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.

Communities are shared spaces where users can build, organize, and enable cross functional groups within their organization to collaboratively learn, share, and solve problems focused around similar technologies, domains or interests. 

Guilds: the first Communities of Practice

Some historians believe the concept of guilds can be traced back as early as 24th century BC Mesopotamia and has been significant in the development of human civilization throughout history, including giving us the first universities. Guilds organized artisans, merchants, and craftsmen specializing in a particular craft, but could also be religious or fraternal guilds organized around specific beliefs and interests. Post-classical guilds utilized the classifications and standards of expertise, beginning as apprentice, advancing to journeyman, then becoming a master craftsman.

Though the economic guild system has died out, the concept of guilds in developing and mastering a domain has seen a resurgence. We see organizations like Spotify returning to the guild model because many of the challenges tech organizations face ultimately come down to people—distributed teams, knowledge silos, redundant work, inefficiencies, and need for growth opportunities. Communities of Practice (CoP) can address these issues in effective ways. 

According to the Scaled Agile Framework, Communities of Practice are organized groups of people with a common interest in a specific technical or business domain, regularly collaborating to share information, improve their skills, and actively work on advancing their knowledge of the domain. In other words, CoPs are the modern day guild for knowledge workers.

Enabling Communities of Practice at Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow has a strong foundation of enabling technical communities both in the global public community and within private organizations. But a lot has changed since we first set out to build a library of programming knowledge. The variety of formats and sheer volume of content out there requires more time and effort to find what you need all while the technologies we use continue to evolve. More people leverage technology in their everyday lives, resulting in an increase in both technology and technology-adjacent roles and growing diversification in tech backgrounds. The result is more people are searching for more content around more technologies than ever before.

On the other hand, there’s plenty that remains constant since we began in 2008. How we as humans learn starts with a question—Q&A is still an intrinsic part of the learning model. Additionally:

• We want to share our knowledge and help others
• We want to be more efficient and productive
• We want to be part of community
• We want to be recognized for our contributions to our communities, especially at work
• We know tech communities are diverse and need to be inclusive, and
• Technologists trust Stack Overflow to help them learn and solve problems

As technology and the people using it change, our needs for learning change too. So we looked at how we can continue to enable our technical communities to develop technology through collective knowledge and identified three main areas where we have an opportunity to make a great impact:  enable more domains to emerge, broaden the types of content and ways to practice skills, and expand community roles to provide more ways for people to engage and have a sense of belonging.

Announcing Communities on Teams

Our aim is to evolve our platform to empower technical communities to learn, share, and grow together. One big step in that direction is launching Communities on Teams, designed to bring together people and knowledge within a technology organization around a specific domain. 

The newest feature in the Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise plan, Communities are self-organizing, bottoms-up groups that help bring colleagues together across projects, interest, and need, narrowing the scope to be more focused around a central theme or domain. While open to all instance members, Communities are especially valuable to those working in the specific domain as content there is aggregated based on the tags chosen for the Community. Users who join these Communities can keep a pulse on activity around their area of interest so they know what’s trending, who’s sharing new knowledge, and where there’s opportunity to contribute or learn.

Once enabled by your Stack Overflow for Teams admin, anyone can create or join a Community. Each Community has a unique name, purpose, and set of tags that define it. From within your Community, you can see recent activity and trending content in your Community, ask a question, post an Article, or create a Collection. You can also see other members in your Community and identify practitioners with expertise across multiple related tags or in a project. Communities identify these experts and their contributions through member acknowledgement and highlight activity from these designated subject matter experts.

By enabling employees to connect, leverage collective knowledge, and work together to solve problems, Communities can strengthen a sense of belonging, provide focused opportunities to participate, reduce duplicate efforts, and ultimately identify more efficient solutions that drive positive outcomes.

