpassed 400 Stackers globally, we completed our annual engagement survey across the company. Employees are also excited for the future–Comparably named Stack Overflow to its list of companies with the Best Outlook and Best Place to Work NY.

While that gives us a lot to celebrate internally, there’s no shortage of work to do. In times when teams are extremely busy and growing, it’s important to take the time to build trust. To be truly agile, you have to trust the people around you. We’re committed to that internally and will continue working towards building inclusive products that developers trust industry-wide.

We’re looking forward to experimenting, learning, adapting, and leading an ever-changing market in the next year. Excited to share updates on the horizon soon!

The post Agility starts with trust appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From an industry perspective, the transition to a new year is a common time for folks to reflect on the year they are leaving behind and their hopes for the year ahead. “The Great Resignation” led to some developers seeking new jobs, especially while a record number of companies raised funding and went public, prompting major growth industry-wide.

There are over 70,000 technical jobs open while roughly 80% of developers are not actively looking for a new job. At Stack Overflow, we hired over 250 team members in 2021 and are planning to hire close to the same number in the year ahead (check out the roles currently open). Naturally, we turned to the community to see what’s most important when evaluating current and future employers to inform our own recruiting efforts and how we serve the community and our industry at large.

Developers are craving flexibility and opportunities to learn at work. If they aren’t getting it, they are looking elsewhere. Developers often set the tone for the rest of the tech industry. As we dive into 2022, all employers need to prioritize flexibility and opportunities to learn. The future of work is the future of continuous learning.

We’re living in challenging times, and creativity is required to succeed. Whether it’s addressing pressing problems like employer branding, getting a tricky implementation to work, or simply figuring out who to go to for context, our goal is always to get people the answers they need, when they need them. That means having the solution at the right time where someone is looking for it. That was our guiding light through 2021 and will continue to be our guiding light for the public platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, Advertising, Employer Branding, and Collectives on Stack Overflow.

Powering the community by empowering the community

Stack Overflow was built by the community, for the community. Investing in community health and growth continues to be our number-one priority. In addition to welcoming more than 750,000 registered users over the last three months, the team awarded almost a million virtual hats for engagement across Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sites during our traditional end-of-year Winter (or Summer) Bash. Special shoutouts to the language communities, which were some of the most active this year. Following Stack Overflow, the next three highest-ranked sites during Winter Bash were the Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian sites.

At the same time, 59 Stack Exchange sites graduated out of beta—one of our biggest graduating classes yet—making it easier than ever for people to find communities covering everything from DevOps to AI. Thank you to everyone who participated in Winter Bash and for all those who continue to contribute to the Stack Exchange network!

In mid-2021, we launched Collectives to connect the community with creators of the world’s most popular technologies. Collectives continued to grow with the addition of the Intel Collective late last year and nearly 40,000 members joining across Google Cloud, the Go language, GitLab, and Intel communities. We also introduced Article Proposals this month—a brand-new feature that allows users to propose and contribute to Articles. This is the first feature that allows users to contribute long-form content on Stack Overflow.

Fueling agility by driving the developer experience

It was hard to even engage in a conversation about enterprise tech over the last two years without discussing digital transformation (now an arguably overused phrase). Organizations across the globe were propelled into a world where they had to evaluate how their tech stack would adapt to remote work in the face of a pandemic. In 2021, organizations geared up to return to offices, then didn’t, then did halfway, then returned home once again. The last year taught us that agility solves fragility. Nearly every customer I speak with mentions agile transformation as a top priority in the year ahead, particularly when it comes to enabling cross-functional, hybrid teams to accelerate their businesses.

We’re doing everything we can to keep developers in their flow state, meaning we’re dedicated to helping teams remove blockers or disruptions and solve problems in real time. We see this with organizations that struggle with scattered systems and channels, distributed subject matter experts (SMEs), undocumented institutional knowledge, or simply preventing disruptions. Insurance giant Progressive shared in a recent webinar how they keep knowledge flowing across teams, leveraging Stack Overflow for Teams’ flexible API to visualize progress and reveal deeper insights into trending topics, questions, and concerns. Similarly, retail analytics powerhouse 84.51° faced a distributed team and a complicated post-acquisition period that made it challenging for their team to find SMEs across the organization.

“Stack Overflow broke down the barriers to be a recognized SME as much as it broke down barriers to learn from them.”

– Chris Wones, Engineering Lead for Merch Analytics and Operations, 84.51°

Shared resources and contextual knowledge at scale fuel highly agile environments. In many cases that means creating a centralized place for teams to ask questions, share institutional knowledge, and collaborate. In 2021, we welcomed more Stack Overflow for Teams customers than any year in our history. 

It’s incredibly rewarding to hear directly from customers how Stack Overflow for Teams is helping them scale, optimize workflows, and increase agility and innovation. We also made it easier than ever this year to help customers keep content up-to-date and work asynchronously without disrupting workflows. We introduced Content Health, an easy way to identify stale answers and build confidence in the content within Stack Overflow for Teams. Additionally, we released an expanded Microsoft Teams integration to make it even easier to ask questions, search for answers, and solve problems without context switching.

Getting recognition for our efforts is the icing on the cake. Thanks to our customer reviews, G2 ranked Stack Overflow for Teams as a leader for the 12th consecutive quarter! And it wasn’t only our products that won awards last year: our company—and the Stackers who power it—was recognized as a great place to work by Built In’s list of Best Remote-First Companies to Work and Comparably’s list of companies with the Best Company Culture.

Looking ahead

Impactful organizations and healthy communities are successful because they exist in the right place at the right time. Stack Overflow is in the middle of the technology ecosystem, where significant transformation is underway and where technologists and developers are front and center. Our mission is meeting the challenges of this moment as we continue to work hard to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. 

Our financial growth this past year enabled us to dedicate more resources across the public platform and beyond, contributing to higher moderator and site satisfaction scores. 2021’s hyper growth also means we’re able to continue making significant investments in the community, the tech stack that supports it, and all our products in the year ahead. As an example, our recently hired head of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) will serve in an advisory capacity to our community and product teams as we continue to build and roll out features in the spirit of fostering an inclusive community.

I’m looking forward to this next chapter in Stack Overflow history when we will keep community at our center and welcome the next generation of technologists to Stack.

The post Keeping technologists in the flow state appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The past two years have been an incredible journey, 80% of which I’ve spent as a fully-remote CEO. When I reflect on the most important moments, I think about our Stackers and Community—I’m truly inspired by their resilience. Given many concurrent issues—the ongoing pandemic, polarized political environments, and challenging social issues—there’s a lot going on in people’s lives. Over the past year in particular, we’ve gotten glimpses into each other’s homes, supported each other through illness and loss, pushed ourselves to have uncomfortable conversations, learned from our failures, and celebrated wins. 

One of my biggest learnings is that organizations and leaders have a responsibility to ensure people are heard, to build high levels of trust and enable them to show up authentically— all so they can do their best work. I’m a firm believer in the idea that building connections strengthens teams and empowers people to be successful in their roles. I’ve learned that while work connects us, a true team is a living, breathing entity. We must feed and nurture it to build high-trust connections. No one can bring only part of themselves to work and be their best. Companies play a critical role creating an environment that’s supportive. I’m grateful for the resilience of our Stackers and Community through these dynamic times. It’s a true privilege to be entrusted to lead such a passionate team and the community we’re building together.

Public Platform and Community

As our environments change, so does the community’s approach to technology. We did deep dives into two topics that saw incredible growth of late: cloud computing and cybersecurity. We learned that nearly 90% of surveyed developers say their organization increased usage of the cloud over the last year. On the public platform, we saw about four years worth of average annual growth of cloud questions in the span of just three months at the start of lockdown last year.

The pandemic had a similar impact on cybersecurity questions. Our recent research showed that security-related activity across the public platform appeared to be tied to major breaches. That is, until recently. The volume of security-related questions on Stack Overflow at the start of lockdown exceeded that of any year in our history.

We also saw exceptional growth in three core areas when it comes to the public platform community. Monthly active users are up 7% over last year at this time, and we’re seeing monthly sign ups tracking ahead of our plan with an increase of 44% over this time last year. Lastly, we’re continuing to invest in improving our moderator experience, and we’re starting to see it pay off. While we continue to focus on making the public platform a welcoming place for all, this is a promising indicator that we’re making impactful decisions.

From a product perspective, we updated our Privacy Policy, made changes to Review Queues, and introduced high-contrast mode for people who need a bit more contrast. These are all aligned with our goal of making Stack Overflow a more inclusive community. We also completed our annual Community-A-Thon, where our employees dedicate time to increasing their engagement with the community on the public platform. 

Finally, we launched our first-ever physical product. It started as an April Fool’s joke. We told everyone that tried to copy and paste on Stack Overflow that their copying and pasting was limited unless they purchased The Key. Panic set in for the 1 out of every 4 users who copies something within five minutes of hitting Stack Overflow. Once people caught on to the joke, we were flooded with requests to actually purchase The Key. The joke is officially over. The Key is real, and it sold out in six hours! We opened pre-orders and nearly 9,000 units have been sold to-date, with the remaining shipping later this year. All our proceeds are going to digitalundivided, a non-profit that leverages data, programs, and advocacy to catalyze economic growth for Black and Latinx women entrepreneurs in tech. It’s amazing to see this impact from our community.

Product update

We’re also seeing a shift within organizations as teams solidify their remote or hybrid work strategies. We’re hearing from technology leaders more and more that agile transformation is becoming a top priority and onboarding continues to be a challenge as they scale their teams. On top of that, a recent survey also revealed that nearly 70% of U.S. workers said their level of burnout has worsened throughout the pandemic. All of these challenges compounded are creating more urgency for Stack Overflow for Teams. We welcomed our highest volume of new customers for both Stack Overflow for Teams and Advertising in the last quarter. We also had our highest ever gross revenue retention (GRR) for Teams in our mid-market segment last quarter.

As customers onboard, they continue to share their experiences with their peers, earning us recognition on G2 across nearly every segment for the 11th consecutive quarter.

We’re continuing to work with customers to build communities on Stack Overflow through our Reach & Relevance products, which consists of banner ads, tag sponsorships, podcast, the newsletter, and blog sponsorships, and finally Collectives on Stack Overflow. We launched a new Collective—GitLab—and surpassed 20,000 members across all Collectives. Collectives on Stack Overflow are communities where developers can directly engage with technology organizations and find resources they need when they need them in one place.

Our goal is to give developers direct access to the resources they and subject matter experts that can help them find answers when they need them. Our customers can also get deeper insights into who is interacting and engaging with their content and technologies on Stack Overflow. For every technology vendor we work with to launch a Collective, our goal is to do the same with an open source partner.