How organizations can use Communities

There are many ways organizations can use Communities to build an inclusive, outcome focused culture. Whether or not your organization already leverages communities of practice or guilds, Communities on Teams is a great platform to enable them and help them thrive. Here are some examples of how customers can use Communities:

• Specialized collaboration: Increase speed to solutions through highly-targeted collaboration and problem solving. (example: cloud migration initiative)
• Support: Increase ticket deflection, speed-to-resolution, and customer satisfaction by empowering your support team to step into their full potential for problem solving and process building. (For example: IT, customer support)
• Areas of practice and knowledge curation: Tailor what’s important to your community to learn, share relevant knowledge, and discover best practices and standards. These are typically focused around a specific technical topic or tooling. (For example: CI/CD, DevOps, AI/ML, API platform)
• Affinity groups: Increase sense of belonging and connect users across your workforce with shared interests, affinities, or identities. (For example: accessibility, ally groups, women in tech)

We believe by combining domain, practice, and community, we will expand long-held notions of what a distributed community can accomplish:

• Bring together individuals within a common domain to learn and solve problems together. 
• Enable the monolithic community to self select into many smaller communities without disturbing the foundation of the whole.
• Blend individual and community goals within a single platform.
• Create new opportunities for more members to contribute more knowledge and feel a sense of belonging to the community.
• Elevate passive consumers into active learners.

We’re excited to see how your organization will learn, share, and grow together with Communities on Teams, both now and as we continue to make more updates. To learn more about the value of Communities of Practice and how to leverage Communities in your organization, join our upcoming webinar.

The post Introducing Communities on Teams: where domain, practice, and community come together with purpose 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.

But learning something new isn’t always easy or straightforward. Our research shows that the first, and often most difficult challenge in a learning journey is figuring out where to start, and then finding appropriate, trusted resources for your needs. 

As we evolve the Stack Overflow experience , we want to make that process easier and more efficient by providing all the resources you need in one place. This may include helping you discover more trusted, quality content and resources; finding, building, and sharing learning paths; creating more focused, connected communities; and presenting you with opportunities for hands-on learning.

We are very excited about our evolution from collective knowledge to collective learning, but it will take time. You’ll see us begin to introduce new capabilities on the platform for you to try, and we’ll update you as we leverage community feedback and user research throughout. Today, we’re pleased to introduce online course recommendations. 

When you visit question pages on Stack Overflow, you may now see relevant course recommendations from two popular online learning platforms, Udemy® and Pluralsight®. These course recommendations will appear as an ad module on the right side of the page, where the job recommendations used to be, and won’t impact the existing Q&A experience. Based on your cookie preferences, the courses you see will either be tailored to content you’ve visited on Stack Overflow, or courses selected based on the content of the page you’re visiting, or will be trending courses.

Through our most recent Annual Developer Survey, we learned that the Stack Overflow community is already turning to Udemy and Pluralsight for online learning. These companies are also committed to making trusted learning opportunities accessible to both professional and aspiring technologists, which aligns with our goal of empowering technical communities to learn, share, and grow together. 

“We share in Stack Overflow’s mission to empower developers and technologists through learning and skill development in the flow of work and look forward to helping the community take the next step in their educational journey,” says Seth Hodgson, VP of Engineering at Udemy. “The new online course recommendation ad will help Stack Overflow users easily access specialized and relevant courses from our extensive catalog—right when they need them.”

“Learning technical skills and keeping them sharp is critical for developers to build better and faster while also growing their careers,” said Chris Tonas, Chief Technology Officer at Pluralsight. “We look forward to partnering with Stack Overflow to provide online course recommendations for our developer communities, so they can discover purpose-built and immersive learning experiences to develop the skills they need to thrive.”  

Online Course Recommendations is an additional step on our path to providing all the resources technologists need in one place, and we look forward to continuing to share new ways for users to learn and grow on Stack Overflow.

The post Announcing more ways to learn and grow your skills 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.

Cloud leaders, such as Microsoft Azure, understand the importance of empowering developer communities with the knowledge and resources they need to progress through these modernization workstreams. With today’s launch of the Microsoft Azure Collective, there’s now a destination on Stack Overflow for all things Azure. 

This dedicated space builds upon an already robust set of Azure developer resources that make it easier to find what they need to build on their terms for on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud, or edge environments, and with best-in-class tools, popular open-source frameworks and languages, and a platform that supports continuous collaboration and delivery. 

Users who join the Microsoft Azure Collective will find more than 190,000+ questions and other relevant content using 350+ tags, such as azure-functions, azure-storage, azure-active-directory, azure-sql-database, and azure-cosmosdb. Developers and technologists can engage with subject matter experts on all Microsoft Azure products, including Compute, Containers, Identity & Security, Databases, Analytics, web, mobile, and more. 

“At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. Stack Overflow is a trusted platform for developers where they share knowledge and learn from each other. We’re committed to taking their experience to a whole new level by bringing Azure experts and developers together. We look forward to contributing even more to this vibrant community!” says Saloni Singh, General Manager – Azure Modern Support Experience.

“Collectives creates a community around specific areas of technical focus, where technologists of all skill levels can contribute, learn, and grow,” says Stack Overflow Chief Product Officer Teresa Dietrich. “We’re thrilled to have Microsoft engage and support the Stack Overflow community to help them build and innovate with its products and technology.”

The curated, centralized community resources available through the new collective will help users discover the most up-to-date answers, including those recommended or written by Azure subject matter experts, technical articles such as how-to guides, and Bulletins for upcoming events and releases. Members can keep tabs on where they rank on the leaderboard, and they can be promoted to Recognized Member status based on their contributions. The Microsoft Azure Collective will help the community continue to learn, share, and grow by bringing knowledge and users together.

To join the Azure Collective as a member, visit https://stackoverflow.com/collectives/azure 

To learn more about Collectives on Stack Overflow, visit https://stackoverflow.com/collectives

Take a tour of Collectives on Stack Overflow, check out https://stackoverflow.co/collectives 

The post Microsoft Azure joins Collectives™ on Stack Overflow 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.

Our CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar, kicked things off with a discussion on the state of work and the factors that are key to a developer’s learning journey and success on the job. Drawing on data from our most recent developer survey, he laid out a positive vision for a future of hybrid work and online learning.

Next up was our CTO, Jody Bailey, chatting with Chris Kohr, a VP of Engineering at Salesforce. Nearly 70% of developers say they encounter a knowledge silo at least once a week, and 62% spend more than 30 minutes a day searching for answers or solutions to problems. For a team of 50 developers, the amount of time spent searching for critical information adds up to between 333-651 hours of time lost per week across the entire team.

The pair discussed strategies for helping developers avoid knowledge silos and context switching and explored some of the keys to getting into a flow state that maximizes both productivity and happiness. 

The final morning session was a fireside chat between our Chief Marketing Officer, Khalid El Khatib, and the journalist and author, Clive Thompson, whose book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and Remaking of the World, is a rich ethnographic study of the programmers who help craft our modern society. The pair had the audience in rapt attention with plenty of laughs as they explored what it takes to be a self-taught developer in today’s tech industry.

In the afternoon, Seth Hodgson, VP of Engineering at Udemy, talked about how to approach skills acquisition as a daily habit. As the demands of the workplace change and organizations shift to keep pace and continue to innovate, their workforce requires constant reskilling. In fact, 87% of leaders say they expect to face major skills gaps over the next five years. He discusses an approach that enables real-time, hands-on practice and peer-driven knowledge sharing, which has enabled Udemy’s 54M learners and 12.5K enterprise partners to always be at their best.

Next up, Stack Overflow CTO Jody Bailey held a fireside chat with Alex Bulat-van den Wildenberg, Group Technology Director and CTO at Capgemini, discussed how scaling subject matter experts and uncovering domain expertise can ultimately drive team and product growth.

After a short break, Stack Overflow Chief Product Officer Teresa Dietrich shared how Stack Overflow builds for the technologist’s holistic learning journey and what updates to expect across all of our products: Stack Overflow for Teams, Collectives, Employer Branding, and Advertising.

Following Teresa, Stack Overflow Chief Marketing Officer Khalid El Khatib spoke with Maggie Hulce, Executive VP, GM of Enterprise at Indeed, and Sally Bolig, Global Head of Employer Branding at Etsy about the ultra-competitive talent market today and the Great Resignation still reshaping our workplaces.  How do you attract talent, retain team members, and scale your expertise across your growing team? They discussed how this talent war stands independent from economic trends, the importance of understanding developer workflows in today’s talent climate, and how tools, onboarding, learning, and collaboration will all impact the talent market indefinitely.

Finally, Human-Computer Interaction researcher Dr. Gloria Mark delivered the closing keynote speech. While we’re unable to embed her talk, look for her new book Attention Span: Finding Focus and Fighting Distraction out in January 2023.

What comes next? 