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

We’ve rolled out a few new initiatives internally over the last few months, including our first DEIB-dedicated (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) quarterly newsletter, a calendar of important days with educational materials, and new tools to help us measure DEI metrics within Stack Overflow, and DEI-related competencies for our performance reviews framework to help hold us accountable. We’re ramping up regular programming to help scale and replicate the success of the Asian and Pacific Islander and LGBTQ+ panels we hosted last quarter. There’s always work to be done, but we’re making steady progress towards a more diverse and inclusive Stack Overflow within our organization and across our platform.

Looking ahead

With the Prosus acquisition complete, we’re excited to accelerate our plans for international growth and expansion. We’re cautiously moving forward with optional return to office plans in New York City and London and continuing to hire remote employees all over the globe.

This month, Comparably named Stack Overflow as one of the highest-rated companies for overall happiness, compensation, and perks and benefits. We’ve already filled over 180 roles in 2021 thus far and are currently recruiting for over 70 open roles (and more being added daily) across nearly every department and time zone. With more than 80% of Stackers permanently remote, we’re also finding creative ways to stay supportive and connected long-term.

As we sprint towards the end of 2021, we’re focusing on the foundational priorities that got us here: operational scale and repeatability, Stacker growth and development, and community health and growth. The Prosus acquisition is allowing us the flexibility and resources to scale our team faster so that we can reinforce our foundation, serve our community at scale, and prepare for takeoff in the year ahead. 

The post Strong teams are more than just connected, they are communities appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

We’re excited to continue working towards our existing goals and priorities with no changes to our focus on creating and maintaining a vibrant community and our core SaaS business model. With Prosus, we can accelerate plans and be even more ambitious about scaling our public and private platforms.

Over the last quarter, we revisited our mission statement to reflect our unwavering commitment to knowledge sharing and consolidated the many versions that have surfaced over the last several years into one:

Empower the world to develop technology
through collective knowledge.

We, and Prosus, understand that our commitment to spreading knowledge and building community is the engine of our success. Democratizing information is the only way to empower learners to develop the future of technology. We hope to further invest in the community so an even wider group can benefit from it – technologists in countries around the world who are all on their unique learning journeys.

Public Platform and Community

Q2 was a time of strong growth for our public platform. We saw more new accounts being created than ever, with April, May, and June trending at or above our highest levels from last year. Part of the credit here certainly goes to our public platform and community teams, which continue to push improvements to the user experience and work to ensure our sites are becoming more welcoming, inclusive, and diverse. But there are also macro trends at work. 

As we join Prosus’s edtech portfolio, we do so alongside companies like Udemy, Brainly, and Codecademy. The number of people around the globe seeking careers as software developers is increasing. So too is the number of professions, from finance to life sciences to climate studies, where writing code is not the primary task, but is fundamental in transforming those professions to become more automated and to drive innovation.  

As our community grows, we must continue to invest in supporting it. As I’ve outlined to all our employees, keeping the community at our center is a core value. We’re pleased to announce that we’ve recently hired a new VP of community, Philippe Beaudette. Philippe has a storied career, beginning in the days of AOL chat rooms, through the early days of Wikipedia, and most recently at Reddit. He brings a great wealth of experience in building safe, inclusive communities where users feel empowered to express their curiosity and share their knowledge. We’re thrilled that Philippe, with his deep community background, will be hyper focused on working closely with the community to help make the Stack Exchange ecosystem even more vibrant. You can read his blog post on our upcoming roadmap and listen to a podcast interview with him below.

Speaking of hiring, we have over 100 open roles across our company. If you want to be part of a high growth organization that works to accomplish a powerful mission at global scale, take a look and see if there is an opportunity available that speaks to you. 

Product

Q2 saw the launch of a new product, Collectives on Stack Overflow, which aims to increase value for our users, community, and clients by organizing Q&A and Articles around a certain technical topic, for example a programming language or cloud services platform. We had two great customers come onboard to help us launch this product: Google Cloud and Google’s Go Language, and we will be announcing many more Collectives in coming months. Our approach to development is product-led AND community-driven. By learning from and serving our community, we can be a force multiplier for companies that want to empower users of their technology. 

The two Collectives we’ve launched for Google Cloud and GOLang are reaching hundreds of millions of Stack Overflow users.

We’re excited for this new approach to organizing knowledge and community on Stack Overflow, and have already seen over 10,000 users sign up to follow our Collectives. I believe that Collectives will help our community to organize and share knowledge around clusters of technology, for example the wide array of development happening in the blockchain space. We recently ran a survey on this topic, and got some fascinating results. There are Stack Exchanges focused on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Iota, EOS.IO, Tezos, and Monero. I’m sure more will emerge as this space continues to grow.

Collectives is part of our Reach and Relevance product offerings, and we’ve had an incredible start to this line of business in 2021. Earlier this year we combined our Advertising and Talent products under one umbrella. We moved away from discrete hiring to focus more on advertising and brand awareness. We are seeing tremendous traction in this space, with firms like AWS, JP Morgan Chase, and Accenture coming on board for brand awareness campaigns.

Just as there are an ever growing number of new users signing up for the public platform, there is a steady increase in the number of organizations that want to reach developers. Some are looking to hire great talent, others want developers to try their product, and others simply want developers to use their platform, tools, or ecosystem. We can help them do it all, and we do it while respecting developer’s privacy and avoiding invasive tracking.

As I’ve written before, Predictable and Reliable Financial Performance is one of our strategic priorities. In Q2 we introduced another new product, sponsored podcasts, and our content marketing business is on track to more than double in size over last year. Put together, Advertising and Collectives delivered an exceptional quarter, the biggest in the company’s history.

Q2 also saw continued traction towards our other strategic priority for 2021: Product-led Transformation. After our launch of our Freemium Teams tier in Q1, we saw a steady stream of thousands signups and users trying out the Teams product. From storied innovators like Xerox to rising unicorns like Doctlib, we continue to see an ever growing cohort of organizations leveraging Stack Overflow for Teams in a range of use cases to ultimately innovate faster through knowledge sharing and collaboration.

One key metric we focus on as we evaluate how our users see value in our Teams product is  something we call Knowledge Reuse. While the number of questions and answers added to a Team are meaningful, we believe the true value is best quantified by understanding how often users are able to quickly find a solution to the problem at hand. On our public site, we note how many people a particular user has reached with their answers. It’s incredible to realize that the contributions of an individual can help tens, even hundreds of millions of others learn and grow.

The same outsized impact happens within private Teams. At companies like Xerox, Doctolib, and Unqork, knowledge is reused hundreds of times a month. That’s hundreds of emails or chat messages avoided, time saved for the person asking the question and for their colleagues. 

One of our most viewed questions on Stack Overflow is a question that asks “What is a NullPointerException, and how do I fix it?” That was asked 12 years and 7 months ago. It has 31 different answers or solutions provided. That question has been viewed 3.2 million times. That’s 3.2 millions times that knowledge was reused. We have one piece of knowledge on our own internal instance that’s had more than 1,000 views in the past two years – How do I submit a Salesforce Case?

Another major impact Teams can have is to break down silos within an organization. Great solutions may not come from the teammate or department you expect. We continue to use Teams internally, where it helps us learn, share, and grow. There are great conversations happening across legal, marketing, sales, product, and engineering. Wisetech Global tells us that at their company all hands, Stack Overflow for Teams has been used to help discuss and debate the best ways to implement some of the company’s core mantras and values. “We have recently been running a program where we’re taking a number of the mantras that we hold dear in the business and we’ve been amplifying that to the global audience,” explains Ian Larsen, GM of software operations. “We’ve been using Stack Overflow for Teams as a discussion forum. It’s a place for people to raise questions, get additional clarity, or just discuss the nuances. So I think that has been great.”

Diversity & Inclusion

A year ago I made a commitment to include updates on our diversity and inclusion progress in these quarterly posts. We are making a significant investment in DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) at the company. We are compiling and preparing to share DEI metrics with employees, evolving our hiring practices, rolling out inclusion training to all employees, and we are in the process of hiring a Director of DEI to lead these efforts. We’ve also committed to a quarterly DEI newsletter compiled by our growing number of affinity groups collectively, which is launching this week.

Over the last three months, we’ve also hosted panels featuring employees and external experts open to the full company on issues and experiences facing our Asian & Pacific Islander community and our LGBTQIA+ community. Hearing shared and individual experiences was eye opening, and I truly believe learning about others’ experiences makes us a stronger, more thoughtful organization in the long run.

There is so much work to be done, but we’re continuing to take steps towards a diverse and inclusive culture that we believe sets the tone for the community we foster online.

Conclusion

As we look out to the second half of 2021, there are many big opportunities we are considering. How can we leverage the global scale of Prosus to expand our business and bring a broader cohort of users, from around the world, onto our public platform? How do we enable beginner developers to leverage Stack Overflow so they become engaged participants, not just casual visitors? What kind of strategic partnerships and alliances are possible with other edtech companies, leveraging our scale and their expertise so that Stack Overflow can offer a wider variety of options for finding solutions and learning new skills? 

The completion of our deal with Prosus isn’t the only exciting news I get to share today. Today we published our annual Developer Survey. It contains many fascinating insights, but one in particular stood out to me. For the rising cohort of coders under the age of 18, online resources like videos, websites, and blogs are more popular than books and school combined, a statistic that doesn’t hold for any of our other age cohorts. Overall the developer profession is full of new joiners, with more than 50% indicating they have been coding for less than a decade, and more than 35% having less than five years in the trade.

So much of what drives us is the desire to empower this new generation of developers and technologists. The resources available to us through this acquisition and the continued growth of our product and public platform give me great confidence that we will continue to unlock new potential, and that we will grow Stack Overflow into an enduring global brand with a vibrant community that continues to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge.

The post Communities are a catalyst for technology development appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Prosus is one of the world’s leading technology investors with stakes in companies such as Tencent, Brainly, BYJU’s, Codecademy, OLX, PayU, Remitly and Udemy.  Their massive scale and reach improves the lives of around a fifth of the world’s population. Prosus’s mission is to build leading companies that empower and enrich communities, as demonstrated by the many community-focused and EdTech companies they work with. This makes Prosus the perfect company to acquire Stack Overflow, and Stack Overflow the ideal investment in their focus on the future of workplace learning and collaboration. It allows us to continue to operate as an independent company with our current team and with the backing of a global technology powerhouse. 

Once this acquisition is complete, we will have more resources and support to grow our public platform and paid products, and we can accelerate our global impact tremendously. This might look like more rapid and robust international expansion, M&A opportunities, and deeper partnerships both on Stack Overflow and within Stack Overflow for Teams. Our intention is for our public platform to be an invaluable resource for developers and technologists everywhere and for our SaaS collaboration and knowledge management platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, to reach thousands more global enterprises, allowing them to accelerate product innovation and increase productivity by unlocking institutional knowledge.