This was our inaugural customer conference, and we had the privilege of getting to interact with employees who lead their internal communities on Stack Overflow for Teams. We were also thrilled that many members of our Stack Overflow community attended. We met folks who had started Stack Exchanges and other who had been asking and answering questions on our platform for over a decade. Given the success of this conference, you can look forward to future Flow State events next year.

The post Missed our Flow State conference? Catch up on all the sessions appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Well, here’s a staggering statistic for you. According to Nick Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford focused on researching the shift from working in offices to working at home, the trend towards WFH has started to stabilize. It was roughly 5% pre-pandemic, jumped to more than 60% during the height of lockdown, and has now leveled off at around 30%. There has been a six-fold increase, in other words, in people working from home between the start of 2020 and today.

In America alone, estimates Prof. Bloom, that translates to saving roughly 200 million hours and six billion miles EACH WEEK. Let that sink in for a second. If we extrapolate across the globe, there may be upwards of a BILLION hours previously spent on commuting that can now be devoted to learning, working, and recuperating for the next batch of productivity.

How are employers, organizations, and software developers responding to this tremendous change? That’s just one topic we’ll explore at Flow State on Wednesday, September 28. The event will gather developers, technologists, and technology leaders to discuss some of today’s biggest challenges and how to solve them.

For example, let’s say hybrid and remote work has cut way down on employees average time spent commuting each week, but also reduced the ease with which they can meet face to face or find a subject matter expert. 

Nearly 70% of developers say they encounter a knowledge silo at least once a week, and 63% spend more than 30 minutes a day searching for answers or solutions to problems. For a team of 50 developers, the amount of time spent searching for answers/solutions adds up to between 333-651 hours of time lost per week across the entire team. You’ve got all this time back if you skip the commute, but many teams no longer have the ability to shout across a room or walk down the hall to shoulder tap a subject matter expert. 

How do you empower a flow state over a state of disruption? Jody Bailey, Stack Overflow’s Chief Technology Officer, will discuss this issue with engineering leaders from companies like Salesforce and Walmart. We’re hosting multiple panels featuring technical leaders with deep experience in the software business who will discuss why redefining productivity means better defining the developer experience.

As the workplace evolves, so do the skills developers, managers, and executives need to thrive. Organizations are undergoing a massive shift as they look to keep pace with innovation while navigating vast time zone differences, increasingly asynchronous work and an ongoing battle for relevance which requires constant reskilling. In fact, 87% of leaders say they expect to face major skills gaps over the next five years with a heavy reliance on the developer community. We’ll be hearing from Udemy’s VP of Engineering, Seth Hodgson, who will discuss how developers can increase their operational effectiveness to drive better business outcomes by regularly addressing skills gaps in the flow of work.

There will be lots of other terrific talks at the event. Clive Thompson, who wrote the book Coders, will sit down with our own Khalid El Khatib, Stack Overflow’s Chief Marketing Officer for a fireside chat. You can also hear from Dr. Gloria Mark, Chancellor’s Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft, and author of the forthcoming book Attention Span. She’s the researcher behind a staggering stat we cite often: We spend an average of just 47 seconds on any screen before shifting our attention. It takes 25 minutes to bring our attention back to a task after an interruption. 

The event is hybrid and every single talk will be broadcast to developers and technologists everywhere. (And if you need a sweetener beyond the great content, anyone who joins will get some Stack Overflow stickers in the mail!) We will gather a very limited number of technology leaders in New York to attend the conference live, where they can select their own Stack Overflow t-shirt with an exclusive design printed on-site and pick up an exclusive copy of Stack Overflow Magazine’s premier issue. If you’re based in New York and interested in attending live, click here. Due to capacity limitations, in-person attendance is limited. Again, all are welcome to attend virtually but you can apply to join us in New York by visiting flowstate.stackoverflow.co and clicking “Request to attend in-person”.

See you on September 28th!

The post Work has changed. Our upcoming conference, Flow State, explores what’s next appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Stack Overflow has been around for nearly 15 years and has become an ever-evolving encyclopedia of knowledge created and curated by a community of technologists. We’ve always been focused on helping technologists learn, and this year, for the first time, we’re launching a program to work with university students on campuses. 

Why are we launching this program? 

We want to learn how you engage with our site, get your input on what we can improve, and work out how to evolve Stack Overflow as a learning tool for the next generation of technologists. We will also offer the opportunity to pursue interesting challenges and earn rewards.

To help us with this effort, we’re recruiting our first cohort of Student Ambassadors. These ambassadors will represent us on campus, partner with us to bring more of their classmates on board, and take a leadership role in completing challenges, earning rewards, and helping us plan what future semesters will look like. For this semester, we’re partnering with Major League Hacking (MLH), which has a terrific track record of working with students from a wide range of schools. For now, we are working just with schools that have an MLH presence, but will be exploring options for how to expand in the future.

So, what do I need to do as a Student Ambassador?

The basic ask of you is simple. Sign up to be a Student Ambassador, create a Stack Overflow account (if you don’t already have one), and help us host some free pizza nights on campus where students will learn about our platform. Really, it is that simple.

These events will be part of the MLH Pizza Fund. You can use the pizza nights for study sessions, project work, or hackathons—it’s up to you. For every student you recruit to attend the event or sign up for our public platform, we’ll add on extra treats like soda and dessert.

Now, these pizza nights aren’t the only thing we’re doing this semester. If you want to go further, we’re partnering with MLH on three week-long hackathons. Teams that participate get to hear from our engineering staff and can earn rewards for completing various challenges. We’re planning to give away lots of t-shirts and stickers, and for those feeling lucky, raffle off the chance to win your own copy of The Key.

OK, so you can earn pizza and snacks, you can take part in challenges, and you can learn from our engineers. What else can Student Ambassadors do with us this semester? 

For teams that complete challenges during the hack weeks, we’ll shout you out on the Stack Overflow blog, podcast, and newsletter, which collectively reach over three million developers each month and will be featured for a day across every Stack Overflow Q&A page. If you can’t attend any of the three hack weeks but still want to take on a challenge, we’ll work with you to try and find a time for your team to participate this semester. 

Oh, and one last thing. Students who join us will get access to an instance of Stack Overflow for Teams. Think of it like your own private Stack Overflow, a place to ask questions about this program, learn more about MLH or upcoming hackathons, or simply share knowledge with other students. 

Thanks for taking the time to consider our Student Ambassador Program. For now, we’re working with schools that have an MLH presence on campus. If you have a campus club or are planning a hackathon that you think would be a good fit, please apply through the Student Ambassador website or email me directly (bpopper@stackoverflow.com) and we’ll get in touch to discuss what’s possible in future semesters. 

The post Stack Overflow is launching a Student Ambassador Program. Here’s how to apply. 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.

Digging a little deeper, we see that learning via video takes the #4 and #6 spots when it comes to online learning. We’ve already got a blog and hey, we’re Stack Overflow, where folks answering questions are providing a form of technical documentation, so video seemed like the obvious place to try and provide more value to our audience.

Starting today, Stack Overflow will be joining the party, publishing a video version of our weekly podcast to our YouTube channel and sharing some highlights and clips on our social media accounts. Below is video to accompany the podcast that was published this morning.

Over the last few years, we’ve covered plenty of topics that students and seasoned technologists alike might find useful or intriguing. We’ve met the folks guiding AWS education, chatted with the creator of modern PHP, spoken with CEOs who decided to become ICs, and had wide-ranging talks and debates on issues like burnout, open-source projects, and career growth. We’ve uploaded a total of four videos so far, and plan to share a lot more, both from our back catalog and new episodes, in the future.

Are there coders or creators you would like to hear from? Got suggestions for the kind of video content you would like to see from Stack Overflow? Drop us a line by email or leave a comment so we can learn from you. 

The post Seeing is believing: The Stack Overflow Podcast now available as video appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Our new questions focused on how coders learn their trade. We found that older code crafters are most likely to learn from books, while the new generation of coders (under 18) relies on online materials and their friends and family. The overall percentage of those learning to code online, however, increased from 60% to 70%. With so many people working remotely after the pandemic—nearly 85% of organizations represented in this survey have some remote workers—it could be that more and more of our daily lives are moving online as well. 

Additionally, as the pandemic drove us out of the office and into remote work, remote work may be driving us away from full-time employment to more self-directed work. The percentage of professional developers that state that they are an independent contractor, freelancer, or are self-employed has risen by about five points to 16.6%, while the percentage of those in our top five responding countries (United States, India, Germany, United Kingdom, and Canada) who have full-time employment has fallen. Has the switch to remote work triggered a new wave of entrepreneurship as well?