Prosus is a long-term investor and loves what our company and community have built over these last 13+ years. They are impressed by the SaaS transformation the company has been on since the launch of Stack Overflow for Teams and especially over the last two years. Prosus recognizes our platform’s tremendous potential for impact and they are excited to launch and accelerate our next phase of growth.

How you use our site and our products will not change in the coming weeks or months, just as our company’s goals and strategic priorities remain the same. As the acquisition is finalized, and we continue to partner with Prosus, I will keep you all posted through my regular quarterly blog posts and Teresa Dietrich, our Chief Product and Technology Officer, will do the same in her quarterly community blog posts.

I want to conclude by thanking all of you for your contributions over the years. Whether you asked or answered a question on our site or simply copy and pasted code, whether you once found a job on Stack Overflow or you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of users of Stack Overflow for Teams. We could not have achieved this milestone without you.

This milestone is just the beginning. Since 2008, our public platform has helped developers and technologists over 50 billion times. That’s just us getting started, and I can’t wait to continue to update you on what’s next.

The post Prosus’s Acquisition of Stack Overflow: Our Exciting Next Chapter appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

There is optimism within Stack Overflow right now as well. We are continuing to build momentum as the company grows. We just closed out the first quarter of 2021, and thanks to the hard work of Stackers across the board, we surpassed our most optimistic financial projections. I want to thank everyone for the effort that made this possible, and talk a little bit about what comes next. 

We went into this year focused on two strategic priorities. Along with our mission and our core values, we let them guide us in all that we do. They are Product-led Transformation and Predictable and Reliable Financial Performance, both of which add value to our community and our customers by allowing us to continue to support and resource them better, and ultimately continue to make this a rewarding place to work.

I am going to focus the majority of this quarterly blog on those priorities. Like we did last quarter, our chief product and technology officer Teresa Dietrich will soon share a blog post on updates to Community Health and Growth—one of the key foundations these priorities are built upon, as well as updates on our products.

Continuing our Product-led Transformation

A lot of SaaS-focused technology companies talk about being product-led. What does that mean? It means putting your product and user at the center of all you do, and leveraging your product to attract, activate, and retain your customers. At Stack Overflow, that means more than continuing to invest in our Stack Overflow for Teams product. It means ensuring that our focus, whether it’s on Teams or on the public platform, solves problems for our core users: developers and technologists.

In March, we announced a big milestone in our product-led transformation: a new freemium tier within Stack Overflow for Teams. Users who create a new instance of Teams can grow it up to 50 seats without paying anything, and they get access to most of the product’s key features, such as integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams. We hoped to sign up about 2,000 new Teams during our first month of freemium, but saw over 10,000 new Teams created instead. This is a phenomenal validation of the product and the strategic work that went into this decision. 

For many of the top companies using Stack Overflow for Teams, interest started with individual contributors, with developers who wanted a better tool to collaborate and share knowledge. We hope that making Stack Overflow for Teams totally free for up to 50 users enables more developers to experiment with our product and prove out its value, eventually leading to broader adoption within an organization. 

Freemium isn’t the only product-led development we’ve made over the last few months. If a user within a free Team is looking to graduate to the next tier, we’ve made it easier than ever to do so. Since late last year, we’ve made it easier for users to educate themselves about the product and take action, such as changing tiers or activating new users within their organization. We offer them useful onramps to learn about the product, its additional tiers, and how to activate users within an organization. We’ve also created an easy path to self-serve upgrade to our Basic and Business tiers for companies who are looking for additional features (such as SSO and GitHub, Jira, and Okta integrations) as well as dedicated support.

Adopting a product-led strategy doesn’t mean every instance of Teams needs to become a paying customer to be successful. There are many small startups and nonprofits that will benefit from our tools without needing to go beyond the free tier. We also hope it will be an invaluable tool to developers and cohorts of developers who are learning to code, for example. We’re eager to see what happens when educational institutions and open source projects have access to tools that allow them to build a knowledge base, craft great documentation, and collaborate asynchronously with peers around the globe. There are already millions of developers from the open source communities surrounding Linux, Python, and JavaScript learning on Stack Overflow. We hope Teams will allow contributors to better collaborate and accelerate software development for everyone. 

Delivering Predictable & Reliable Financial Performance

These investments in Stack Overflow for Teams are paying off. Looking forward, we are excited by our sales pipeline, which signals that the stronger than expected growth we saw during the first three months of the year is poised to continue through this year. We have also seen growth in our annual recurring revenue (ARR) and increases in our net renewal rates (NRR), two key metrics for measuring the health of a product-led SaaS company like Stack Overflow. 

As we evaluated the success of Stack Overflow for Teams and our existing Advertising business, I worked with our board and senior leadership team to make a difficult decision. As I wrote recently, we have realigned our Talent business to simplify it overall and focus on areas where we have strong differentiation and tremendous potential for growth. This means focusing on employer branding and company awareness and moving away from job slots and direct hiring. It ties the product closer to what we offer through Stack Overflow Advertising and is part of what we’re calling our “Reach and Relevance” strategy, allowing companies to reach and engage meaningfully by sharing relevant information with millions of developers and technologists. As I’ve said, this change unlocks greater value for our users and helps our customers better achieve success.

The recent change to Talent means we have less transactional and more recurring revenue products, something that will increase the value we can deliver to customers and users in the future. It also makes it easy to answer a question we’ve been asked many times over the years, “How does Stack Overflow make money?” The answer is much easier than it’s been historically. We have two high growth businesses: 1) our hyper growth Teams business and 2) our high growth Reach & Relevance business.

To illustrate the opportunity in front of us with Stack Overflow for Teams alone, I want to share a quick customer story with you. We began working with Progressive Insurance in September of 2020. It was piloted with 450 seats. Since then it has grown to 1460 seats.

“Stack Overflow has proven invaluable in democratizing access to information and improving cross-team collaboration within our IT organization. We’ve found that over 62% of questions asked on Stack Overflow have been answered by someone from a different team and that most questions are answered by a subject matter expert within three hours,” said James Morgan, Developer Advocate.

“Our most popular questions and answers have reached well over 25% of our user base, preventing repeat questions from being asked in the first place—a huge productivity boost over the interruptive direct-message approach to answering questions we’ve traditionally employed.”

Progressive Insurance is just one of many new and recent customers. As you can see from the refreshed logo section of our Teams page (which represents a small portion of the companies we work with), many of the world’s leading companies use Stack Overflow for Teams.

To 2021 and beyond

I’m very optimistic about our path forward. Our Stack Overflow for Teams business and Reach & Relevance business are both growing quickly, but they also will play an important role in the year ahead. As companies continue to navigate a dynamic work environment, which is sure to include hybrid and distributed work, they will leverage our products to keep developers and technologists engaged and productive. As a company, this puts us on a positive and high value trajectory, giving us the ability to deliver clear value to our users with our Product-led Transformation and ensure that we have Predictable & Reliable Financial Performance.

It’s important to mention that those two priorities are built on three key foundations:

• Community Health & Growth
• Operational Scale & Repeatability
• Stacker Growth & Development

Put simply: we would not be a growing and successful company without our community. We are making progress on all of those fronts as well. When it comes to the community, we averaged 200k signups per month in Q1, which is up 14% year-over-year.”. We are also making progress when it comes to our site satisfaction score, a metric the Public Platform Team tracks on a recurring basis. Like I said at the start of this post, Teresa Dietrich will be sharing more updates on the community and product front soon.

Given our outstanding performance in Q1 and increasing momentum, we have a great year ahead. Just like I call out our community above, this growth wouldn’t be possible without all our amazing Stackers who work together from around the world to serve our users. And our continued growth won’t be possible unless we continue adding to our team. There’s so much exciting work ahead. Few companies allow you to impact millions of people around the globe with your work. In our case, the work is democratizing access to all technology related knowledge so developers and technologists can innovate, build, and support the world’s technology. It’s this opportunity that personally excites me every day. We’re hiring on virtually every team, and if you’re interested, you can check out our open roles here.

I look forward to keeping you updated as our company continues its high growth journey.

The post Accelerating Stack Overflow’s transformation appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

It’s been a year of transformational change for all types of companies, Stack Overflow included. We are fortunate to have seen great growth from Stack Overflow for Teams, which allowed us to raise our Series E last July. We have seen steady growth from Stack Overflow Advertising. Even our Talent business—our oldest paid product, which was our only line of business negatively impacted by the pandemic—has continued to deliver value to customers looking for developer talent and developers looking for work, career changes, and more.

As we continue to navigate the pandemic, we try to use our mission as our compass. Our mission is to serve developers and technologists, and we want to ensure our public platform and our paid products are doing that always. In the spirit of continuing on our product-led transformation and realizing our mission, we are making some changes to Stack Overflow Talent.

We are realigning the Talent business to focus more on customer employer branding and company awareness needs, and moving away from job slots and direct hiring. This will tie the product closer to what we offer through Stack Overflow Advertising and is part of what we’re calling our “Reach and Relevance” strategy, allowing companies to reach and share relevant information with millions of developers and technologists. At the end of the day, this change unlocks greater value for our users and helps our customers better achieve success.

We are continuing to support all of our existing Talent products and these changes won’t affect any of our customers leveraging job slots or direct hiring products in the near-term, only their point of contact will change. As these products evolve or are sunset, customers will be notified well in advance.

These changes, however, impacted a small portion of employees within our Sales & Customer Success organization. We are highly appreciative of the hard work that went into the past decade to launch, support, and grow the Talent business. We would not be where we are today if it wasn’t for their dedication and drive, and we are doing what we can to support their transitions.

We hope our users and customers will continue to see and reap the benefits of our product-led transformation, which includes Teams’ freemium that launched just last month and new, upcoming launches as part of our Reach and Relevance strategy. We are grateful for your support over these last 12 years and look forward to continuing to serve you as best we can.

The post An update on our product-led SaaS transformation appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Despite the global headwinds, we saw impressive growth in our Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise and Advertising businesses. Our Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise business experienced our strongest quarter in the history of the company in new customer additions and new annual recurring revenue. Advertising had its best growth year in the history of the company and its best quarter ever. Talent, which was heavily impacted by the shock of the pandemic, stabilized in the last two quarters of the year, positioning itself well for a rebound when the economy begins to more fully reopen. 

Stack Overflow for Teams continues to broaden its customer base and forged new partnerships with the tech sector. As an example, Box, a customer that I elaborate on below, brought on Stack Overflow for Teams to improve collaboration in the “new normal” of remote, asynchronous work. And some of the world’s largest banks and telecom companies signaled their belief in the value of our product by significantly expanding their investment in their private instance of Stack Overflow.