Our other new line of inquiry was version control. We had previously included Git in the “Other tools” section, where it took top honors. It was no surprise that Git was far and away the top version control system, especially among professionals, but what was surprising is that 17% of learners do not use a version control system at all. I guess they’ll wait until onboarding at their first job. 

The big draws with the Developer Survey have always been the technology rankings, where technologists profess their most used, loved, dreaded, and wanted languages, frameworks, and more. The top five languages for professional developers haven’t changed: JavaScript is still the most used, and Rust is the most loved for a seventh year. The big surprise came in the most loved web framework category. Showing how fast web technologies change, newcomer Phoenix took the most loved spot from Svelte, itself a new entry last year. 

Two years ago we asked how you felt about searching for an answer and finding a purple link. Sparked by that, the team wanted to see how many of us are visiting the same question more than once. Our data experts found that the majority of people come back to an answer over and over: 62% of regular Stack Overflow users visit the same question multiple times in a three-month period.* One of our data scientists tells us he probably visits this question once a month. Why remember everything when you can use Stack Overflow as your second brain? 

In this year’s survey, we had a special section at the end where we asked professional developers to tell us what impacts their productivity at work, how often it happens, and how much time it takes out of their day. More than 36,000 developers answered. Their responses can help the developer community start to quantify the impacts of the daily, invisible productivity frictions.

In short, most professional developers are experiencing some level of decreased productivity every week. 68% of respondents say they encounter a knowledge silo at least once a week. For people managers, often the more experienced developers, 73% report encountering a knowledge silo at least once a week.

About 63% of all respondents spend more than 30 minutes a day searching for answers or solutions to problems, with 25% spending more than an hour each day. This productivity impact can add up. For a team of 50 developers, the amount of time spent searching for answers/solutions adds up to between 333-651 hours of time lost per week across the entire team.

On the other side, 46% of all respondents spend more than 30 minutes a day answering questions. 32% of people managers spend over an hour each day just answering questions, while only 14% of independent contributors spend over an hour answering questions. Again, this productivity impact can add up. For a team of 50 developers, the amount of time spent answering questions adds up to between 278-568 hours of time lost per week across the entire team.

Check out the full results from this year’s Developer Survey here. If you’re interested in digging into the data and finding your own insights, we’ll be releasing the results dataset later this year. And as we have done for a while now, we’ll continue to run smaller, focused surveys on everything from web3 to what makes developers happy at work. 

Our mission is to empower the world to build technology through collective knowledge. You all have helped make this survey possible, and we hope that the results give you insight into where the world of software and technology is today. Please share the results of this survey and we’ll see you next year. 

If you have questions about the survey results, you can reach us at press@stackoverflow.com.

*activity from Feb 1 through April 30 of this year; “regular users” are defined as those who visited Stack Overflow more than 5 times over the 3-month period – recurring users should mimic a typical employee who attempts to ask any question from a coworker.

The post Asked and answered: the results for the 2022 Developer survey are here! appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Given this history, it’s only natural that WSO2 is joining Collectives on Stack Overflow. Collectives are subcommunities on Stack Overflow focused on a specific platform or ecosystem and defined by tags associated with an organization’s technologies. You will find answers from subject matter experts, relevant resources and information (including questions, recommended answers, technical articles, and bulletins), and a leaderboard to see where you rank based on your contributions. 

Any user with a Stack Overflow account can join the WSO2 Collective. It brings together experts from within its organization and the Stack Overflow community to share knowledge and collaborate on topics like ‘wso2’, ‘wso2-identity-server’, ‘wso2-api-manager’, and ‘ballerina’. Top contributors can be selected by WSO2 as Recognized Members, users recognized by the company for their contributions and trusted to help nurture the Collective by responding to questions, collaborating on articles, and recommending answers.

“The developer community has long been the focus of WSO2. The products and projects we’ve built over the years all had the same goal: to enable development efforts across many industries,” said AJ Danelz, Head of Developer Relations at WSO2. “Collectives supports our goal of fostering a healthy community through open collaboration and feedback to help each developer—as well as our teams—continue to improve.”

The information and resources developers need to build with WSO2 technologies have historically existed across numerous forums, help centers, and other avenues. “Centralizing our communities’ communication is important,” said Danelz. “We want to meet developers where they are instead of making them come to us. Collectives on Stack Overflow gives us the tools necessary to foster a community without demanding anything in return.”