We are thrilled that our Stack Overflow for Teams product continues to drive developer and technologist productivity through rapid sharing of key internal information. Customers using Stack Overflow for Teams tell us how it’s reducing the time it takes to onboard new developers and technologists – for some by as much as 40% – and giving time back to all the people who support the new hires. Q&A is also a powerful tool for everyday productivity, and several customers have told us that their support engineers see 20-30% reduction in help tickets, allowing them to focus more on solving the root cause of the issues people are asking about. 

Customers have seen a 40% reduction in the time it takes to onboard new developers

I make it a point to speak to our enterprise customers on a weekly basis and I’m energized by the excitement CIOs exhibit around the acceleration of their plans in today’s fever pitched technology environment. Developer productivity in a distributed work environment, cloud transformation, DevOps, cloud security, and big data are top of mind for technology executives. There is a wealth of knowledge on these topics across Stack Overflow’s public platform, and we have seen interest in these sites continue to expand. On average, monthly signups in 2020 consistently increased by at least 20% over the year prior. Knowledge on these same topics is populating instances of Stack Overflow for Teams and driving productivity within companies all over the world.

To illustrate what’s happening with our tools, let me share a little more about our story with Box. The company went public in 2015 and has around 2,000 employees and several hundred engineers. It provides modern cloud capabilities with enterprise grade security and compliance to companies like AstraZeneca, Nationwide Insurance, Morgan Stanley, and GE.

A Teams customer saw a 20-30% reduction in help tickets, allowing their support engineers to focus

In 2019, Eddie Flaisler, the company’s head of enterprise engineering, decided there was a challenge Box needed to address. “The biggest issue we had as an engineering organization was knowledge transfer and searchability of knowledge. I think it is very common in engineering organizations that you find people have a lot of institutional knowledge, a lot of things that they keep in their head. Either it is not documented anywhere, or it is in a collection of Box notes, Google docs, Confluence pages, just all over the place.”

Over the last year and a half, 650 users at Box have provided over 900 answers which have been searched and viewed thousands of times on their Stack Overflow for Teams instance. “Stack Overflow is heavily used at Box as the interface for engineering teams, in terms of how other teams, be it support, product, or marketing, can communicate with them,” explains Flaisler. 

It was important that employees be able to get answers to technical questions, but engineers also needed time for focused work. Avoiding context switching was key. “If you have a question, if you have some clarification that you need, instead of overwhelming everyone on Slack or an email, there’s a queue. Questions are created, somebody is monitoring the questions and responding, and this has improved productivity across the board.”

New products and processes

Starting with this blog post and going forward each quarter, we’ll be making a slight shift to the content. Community members have shared their feedback, and asked for more detail on what Stack Overflow is doing in regards to the public site, moderation, and user experience. We want to deliver that, so we are planning a new series of posts written by Teresa Dietrich, our chief product & technology officer, who thinks deeply about these topics every day. My quarterly blog posts will focus more on what’s happening with our company, our paid products and overall business. Here are several of those updates.

This month we released For You, a new personalization feature for Teams that involved collaboration across Product, Engineering, and Marketing in order to launch successfully. This feature helps customers rapidly share solutions within their organizations by keeping information fresh and prompting users to engage in building a knowledge community.

We have lowered the barrier to entry for Stack Overflow for Teams, offering customers the ability to sign up for our Basic or Business tier through a self-serve portal we launched last quarter. That led to a more than five fold increase in interest for these products in December. That same month, Stack Overflow for Teams was also presented with a Stratus award for outstanding product in the cloud collaboration category. We continue to invest in and innovate on this product, for example launching version 3 of our popular Slack integration earlier this week.

In December of 2020, we announced a new partnership with Times Bridge of India. They became an investor in our latest funding round and are working with us to expand our Stack Overflow for Teams product to the fast-growing SaaS market in India, which is expanding around 30% a year. We join a great group of Times Bridge partners, including Coursera, Airbnb and Uber, and we’re excited to begin working with entrepreneurs and innovators across this region.

In December, we also soft-launched our new process for employers with ad hoc hiring needs (companies hiring five or fewer roles, for initially shorter than six months, and with no need for more complex hiring and branding products). The new process consisted of a streamlined purchase flow for these customers that should get them on the platform and hiring fast. After a successful pilot, we began a phased launch in the United States in January. 

Crafting a Strong Culture

Stack Overflow has always focused on our culture and we are thrilled to be recognized by Built In in their Best Places to Work rankings across four different categories! Over the December break, we were also recognized as one of the Best Work-From-Home companies by PowerToFly, a women-led recruitment platform.

I want to give a big thank you to our people team for their work, which made these awards possible. I also want to give a warm welcome to Debbie Shotwell, who joins our senior leadership team as the new Chief People Officer. As we enter Stack Overflow’s next phase of growth, Debbie will partner closely with me and our leadership team to lead the company’s people strategy. Debbie, who was previously Chief People Officer at Saba Software, has 20 years of experience delivering business transformation and creating innovative cultures aligned with the rapidly changing needs of the workforce. We continue to bring on top talent from the SaaS industry and have lots of open roles.

What Comes Next

Looking forward, we have some exciting announcements planned for the first half of this year. We are envisioning ways for companies to better support their tools and technologies through our public platform, driving value for the creators, but also for the consumers, who will have an easier time finding high quality answers to their questions.

We are also excited to find new ways to get Stack Overflow for Teams into the hands of more customers with a wider variety of use cases. What began as a product used solely by engineering teams has expanded to include product, product marketing, data science, product design and customer success. We want to create a version that would provide immediate value to the tens of millions of developers and technologists who visit our public sites each month. Stay tuned for some exciting news here in the coming weeks.

With the rollout of vaccination campaigns underway in many parts of the world, I am hopeful that we are turning a corner towards a brighter, healthier 2021. Remote work will continue to be the norm for most technical workers through the next several quarters, and we believe that a fundamental shift has occurred during the last year, with many companies having a far greater percentage of remote workers for the long term. Stack Overflow was created to help people from across the globe share knowledge, improve their productivity, be more agile, and drive the speed of innovation. Our mission matches the moment, and I’m excited for Stack Overflow to continue empowering developers and technologists with the tools and information they need to succeed.

The post Building momentum in our transition to a product led SaaS company appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

I came across an interesting question on MathOverflow recently. It asked for examples of mathematical models to explain the structure of spider webs. One of the key properties of these beautiful creations is that they can avoid concentrations of stress, even when some of the threads are broken. Spider webs are a remarkable example of resilience. 

This month marks my one year anniversary since joining Stack Overflow as CEO. When I left Texas in October and spent months working from our headquarters in New York, I never could have imagined the road ahead; for myself, for this company, and for the entire world. Our office in New York is empty today, our global team is working remotely, and I’m back in Texas. But our mission continues. Through all the challenges, one of the things I have observed with admiration is just how adaptable and resilient we can be as an organization and as a community. To our employees, our customers, and our community, I want to give my thanks for your perseverance. 

There is a lot for our company to be proud of and we have some exciting work ahead of us. We completed an important round of fundraising while navigating an ongoing pandemic. We have seen significant growth in our Stack Overflow for Teams business as remote, asynchronous work becomes more critical to success, and we enter Q4 with record amounts of interest in the product. We’ve found that our customers want to be able to create a Team quickly, which is why we’ve now enabled a self-serve option for our Business plan of Teams. Starting this week, you can create a new Team, invite folks, and start sharing information within minutes.

During my first quarter with the company, we all met up in Austin, Texas to connect and plan for the upcoming year. This year, we held a company-wide virtual meetup to lay out our 2021 strategic goals and unified product strategy and vision. We have followed a unique path and approach, one that started with establishing a community, coalesced around a brand, and is now focused on building products based on what we have learnt from our users to make their lives more efficient and productive.  Below is a slide I shared with the entire company during our virtual meetup that highlights our two strategic priorities and three foundational pillars for 2021. 

As I look ahead to my second year at the company, my team and I are focused on helping our global community of users and customers build and maintain connections. At Stack Overflow we are focused on creating platforms and products that help users and customers to share information, build their knowledge, and collaborate more efficiently. Whether it’s Stack Overflow, our technical Stack Exchange sites or Stack Overflow for Teams inside organizations, we are in the business of building digital communities, and the connections one finds in these groups are more essential in this increasingly remote world than ever. 

Building Bridges in the Community

The challenges we face today as a result of the pandemic are acutely felt by students and recent graduates who are trying to complete their education or find a start to their careers. We know from our Developer Survey and social media that our public site is utilized actively by students learning to code, and we wanted to learn from them as well. New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) is the nation’s largest youth employment program, historically connecting NYC youth between the ages of 14 and 24 with career exploration opportunities and paid work experience each summer. Stack Overflow recently took part in SYEP’s Summer Bridge 2020, helping a cohort of young learners to get first-hand experience with the tech industry. 

Many of these young learners have visited our sites when they needed help with a technical problem, but not as many had taken the next step of contributing their own questions and answers. We asked them to form groups and present us with ideas for how to increase participation. We are considering their suggestions for educational content and working to make the rules of our communities more transparent and accessible. 

We continue to focus on improving our working relationship with the community and to address long standing issues. We have read the letters, meta posts, and comment threads from passionate users who sincerely want to help improve our sites and to make this a place where everyone feels safe and welcome to contribute. 

Our users had also been asking for us to move our editor over to highlight.js. It’s open source and actively maintained, so we thought it would be a better bet for the long term than Prettify, which was discontinued in April. This is a nice example of work from our Stack Overflow for Teams group migrating over and making a difference on our public Stack Overflow website. You’ll see more interplay and mutual benefit between these two products in the future.

Our community team also put tremendous effort into a Ticket Smash event, working our way through a backlog of requests, bugs, and fixes. We made it through all 631 tickets in those two weeks. The team worked on issues that our moderators escalated and got a much better understanding of what our moderators face every day. Their tireless work on behalf of the network is always awe inspiring.

We are also working hard to make our community more diverse and inclusive, and that means prioritizing racial equity efforts and taking steps to help fight racism in the tech community and beyond. On that front, our leadership team has continued to make good progress in close partnership with the company’s Black and Brown Affinity Group (BnB). The BnB group has identified a short list of companies with which we hope to partner in order to assist them in their work through in-kind contributions of our products. Internally, we are making more resources available to our employees, and we recently published a formal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Policy that includes an update to the company’s hiring policy. Look out for more updates in these quarterly CEO blog posts and across all of our channels.

Investing in Stack Overflow for Teams and Transforming into a Product-led SaaS Company

What does it mean to be a product-led company? To us, it means focusing on solving users’ problems to drive adoption and engagement, creating viral growth for our products. Rather than relying heavily on sales and marketing, we deliver value to our users and provide natural avenues for them to expand their interaction with our products, in a self-serve manner. We’ve been user focused as a company since our public platform was launched over a decade ago, so this is an extension of that thinking into our product portfolio.

Being product-led means solving real problems for our users within the product and allowing data on product usage to guide our next steps on our roadmap. Putting the user journey front and center lets us leverage the strength we have as an organization – learning and feedback from our public community. We want to push the solution closer to the user, giving them the choice and allowing them to decide when it’s time to level up and add more features. 

One of the best ways to understand where you can improve your products is by working to adopt them into your own daily use. Since my last quarterly blog post, we have rolled out a new powerful feature in Stack Overflow for Teams called Articles. The goal is to provide a new content type—long form prose (with Stack Overflow’s familiar principles) — that can sit side by side with shorter Q&A for developers and technologists to share policies, how-to guides, product launch retrospectives, and more. Teams can then organize Articles and Q&A into Collections, providing a single source for all knowledge on certain topics. This combination of Q&A and longer form content is a powerful mechanism for efficiently sharing comprehensive technical knowledge within organizations. You can check out these features for yourself on the new Stack Overflow for Teams Tour page for our Business tier.    

Within our company, our teams have been working to migrate information from wikis, FAQs, and other forms of documentation into our own instance of Articles. It’s given us a new perspective on how we can be most efficient and supportive when onboarding new employees, drive distributed teams to collaborate and engage employees irrespective of their location or function —- and how that process can actually result in high value documentation that helps the entire team be more connected and aligned, asynchronously. 

For example, Josh Duffney, a site reliability engineer, joined the company in June of this year and began asking lots of questions on our internal instance of Stack Overflow for Teams.  Through this process, something that in the past might have been done with shoulder taps, lunchtime chats, email threads, or casual messages in a work chat, he was transforming something intangible into digital artifacts that everyone on the team could use and improve. “A lot of what I have been learning and committing to Stack Overflow for Teams is institutional knowledge. A good example is how to test our Terraform modules. I can ask that question, record the answers, and then bring a bunch of Q&A together to create an Article that documents the difference between my assumptions and the reality.” Our clients have created hundreds of Articles, and the feedback we have been getting from them will be invaluable as we work on the next version of this product.

We are especially excited for what’s to come. Our Series E investment means a large investment in our Stack Overflow for Teams product, so it can be more useful to current users and much more widely adopted. We have many exciting product innovations and announcements to come through the end of the year and into 2021, like a deeper partnership with Slack that was teased a bit at Slack Frontiers earlier this month. We are partnering with them on their Org-Wide app, which is available now for select enterprise-level customers and will be rolling out more widely soon. We are excited to continue deepening the integration between our workplace toolkits. The combination of leading synchronous collaboration tools like Slack with leading asynchronous collaboration tools like Stack Overflow is a powerful efficiency driver for developers and technologists.  

At the beginning of October, we also announced the completion of our SOC 2 Type II audit for our Enterprise tier of Stack Overflow for Teams. This reinforces that the controls we put in place match trusted requirements, including international security, and that our Enterprise customers using Stack Overflow for Teams have their data well guarded. 

Finally, we released Enterprise 2020.2 for Stack Overflow for Teams (Enterprise tier) which included a power-packed set of features for our Enterprise customers including Articles, Collections, User Groups, Dark Mode and Question Following.

Advertising and Talent

The third quarter saw the highest number of ads transactions on our platform in the company’s history. One of our clients during this period was Twilio, which used our Direct to Developer program to get their technical blog posts in front of programmers searching for similar topics on Stack Overflow. Following the launch of their campaign, traffic to many of these articles doubled or tripled, with the monthly readership in some cases increasing by a factor of ten. “There is tons of content that before wasn’t really getting much attention and now we see a lot of traction,” says Troy Blanchard, a senior manager on Twilio’s marketing campaign. 

With Stack Overflow, Twilio was able to reach developers on their second screen, the knowledge base visited by over 100 million developers and technologists each month, many of whom visit the site multiple times a week to find help with coding questions. “It’s been this smooth journey from looking up a question on Stack Overflow to finding interesting content to learning more about Twilio. It’s hitting home with the developer audience.” 

I think one of the reasons Twilio’s campaign worked so well on Stack Overflow is that we share the same values when it comes to advertising. Stack Overflow ads continue to be simple. You won’t find animated GIFs, videos, or pop-ups. But for Twilio, that’s not the point. Relevance, reach, and respect for the audience are the keys to success when trying to reach programmers. The key is to have share of mind on the site most developers visit multiple times a week. “Our chief product officer asked me, are we doing stuff on Stack Overflow?” explains Blanchard. “As the product officer, he’s not asking to see a Twilio billboard every time he goes to the airport. He’s thinking, I want people to see Twilio when they are in the act of building something with code.” 

Regarding our Talent business, while there is still uncertainty around companies hiring in the midst of the pandemic, we have been seeing consistent and steady month-over-month growth from our low point in March. The volume of interest is increasing, a strong early indicator that the market is improving. Our team continues to find new ways to adapt to our changing market conditions. We added new features to our reporting toolkit so Talent customers can track their follower growth and new products so that companies without immediate hiring needs can continue to invest in building overall awareness and mind share for their brand among developers. And new features, like Company Awareness, allows brands to stay top of mind with developers and strengthen their candidate pipeline even when they aren’t directly listing openings.

When I think about what’s happening with workplaces these days, it’s becoming increasingly clear that office life for most knowledge workers is unlikely to return until the summer of 2021, and even then, many big tech companies have declared that workers who have moved remote during this period can continue to operate far from cities or campuses. A recent piece in the New York Times found that a growing number of companies are delaying the reopening of their offices or allowing employees to remain remote indefinitely. According to a recent study, 73% of U.S. employees fear that returning to an office would pose a significant risk to their health.

Our senior staff have been contributing to the blog, sharing advice on hiring, communication, and professional development for a distributed workforce in a remote world, sharing our own experience with these tectonic shifts across industry and labor. Luckily we have experience building communities online. The New York Times cited us as a place to learn, network, and search for new employment opportunities. And speaking of jobs, we have a new Careers page up and lots of open positions we are hiring for here at Stack Overflow.

Looking to the Future

Stack has always been about enabling asynchronous collaboration, and the visitors who rely on us for answers come from every corner of the world. That approach is becoming increasingly valuable in a time when so many offices are closed and colleagues are working remotely from home. We have seen the move to remote reflected in usage of our sites, with many companies expanding their use of cloud services and remote deployments. 

For example, May, June, and July saw the highest number of new questions being asked for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, with some months reaching as high as 50% more questions than the same time last year. I am also so excited to see the interest in transformational technologies continuing to accelerate on Stack on sites like Quantum Computing Stack Exchange, Artificial Intelligence Stack Exchange and Open Source Stack Exchange.

Our public site has now reached a tremendous milestone, with over 20 million questions asked and answered on Stack Overflow alone. It was designed from the ground up to enable users from anywhere in the world to collaborate asynchronously in order to build a powerful repository of information.

With Stack Overflow for Teams, companies like Bloomberg, Box, and Microsoft are building incredible knowledge bases within their own organizations. I’m excited about our ongoing research into creating new meaningful and thoughtful ways for developers and technologists to connect with each other and more directly with technology companies that are building sub-communities on Stack Overflow. We have seen companies like Snowflake and Sencha move developer support from internally developed forums to Stack Overflow, an effort to meet programmers in their workflow, at the place they already visit several times a week. 

There is a lot more potential we can explore when it comes to helping companies support their platforms and technology by connecting their experts with the users seeking information on our sites. Since Snowflake switched their technical Q&A to Stack Overflow in 2019, questions with its tags have grown substantially.

Traditionally, a company would start with a product, build a brand around that, and see a community form around the use of their product or the spirit of their brand. At Stack Overflow, we have done just the opposite. We began with a community and a mission to democratize access to information on code. Over time, collaboration and knowledge sharing became the core of our brand. Last but not least, we built products that grew out of the foundation our community had created and out of what we learned from crafting great Q&A systems for them to use. When people ask what our story is these days, I tell them it’s quite simple: we are in the business of building great technology communities. As developers and technologists increasingly find themselves sharing knowledge and collaborating in a remote and asynchronous environment, our mission has become more important than ever. Thank you for continuing to support it.

We are happy to hear your comment below or in our discussion post on Meta Stack Exchange.

The post Communities and Connections will power our growth in 2021 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

I am thrilled to start this quarter’s blog post with the very exciting news that today we announced $85 million in Series E funding for the company. This is an exciting inflection point in our company’s history as we accelerate the realization of our mission: to help write the script of the future by serving developers and technologists. 

The financing round was led by GIC with participation from new investor Silver Lake Waterman with participation from our longstanding, institutional investors that include Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures (USV). We are excited to partner with some of the world’s best technology investors as we embark on this next phase in our journey. A special note of thanks to our team, led by Jerry Raphael, our Chief Financial Officer, for the significant hard work that was invested in this process.

Stack Overflow has been a venture backed company for 12 years and our last funding round was in 2015. This investment will allow for a continuation of the work we are doing to establish the foundation for Stack Overflow’s next phase: a leader in products for developers and technologists to collaborate and share knowledge as they build the next generation of applications. 

As the world’s companies go through an intense and accelerated phase of digital transformation, Stack Overflow is at the heart of this movement. The change, which ranges across almost all industries, is being propelled by the massive shift to the cloud, a focus on agility via the DevOps movement, and access to talent from around the world through distributed and remote work. This funding enables our company to add additional resources to the ecosystem of products and communities that we build to help solve difficult problems for developers and technologists. 

“Stack Overflow for Teams makes it easy for our developers to find the information they need quickly. It reduces the repetition of questions internally and eliminates cross-functional silos,” said Chris Thomas, Managing Director at Moody’s Analytics, a customer of Stack Overflow. “Stack Overflow for Teams helps us drive more collaboration and innovation at Moody’s Analytics, especially as we’ve gone fully remote.”

Our public community and commercial products are symbiotically linked. One cannot succeed without the other, and the more one prospers, the more it can propel the success of the pair. With this funding, we will be able to invest in more people and tooling on our public platform and community management teams; in the tools, features, and platforms that support our community managers, moderators, and users. We’ve shared our roadmap for the community, and I am confident that this funding will allow us to deliver on and expand that commitment. What we learn from these communities will help us to build better, more useful products for developers, technologists, and the companies that rely on them.

While celebrating this news, I also want to acknowledge that these are difficult, turbulent times for many. While some areas of the world now seem to be on a path to containing the COVID-19 pandemic, other regions, including our home base in the United States, are still grappling with a rapidly growing number of cases. There is reason to have hope. New York, where Stack Overflow was founded and is headquartered, has suffered tremendously, but now seems to be on a better path. As a company, we have also experienced disruption, but have now found our footing. This is thanks to the tremendous efforts of our community, our employees, our customers and the 120 million monthly developers and technologists who continue to turn to us as a trusted source of knowledge to help them to do their jobs.