Going forward, the WSO2 Collective will serve as a dedicated, centralized space to collaborate on the organization’s technologies. “We want to ensure our users can find the help they need, and that will inform others. We intend to focus our public interaction around Stack Overflow questions and plan to leverage the visibility our Collective provides to grow and recognize community members who are contributing.”

WSO2 also looks forward to using its Collective as a space to discuss Ballerina. “Ballerina is a new language built for the modern cloud-native application. The team made the programming language 100% open-source with all parts of the project developed openly at https://github.com/ballerina-platform.” says Danelz. “Ballerina is the only modern cloud-native programming language that provides features for easily using, combining, and creating network services for the cloud.”

Digital transformation remains a focus for businesses worldwide, and developers are building and innovating with WSO2’s API-first software to meet the demand. “Across WSO2 products, we execute more than 18 trillion transactions, expose more than 200,000 APIs, and manage over 1 billion identities every year. Developers are behind every one of those stats,” says Danelz. “We will continue to foster our relationship with the community by improving the tools and resources they need. By enabling community, the community can enable itself. Stack Overflow is where developers go to learn and grow, and we look forward to further empowering users through our Collective.”

The post WSO2 joins Collectives™ on Stack Overflow 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.

We are pleased to share that we have completed our 13th Stack Gives Back and donated $55,700 on behalf of our 557 Stack Exchange moderators. Here is how the money was distributed.

$5,960 to the International Rescue Committee

The International Rescue Committee responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives. 

$6,166 to UNICEF

The United Nations Children’s Fund provides long-term humanitarian and developmental assistance to children and parents in developing countries 

$8,427 to Girls Who Code

Girls Who Code is a nonprofit organization that aims to support and increase the number of women in computer science by equipping young women with the necessary computing skills to pursue 21st-century opportunities.

$14,182 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation. 

$20,965 to Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières)

Doctors Without Borders is an independent, global movement providing medical aid where it’s needed. 

TOTAL: $55,700 USD

I would like to thank every volunteer moderator for their passion, time, and leadership in the communities that make up Stack Exchange network. Let’s keep moving forward and have a positive impact on the world, online and offline.

The post Stack Gives Back 2021 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

We’re thrilled to announce a new and foundational feature, Content Health, that helps intelligently identify and surface potentially outdated or inaccurate knowledge—content that needs to change. This programmatic approach to updating knowledge will help your teams curate an accurate knowledge base as your business environment evolves.

We will build upon and enhance this new feature over the months to come, but we’re excited to share with you an early version that Business plan customers on Stack Overflow for Teams can use immediately. Our Enterprise customers will get access to the feature with our upcoming 2021.3 release.

Why do I need Content Health?

When your central knowledge base becomes outdated, your employees’ and coworkers’ trust that they can find the right answers erodes. The moment your team members stop trusting the platform is the moment it has lost its reason to exist! Instead, teams find one-off, piecemeal ways to get accurate information, like asking a coworker or burning hours solving an issue that has already been solved by someone else. The trust problem grows exponentially as users stop coming back to the platform to add new knowledge, causing it to become further outdated.

Our new Content Health feature gives users total confidence in the accuracy of the information on Stack Overflow for Teams. 

What the Content Health feature does 

Existing features such as upvoting, accepted answers, comments, and notifications both on- and off-platform via our out-of-the-box connectors such as our Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations help teams proactively update their knowledge base and identify the best solutions.

The collaborative aspect of Stack Overflow for Teams makes it easy to tag Subject Matter Experts who have the most accurate knowledge or tag a department when a policy needs updating. This process works well for new knowledge and organically encountered content when users search for specific knowledge. To proactively maintain knowledge, users must either know or look for out-of-date questions, Articles, and other content as part of their project work or a knowledge base cleanup.

Now, we’ve made this process even easier and more streamlined. Engaged users and experts can take action by reviewing, updating, or retiring knowledge that Content Health flags, rather than manually scouring the knowledge base for necessary updates. This feature helps shared knowledge stay relevant so that Stack Overflow for Teams continues to be a useful and valued knowledge base for your organization.

You’ll get an assist in bolstering the accuracy and trustworthiness of bite-sized Q&A and long-form Articles. Stack Overflow for Teams can remain your central source of truth.