Community

In Q2, there was significant focus from our Community team, led by Teresa Dietrich, our Chief Product Officer, to improve the foundation for our moderators. Earlier this month, we introduced a new moderator agreement, our first update to this document in many years. We’re glad to see it has been well-received by the community, and we listened to moderator feedback as we worked to build a strong consensus around this document. We also launched several new avenues to engage with and enable our moderators: including a moderator council, moderator townhalls, and a moderator training platform. We have also worked to update our approach to Creative Commons licensing. We have clarified a number of longstanding open questions relating to how the CC BY-SA licensing applies to content, and have added the ability to easily determine the applicable license version for each post revision (based on its creation date) on the site and through the API.

We continue to see positive metrics around our community. April saw the largest number of new signups (260K) in Stack Overflow history, and the second quarter saw the highest number of engaged users on our platform since January of 2019. This quarter saw growth spurts on exchanges like Ask Ubuntu and 3D printing. I am personally excited by the activity in our communities around topics like machine learning and cloud computing.

Finally, internally at Stack Overflow, we just wrapped our first ever company Community-a-thon. The goal was to familiarize all Stack Overflow employees with the platform, to have them experience firsthand what it’s like for the average Stack Overflow user to ask and answer questions and to provide their own feedback to our Product organization. Stackers contributed over 400 questions and answers on a range of topics. We’ll be doing this again in the future, as it helps to generate a lot of great ideas across departments and strengthens the feedback loop between users and employees. When you’re building, marketing, or selling a product connected to our community, it pays to understand the foundation with high levels of empathy for users.

Product

Our long term product vision is to build an ecosystem of communities and products that enable developers and technologists to solve their hardest problems — to find the solutions they need as they build the world’s next generation software applications. As a product-led company, we look at meaningful and repeatable ways to deliver value to our community of users. The foundation of our company is our public platform, visited by over 120 million unique people from around the world each month. On top of that, we have built a suite of products: Teams, Advertising, and Talent.

The pandemic has radically reshaped the way in which people around the world do their work. For many companies, when the option is available, remote work has become the norm. In this environment, we have seen a surge in demand for our SaaS collaboration product Stack Overflow for Teams. As an example, our Basic Trials for Stack Overflow for Teams have increased 10X since 2019. Employees across Engineering, Product Management, Data Science, and even Customer Success organizations need a way to ship products faster, accelerate onboarding, improve customer experience, and drive innovation by communicating and collaborating asynchronously, no matter where in the world they are working from. G2 and the DevOps Periodic Table have recognized Stack Overflow for Teams as a consistent leader in this space. 

Great collaboration and knowledge sharing comes from breaking down silos between teams and departments. As an example, for our Teams product, we launched the Custom Awards feature, which is a great mechanism to build high levels of engagement within the internal communities our customers create within their companies and organizations. The feature allows customers to reward and recognize employees based on achievement of specific goals that the company cares about. 

Our Advertising business, which allows companies and enterprises to showcase their platforms and tools to developers and technologists, has also seen increased demand over the past quarter. We also expanded our Direct to Developers advertising to our technical Stack Exchange websites, allowing companies to reach and engage a much larger audience. This also means companies looking to reach developers and technologists who specialize in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, cybersecurity, Android, or iOS, can communicate with talented technologists on sites dedicated to sharing knowledge around those specific topics. 

For our Talent product, we have redesigned navigation on our Jobs board, leading to a major increase in usability and click through rates. Job listings can now be found across all our technical Stack Exchange sites, not just Stack Overflow, furthering our goal of integrating our main site with the plethora of highly active and engaged communities around other technical topics like Cloud, DevOps and Machine Learning. We will continue to invest in Jobs as developers and technologists look for work in record numbers. 

For both our Talent and Advertising products, we have focused on improvements that benefit developers and technologists—making it easier to discover and find jobs and new tools and services, both of which are so vital during the current situation.  

Next Steps

Along with COVID-19, another major force reshaping our world over the last three months but for the better is the Black Lives Matter movement and growing awareness around the United States and the world that more must be done to combat and dismantle systemic, structural racism. The Black and Brown (BnB) affinity group at Stack Overflow has been leading the creation of short and long term plans for our response to these issues. You can read more about that here, and you can listen to Ian Allen and Syeeda Briddell, Stack employees and co-chairs of our BnB group, who recently came onto the Stack Overflow podcast to discuss these issues. 

Looking to the future, I would like to detail some of the plans we have for building on our recent growth and for putting our new funding to work. Our vision for Stack Overflow for Teams is to create the world’s most powerful product for asynchronous collaboration and knowledge sharing. The foundational approach Stack Overflow built for our public sites that has served our community for over the past decade has proven to be just as effective when deployed inside of enterprises and companies large and small. Stack Overflow for Teams is a powerful alternative to traditional approaches to documentation and Wikis, a more organic and democratic approach to organizing and sharing the information and experience that exists inside your co-workers’ minds. The feedback users get from earning reputation and badges creates a flywheel effect, encouraging fresh content creation and effective moderation by incentivizing users to level up and earn expanded privileges when they contribute knowledge and curation to the system.

With so many organizations today focused on digital transformation and business continuity, the ability to quickly organize information, connect questions and answers and to collaborate on solutions is becoming increasingly valuable. Video calls via Zoom and Google Meet, emails, and chat apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams are now our primary means of communicating synchronously inside of information and technology companies. These trends were already in place when I joined Stack Overflow as CEO in October of 2019, but they have accelerated dramatically during the shutdowns and quarantine that have rippled across the globe. We believe it’s going to be critical for companies and enterprises to leverage asynchronous collaboration products like Stack Overflow for Teams to improve productivity and minimize distraction. We will continue to focus on making the product an even more indispensable part of the developer and technologist workflow while working cohesively with the above synchronous collaboration tools. 

The vitality and variety of our products is a reflection of the health and breadth of our community. It’s inspiring to see the diversity of thought and technical knowledge being shared on our network — knowledge that is foundational to the world’s next generation of software applications. The more our community succeeds, the easier it will be for us to scale Stack Overflow the company. As we grow, we can hire and invest in the products and people our community needs to thrive. Neither side can prosper without the other. My commitment today is to continue down the path of transparency and accountability with our community, so that they can continue to scale Stack Overflow and our Exchanges, and we can continue to grow our business, a relationship that allows for greater collaboration and knowledge sharing across companies and communities that span the globe.

The post Our Series E Funding – An Inflection Point to Accelerate the Realization of our Mission appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Earlier this week our Black and Brown Affinity Group (BnB)—a community of employees comprising Stackers from all teams, levels of seniority, and geographies—presented a short and long-term plan to our leadership team. We felt it was important that Black voices be heard loudest in this conversation, and we are grateful that they came together to form such a thoughtful plan.

Following that meeting, we have several short- and long-term initiatives in the works.

Effective immediately, we are donating $50,000 to the Equal Justice Initiative and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in order to support these organizations in the important work they are doing to end systemic racism. Internally, we are continuing to encourage any employee who needs time and space to process current events or participate in protests should they choose to take sick time so that it doesn’t impact their personal paid-time off.

Over the next several weeks, we are working with our BnB leaders on several additional actions that we hope will further empower this movement.

• We are evaluating how we can donate our product capabilities to nonprofit organizations and activists working on the front lines. This includes our SaaS collaboration and knowledge sharing tool Stack Overflow for Teams, banner ads across our sites, and job slots within Stack Overflow Talent.
• We are creating an employee volunteer program to allow all Stackers to take dedicated, paid time off to give back.
• Also internally, we are further investing in diversity and inclusion (D&I) training and resources and creating a program whereby employees will pledge to educate themselves and stand up for D&I.

In the longer term, the leadership team will continue to partner with our BnB leaders, our People Team, and other stakeholders in order to impact systemic change. This includes increasing the representation of Black people and people of color on our content channels, investing in D&I leadership and mentorship programs, and ultimately hiring, retaining, and promoting a more diverse workforce through structured hiring, learning and development, and inclusivity at all levels of the company.

We know that accountability and transparency are key in order to enact change, so we are also committed to sharing updates on a quarterly basis on how we are progressing and where you—the community—can continue to be helpful.

Thank you to our customers, community, and employees for supporting us making this a priority. And an especially big thank you to our Black colleagues for their leadership. Again, we stand in solidarity with the Black community. Black lives matter.

The post Steps Stack Overflow is taking to help fight racism appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Every Friday, since I started in October 2019, I’ve sent the company an email and brief “Fireside Chat” video with my observations on the week and our progress as we transform into a leading SaaS company. Since we went fully remote in early March, these company-wide communications have provided updates on how we are navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. Below are some of the thoughts I shared:

This is a key moment in our company’s history, as the whole world is dealing with significant uncertainty. Know that you are not alone. We are facing this situation together. 

Reflect on other challenging times as it relates to your life and how it ultimately passed and made you into who you are as a person today. I’m confident that with your help and daily leadership, we will figure it out, solve the various problems in front of us with an agile and growth mindset, and WE WILL come out of this crisis as a stronger company.

My ask is that you stay focused on living our core values and actively connect with your team, our community, and customers.

I want to share the same sentiment with our community, our customers, and the millions of developers and technologists who visit our network from around the world: Let’s all continue to take care of each other.

Since late February, our newly formed leadership team has met three times a week in COVID-19 related standups. In these meetings, we ensure that we are evaluating all available data, problem solving with an agile approach, and making timely decisions on a variety of topics. We cover everything from the health and safety of our employees to how we can best support our community given our remote DNA, to how to best serve our customers with our SaaS collaboration products. 

This has been a tough week at Stack Overflow, and taking care of each other is more important than ever right now. Like companies large and small, we have had to make difficult choices in order to reflect the market conditions. This week, we reduced our global workforce by approximately 15%. Most of the affected employees were furloughed, except for employees and contractors in regions where furloughs were unfortunately not an option. These actions primarily affected sales and customer success teams within our Talent business, which is dependent on the hiring environment.

We made these decisions with great care and only after assessing and leveraging all other options. We’ve paused all non-critical hiring, suspended our travel budget for all of Q2 and Q3, and cut marketing and software costs significantly.

Reducing our headcount was a painful but necessary decision, of no fault of the employees affected, and one that I take full accountability for as the CEO. We did this in order to ensure that we can serve our customers and community in the long-run.

Despite the impact to our Talent business, we are seeing significant growth in our core SaaS business, Stack Overflow for Teams, and our Advertising business. Our Stack Overflow for Teams collaboration SaaS business is seeing strong interest from enterprises and mid-market companies to raise their remote and distributed team preparedness via collaboration and knowledge sharing software. Our Advertising business continues to show strength. As the 41st most visited website in the word, we attract over 120 million unique visitors every month, and companies want to showcase developer and technologist-centric products in an era when technology is top of mind. So our priority moving forward is to rapidly accelerate the growth of these businesses in order to welcome our colleagues back as soon as possible, and in order to help developers, technologists and teams around the world achieve new levels of collaboration and knowledge sharing. 

I heard some wise words recently: with a crisis like this, you can’t go around the problem, you have to go through it. As a new leadership team and rapidly transforming organization, it’s been inspiring to see us come together in a very challenging time and be highly transparent in our approach to move the organization forward. Given that, I want to focus a bit on what we are doing, as a company and community, to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Core Values, Mission, and Vision 

With COVID-19 now a world-wide pandemic, it’s a moment in our history where humanity will step up yet again and come out stronger. Our newly defined core values have allowed our company to stay grounded as we navigate these challenging times. 

• Adopt a customer first mindset
• Be flexible and inclusive
• Be transparent
• Empower people to deliver outstanding results
• Keep community at our center 
• Learn, share, and grow

Our mission of helping write the script of the future—by serving developers and all technologists—guides all our initiatives across the company and is so critical during this pivotal time in history. The community of users across the entire network of Stack Exchange sites, and the content that they author and curate, serve as the foundation for all of our products and highlight the importance of having active and engaged users on a platform that encourages easier and more comprehensive knowledge sharing and collaboration. 

Companies and organizations around the world are rapidly accelerating their own digital transformation journeys and Stack Overflow is at the heart of that transformation. We’re humbled to play a meaningful part in that transformation as we help solve the most difficult technology problems through our ecosystem of technical communities and SaaS collaboration and knowledge sharing products. 

Community 

While commuting and socializing has dipped in recent months, traffic to a number of our Stack Exchange sites has surged during this period, a reflection of people’s need for great answers to pressing questions. Beyond Stack Overflow and our technical Stack Exchange websites like DevOps, ServerFault (for SysAdmin and Cloud-related topics), Software Engineering, some of our other Stack Exchange websites are growing for obvious reasons. Our Biology and Medical Science sites have seen a wave of interest as people seek to understand the nature of viruses and what we can do to stop them. And there has been a massive jump in traffic on Meta Academia, up 245%, as students and teachers work to navigate this new world of remote learning 

It’s also a testament to the Academia community, which responded by putting together an amazing list of resources for people whose academic workflow has been disrupted by COVID-19.  

We are seeing similar efforts across numerous Stack Exchanges, as digital communities that have existed for years—or in some cases, over a decade—come together in this moment of crisis. As these groups discussed how to tackle the new challenges facing employees, families, individuals, and organizations, they created a new chat room where users from across the Stack Exchange Network can come to to discuss issues or emotions related to the ongoing crisis.

In addition, we have worked on initial experiments aimed at adding potential content sharing and integration between Stack Overflow and other technical sites on the network, to reflect the converging technology environment as it relates to full-stack engineering, Cloud, and DevOps. 

Along with the surge in traffic to our sites, we have also seen an encouraging lift in new users signing up for accounts. You can see the spike and continued lift that has been happening in 2020.

Product 

Despite our focus on navigating COVID-19, I do want to use this quarterly letter to highlight a number of positive, notable product releases we made during the first quarter of 2020. These are the building blocks that will help our company, community, and customers to weather this storm and to rebuild when it passes.

As many regions around the globe have asked citizens to shelter at home and companies focus on business continuity, there has been a huge spike in demand for collaboration and remote work tools—both synchronous and asynchronous. We have seen this change reflected in a spike in demand for Stack Overflow for Teams, our leading asynchronous collaboration and knowledge sharing SaaS product. As a highly-remote company, we have been using Stack Overflow for Teams at Stack Overflow for many years—to rapidly launch new products and features by breaking down silos across Product, Engineering, Sales, and Marketing. 

March was our best month ever for Stack Overflow for Teams deal volume in the history of the four year old product, with growth hitting 188% of our goal and with major enterprises joining the fold. This week, we signed a landmark multi-year Stack Overflow for Teams customer agreement, the largest commercial agreement in the history of our 12 year old company, with one of the world’s largest financial institutions to enable collaboration and knowledge sharing across 30,000 users in their global enterprise.

We have heard from many customers that Stack Overflow for Teams has become a critical asynchronous collaboration tool for their companies as they shifted their workforce entirely remote during this pandemic. “Having a well-run online community where Unqork no-code software creators can share knowledge and seek out expert advice is critical to our growth and success. We’re finding the Stack Overflow for Teams platform particularly valuable with the current remote work environment,” said Olga Gomonova, Unqork’s Head of Client Enablement. “Stack Overflow has helped make it even easier to create applications without code, and our Stack Overflow community has become an important part of our enablement and employee onboarding processes, as well as our overall knowledge management strategy.”

We also made the basic tier of Stack Overflow for Teams free until at least the middle of this summer. It was the right thing to do for big and mid-sized companies that are struggling to go remote and for companies of every size facing business continuity challenges. Within the hundreds of companies that are leveraging extended trials of Stack Overflow for Teams, we were especially excited and encouraged by the hospitals and healthcare and telemedicine companies that signed-up.

With so many new customers of all kinds, one of the key things we want to do is make sure that the products we are building integrate seamlessly with developers’ and technologists’ existing workflow to ensure high levels of productivity. In the first quarter, we announced new integrations with Github, Jira, and Microsoft Teams. 

On the public platform side, we have made a number of important updates. We released a beta version of a feature that will give users more control of what they experience on our network by allowing them to report ads they don’t like, and we launched version 2.0 of our Unfriendly Robot which automatically flags unwelcoming comments. We made it possible for users to follow questions and answers that they did not author, giving folks an easy way to stay up to date with changes to posts that they are interested in. We are excited to share plans for a long-awaited overhaul to review queues. And we shipped the first in a series of changes to the “close question” experience that we hope will make life easier for moderators and more pleasant for users.

Teresa Dietrich, our Chief Product Officer, published the Q2 edition of our public community roadmap. A few highlights: 

1. We have finished the process of creating the first Pro Tempore Moderator Council. 
2. We plan to update the Moderator Reinstatement policy in May to potentially include the Moderator Council’s proposed involvement in the process. 
3. Our Community Managers have been hard at work creating content for moderator training which we have shared for feedback on the Mods Teams instance. The plan is to incorporate the feedback and then select and implement a platform for delivery of the training, which should launch in May. 
4. In June, we plan on running a Community@thon event that will encourage and provide guidance for all Stack Overflow employees (of all experience levels on the network) to spend time using our sites, posting content, and interacting with the Community. 

And of course, when it comes to changes to our Stack Overflow public site, we introduced a feature that has long been among our most requested, the ability to view Stack Overflow in dark mode. This feature has proved incredibly popular, delivering our best month of blog traffic ever, and led to a significant boost in the number of people signing up for new Stack Overflow accounts.

Along with our roadmap, we have had in-person meetings with several veteran moderators and learned a lot. We recently had a pair of moderators on the podcast to share what they are seeing in their community. We hope to continue this kind of positive dialogue with our community. During this trying time, we have seen record traffic to our blog and podcast, and we have doubled the number of podcasts and newsletters released each week to try and share important information and stay in touch with current events as the crisis continues.

Later this month we will launch the results of our 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Thank you to over 65,000 people who took this year’s survey; I know you’re anxious to dig into the findings.

COVID-19 Partnerships

We recently announced that Stack Overflow is forging new partnerships to help tackle the COVID-19 crisis. We are supporting IBM by helping to promote and judge their annual Call For Code, a hackathon which will work to build tools for citizens, companies, and government agencies. We have also featured IBM staffers on our podcast and in our newsletter who are working to help educate coders in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that is now in high demand from government agencies trying to meet unprecedented demand for unemployment insurance. 

We are partnering with the World Health Organization (WHO) to highlight some of their soon-to-launch COVID-19 technologies and platforms within our blog, newsletter, and podcast.

We are also continuing to create content that is useful for anyone looking for work right now. Whether it’s a guide for learning to work asynchronously, handling remote interviews, or a list of companies that offer free online training and certification. We’re sharing that content with individuals and organizations who are going through tough times, and partnering with organizations like Pursuit to share best practices for new and recent coders on finding work during this difficult time.

Moving Forward

It has been nearly two months since New York City, where Stack Overflow is headquartered, mandated shelter-in-place. Since then, so much has changed, so many have suffered, and so many have shown incredible courage and selflessness in battling COVID-19 and to save the lives of those infected.

We are beginning to see glimmers of hope. Countries and cities that were badly impacted have started to flatten the curve. Scientists and researchers are pushing vaccines into early trials, tests that can be done rapidly and at scale are going into production, and companies large and small are finding ways to adapt to this new way of working. 

The COVID-19 pandemic is a reminder that we are all connected as inhabitants of this planet and that human nature is to persevere in the face of even the most extreme adversity. I want to thank our employees who have demonstrated tremendous initiative, collaborated, and worked tirelessly to support and serve our customers and community through this difficult time.

I know that the road ahead will continue to be hard for many, but I feel confident that humanity will recover. We will use technology to break down barriers, come closer together, and find better days ahead. I’m optimistic because I’ve seen every day that we are stronger as a global community than we are as individuals, and that we all have the capacity to adapt and move forward. I believe this moment will ultimately teach us that we are resilient, together. 

We appreciate hearing your thoughts and feedback in the comments below. 

Update 5/12: A mention of Academia was changed to Meta Academia, where the surge in traffic occurred, and a Y-axis was added to daily signup chart for further clarity.

The post A message from our CEO: The Way Forward appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The safety of our employees, community, and customers are our primary concern. There are a number of measures we’re taking to ensure we manage to safely get through this situation while continuing to serve our community and customers effectively. 

For our employees across our three main offices in New York, London, and Munich, we’ve asked them to begin working from home starting today, March 9th, and we have asked all employees to curtail non-essential travel for the time being. 

Stack Overflow was born remotely. It began as a discussion across blogs and a podcast conducted on Skype. We’ve had employees working across continents for over a decade. Today, roughly one third of our employees work in locations where we don’t have a large team or physical office. 

What that means is that for Stackers, much of our day to day work on Slack, GitHub, Stack Overflow for Teams, Google Docs, and other collaboration tools will be conducted as normal. We can continue to push projects forward and be in constant contact with one another. But we recognize that not everyone has the ability to work remotely. For our staff whose work involves maintaining our offices and preparing meals, we will continue to pay and support them, and they will devote this time at home to online professional development. 

For our customers, we are committed to keeping our services up and running. As many of you shift to more remote work, we hope our SaaS product— – Stack Overflow for Teams, will be a valuable tool to share knowledge, find information, and collaborate effectively while remaining safely at home. 

To our community, please know that our community managers will be available if there are issues you want to discuss or challenges that arise. Let’s all work together to ensure the information and discussion across our Stack Exchange network is based on facts and science. 

These are challenging and sometimes frightening times, but we feel confident that as a company and community, we can get through this together.

The post A Message to our Employees, Community, and Customers on Covid-19 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

• Across Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network, we saw around 10 billion page views from 100+ million unique visitors over the course of 2019.
• In 2019, Stack Overflow added over 2.8 million answers and 2.6 million new questions, with over 1.7 million new users joining the community. There are now over 18 million questions and 27 million answers on Stack Overflow, and over 150,000 people sign up for a Stack Overflow account each month, 12 years after we started.
• Every day, users answer thousands of questions on topics like cloud technology, container orchestration, and machine learning. There is an ever growing trove of knowledge on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.
• Our community members and volunteer moderators handled almost two million flags to keep inaccurate, abusive, unwelcoming, or inappropriate content off the site and in line with our updated Code of Conduct.
• Hundreds of thousands of engineers leveraged the power of Stack Overflow for Teams to better collaborate and ship products faster.
• Over 40,000 jobs were posted on Stack Overflow Jobs in 2019. We now have over 1,000,000 searchable profiles of developers who are interested in being contacted about a job on Stack Overflow Talent.
• Almost a million developers found new and useful tools after seeing a company advertise on one of our sites. 

There are a handful of companies that are indispensable to the world of software and to our evolution to a digital society. Stack Overflow is privileged to be in this group of disruptive companies. Thanks to our founders Joel and Jeff, our employees all over the world, and the millions of community members who have contributed so meaningfully to our mission and laid the foundation for our future.

The work we do would not be possible without the contributions of our incredible community. Across Stack Overflow, hundreds of thousands of users, supported by hundreds of moderators, helped to review questions, triage answers, propose new tags, and keep the discourse respectful and on topic. The little actions taken on a daily basis add up to millions of important contributions. Alongside this tremendous activity, nuanced discussions about topics like cybersecurity, cloud server architecture, and data science are happening across our network of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange sites. 

Learning from the company and community — and evolving the organization

During my first three months at the company between October and December of 2019, I connected with all our employees around the world and spent a significant amount of time outside the office speaking with customers and community members. What became apparent in my conversations is that software development has evolved rapidly, and successful companies are evolving their own cultures and practices to keep pace.

For the modern developer, the lines between programming languages, software frameworks, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps are blurring. Developers and organizations are trying to keep up and compete (as the incumbent) or disrupt and take market share (from the incumbent) in an as-a-service digital economy. Every significant developer technology relies on coders finding answers by asking questions on Stack Overflow. But while Stack Overflow has played a massive role in empowering and enabling developers around the world to learn, write code, and build products faster, we as an organization have not kept up with the evolution of the industry.

It is critically important that we evolve our platform, community infrastructure, and culture to be more useful to our community so we continue to be a core part of a developer’s workflow. Of the ~90,000 respondents to our 2019 Stack Overflow Developer survey, 80% tagged themselves as hobbyist programmers, 60% wrote their first line of code before the age of 17, and only 10% were women. Statistics like these have significant implications on how we think about making our community more welcoming, engaging, and inclusive. The key to Stack Overflow’s future and growth are the millions of developers from around the world who find the site useful, but who haven’t yet been welcomed into the community. We need to expand our reach and engagement to ensure these developers join the conversation and push their own learning to new heights.

A key part of great product development is to stay close to customers, listen, and take a thoughtful, data-driven, and research-oriented approach to building products. In our case, it is critical that we work closely with our community to listen, change, and evolve rapidly. As an example, over the past several months, we had a lot of dialog with our community about how best to enforce and evolve our code of conduct. We learned that we needed much better channels to listen to our moderators and community members. We have not evolved the existing channels of engagement for power users in our community, like Meta, or articulated how we intended to make improvements going forward. This has caused friction as our user base and business have rapidly grown. We acknowledge these issues, apologize for our mistakes, and have plans for improving in the future.

In the fourth quarter of 2019, we created a large task force made up of passionate community advocates from across the company to propose solutions to this core problem. The team’s mission is to improve our feedback loop and working relationship with our community. We added a member of our Community team to our leadership team and restructured the organization to invest in Product leadership to build Community-centric features. We are also forming a moderator council, which will include a group of users with diverse experience levels and backgrounds who can help guide our processes. We’re making hard choices and treating no assumptions as sacred in considering ways to evolve the community.

Most importantly, we kicked off a key large scale community survey named Through The Loop and invited our entire community to share their suggestions, product feature requests, and ideas for how Stack Overflow should evolve more broadly. We’ve heard consistent feedback from you regarding key topics like question and answer quality, welcomingness and inclusion, and discovery for relevant questions and answers. All of this is in pursuit of new and more productive ways to work with and listen to our community in the next era of the company. We want to serve all of the millions of people who use Stack Overflow, not just those who know the most about how the site has worked in the past. To be clear, this does not mean channels like Meta will go away, but they need to grow to ensure that users are heard and responded to in a timely fashion. 

We’ve completed the process of defining how our moderator council will be structured, shared an internal framework for asking coworkers tough community questions, defined the important functions that would be best served by more scalable solutions than Meta, and built outlines of our new moderator training modules. By the end of this quarter, all of these initiatives will be shared publicly with you, our users.

Community engagement and inclusion is a top priority for Stack Overflow in 2020. Already, the team has established and released a plan for improving communication and empowering our users internally. We are experimenting to improve in areas we know need work: encouraging more question asking, reduce user to user friction, expanding inclusion, and creating a more integrated experience between Stack Overflow and other technical sites on Stack Exchange. The results of all of this work is being shared publicly through our new Loop series on the Stack Overflow blog and by subscribing to our Stack Overflow newsletter and podcast. We have seen some encouraging results: more people are asking questions, we cut the number of negative comments nearly in half, and December was our best month ever for new user signups!

Building a business and serving every team

At the same time, Stack Overflow continues to grow and evolve as a business. We began with our Advertising product and then expanded to our Talent product. My first quarter helping to manage these businesses has convinced me that Stack Overflow is an underestimated and perhaps even under recognized platform for helping developers connect with companies directly either to understand their developer-centric products or to find their next role at those companies. There’s a lot we can do to raise the awareness of these capabilities.

Our third line of business, Stack Overflow for Teams, is our flagship SaaS product and lets development and technical teams use the power of Stack Overflow internally to answer questions about their own code and technology. It’s becoming an invaluable part of the toolset for developers and technical workers at tech giants like Microsoft, which has over 70,000 users. It’s also used by small startups like Osso VR, which has a few dozen developers using the platform. The Enterprise version launched only two years ago and our mid-level Business tier just six months ago. Within this short period of time, Teams became the fastest growing product in our portfolio. We’re also expanding partnerships within the product. Stack Overflow for Teams integrates with lots of your favorite tools—Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Okta. Key developer workflow tools like GitHub Enterprise and Jira are coming shortly. 

The way companies use Stack Overflow for Teams is fascinating, including one that hits close to home: development teams looking to ship product faster and be more responsive to their customers. This requires Engineering, Product Management, Product Marketing, and other teams to collaborate closely to not only build and ship products but also enable Sales and Customer Success teams to present accurate and up-to-date feature updates and roadmaps to prospects or customers. We recently made Stack Overflow for Teams available for free for the first 30 days, so everyone can experience the power that comes with this collaboration and knowledge sharing tool.

What I hear time and again in conversations with our customers and community members is that the tools we built to discuss writing code can be extremely useful across many areas of an organization—in Engineering, Product Development, Product Marketing, and even People, Business Operations, Legal, Customer Success, and Sales organizations. I know developers love data so I wanted to share highlights from a study we commissioned from Forrester Consulting to assess Teams’ TEI (Total Economic Impact). They sat down with four of our enterprise-sized customers and dug deep. After weeks of interviews and number crunching, the findings prove an incredible 179% return on investment. The full study also revealed some other surprisingly huge impact for companies that use Stack Overflow Teams:

• $224,000 in question-asking time savings in the first year
• $1.1M in question-answering time savings in the first year
• Decreased time to market
• More efficient onboarding for new team members

These numbers are exciting and give everyone at the company a lot of confidence that we can continue to help developers and technical workers all around the world do their daily jobs better and more efficiently. 

Growing Stack Overflow

In 2020, in order to continue to fuel our growth, we’re expanding and diversifying company leadership. Just last week we announced the addition of Teresa Dietrich, who joined as our Chief Product Officer and brings great technical leadership experience from companies like McKinsey New Ventures, Namely, and WebMD. We’ve also added Adrianna Burrows to our Board. In addition to being a Stack Overflow alum, Adrianna has been a marketing leader at great companies like Microsoft, Cornerstone on Demand and is currently CMO of Payscale. I’m grateful to have their expertise to help drive the company forward. 

Stack Overflow is already an indispensable part of the developer workflow from the perspective of our public community, but there is so much more to do for developers as they ship code. Many of the product innovations we’re excited to explore under Teresa’s leadership are the opportunities at the intersection of private and public Stack Overflow. Developers want us to be a more active part of their daily workflow. Coders already leverage public Q&A several times a day to answer their most pressing development questions, but want a more integrated and more enriching experience, especially when combined with our private Teams product. 

We are already seeing many companies leverage our community infrastructure to better support their own developer communities. Sencha, Snowflake, and Mapbox have all announced efforts to use Stack Overflow as a platform for helping programmers to use their products. “We want to make it easier and faster for anyone to find answers to their questions, especially questions that others have raised without needing to wait for a reply from our team,” wrote Yaniv Markovski, head of support at Mapbox. “As a bonus, joining in on this community conversation creates a feedback loop that allows us to create better documentation and learn how we can improve our product.” We are currently exploring how we can create an exceptional experience for developers and companies to interact more directly on Stack Overflow— i.e., by creating more curated channels and spaces on Stack Overflow to interact more directly with specific communities. Stay tuned for more ideas here!

As we look forward to 2020, we plan to invest in public Q&A, expand our community, and continue to cement our place as a pillar of the software industry and broader knowledge economy. We also know that we have work to do on improving how we engage with our community, as well as continuing to strive for more diversity, inclusion, and approachability.

This is a big mandate. So as we embark on the journey this coming year, I’ve asked everyone at Stack Overflow to maintain a growth mindset (through hard work, openness to feedback, and resilience), to always operate with our “why” at the center, and to conduct every meeting as if there is a community member and customer in the room. What I ask of you—anyone reading this post—is to continue to grow with us, to give us feedback through our new feedback loops, and to continue to rely on Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network as the essential resource for exchanging ideas and information on technical topics.

Visionary companies are guided by a mission, not just a sustainable business model, and seek out challenges that can help move humanity forward. We have the opportunity to do that at Stack Overflow, to realize our profound mission of helping write the script of the future by serving developers and technical workers. Let’s answer the most important questions in this great new era of technology, together.

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