The Content Health feature is specifically useful for experts, curators, engaged users, and Moderators of your Stack Overflow for Teams instance. The Content Health review queue uncovers and prioritizes knowledge that’s due for a second look based on its age and usage.

Those with access to Content Health can use Tags to filter the content to divvy up tasks and focus their efforts on verifying areas where they’re knowledgeable.

They can verify, edit, or mark knowledge as obsolete. Once a post is verified or edited, it is removed from the review queue.

Available actions to keep your knowledge fresh

Watch the Content Health feature in action.

In conclusion…

The initial Content Health feature is now available to Business plan customers, and we can’t wait for our customers to take it for a spin and see the value of this new programmatic and streamlined approach to a healthier knowledge base. And we are just getting started –  our teams are already hard at work to enhance this feature in the coming months.

Want to learn more or upgrade? Contact us today.

The post Introducing Content Health, a new way to keep the knowledge base up-to-date appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Since that launch, scores of our customers have used it to get faster access to knowledge within their existing workflows. We’ve even seen a 137% increase in the MS Teams usage over the past six months within our Enterprise customers. 

To make this integration even more helpful to users, we’ve been working hard to update it. Since the original launch, we’ve collected feedback from our customers about the most valuable functionalities within Microsoft Teams. Thanks to our product and engineering teams, we’re updating this integration to make the native Stack Overflow for Teams experience available to users directly within Microsoft Teams.

With new features and tweaks to the integration, we’re sure that the new and improved Version 2 will come in handy. Below you’ll find additional context around the evolution of this integration and how it might be useful to your organization!

An integration is born

According to Harvard Business Review,  a “collaborative overload trap” is when people schedule and participate in more meetings to be more productive, but these meetings displace focus time and can make employees less productive. That same study noted that “it can take us as many as 23 minutes to get fully back on task after [an] interruption.”

Part of the problem could be too many apps, which can contribute to burnout, wasted time, and a general energy drain that permeates the whole company. When fragments of knowledge are stuck in random chat channels in Slack or MS Teams, or hidden away on Google Drive, employees waste time and energy hunting for the disparate information they need. 

These interruptions and delays can have real impacts on an organization’s bottom line. IDC estimates that Fortune 500 companies lose around $31 billion a year by failing to share knowledge within their organization.

Large organizations use multiple business applications to help teams collaborate and coordinate their work: chat applications,homegrown tools, project management, and code repositories, just to name a few. Once they cross that threshold into too many tools, these platforms that are meant to boost productivity actually become a burden. 

We created the Microsoft Teams integration to minimize the knowledge-hunting problem that can lead to context-switching and ultimately burnout.

“Stack Overflow for Teams integration with Microsoft Teams is nice because this is mostly where I do my day-to-day work. I don’t have to leave Microsoft Teams to go to another site.” – Brandon Camerer, Senior User Experience Designer, CloudFit Software

Solving for collaborative overload

Microsoft Teams is an integral part of many business operations. Our integration with Microsoft Teams removes interruptions and accelerates development time. 

Specifically, the Stack Overflow for Teams integration provides quick access to answers and solutions, knowledge retention for future reuse, and awareness of new or updated information. You never have to leave Microsoft Teams to find the information you need. 

Microsoft uses both Microsoft Teams and Stack Overflow for Teams to improve communication and reduce repetitive and distracting pings. 

“With the integration between Microsoft Teams and Stack Overflow, I’m just super excited to have one place where I can see my questions in an area where I already do a lot of my work today.”

• Laura MacLeod, Program Manager, Developer Services Division at Microsoft

How it works

The v2 of this integration provides the features you already love, with new enhancements that make your workday better. Let’s look at what’s new:

Minimize context switching 

At Stack Overflow, we’ve always emphasized the importance of avoiding context switching. With this integration, you never have to leave Microsoft Teams to access your Stack Overflow for Teams knowledge. Our first version of the integration enabled the channel bot action to search all of Stack Overflow for Teams. Search results were then displayed within the channel for quick access to everyone in the channel.

With v2, there’s even less context switching:

• With the message extension feature, a user can search the Stack Overflow for Teams knowledge base, from within a chat channel in Microsoft Teams. The integration provides the best fitting match, and the user is then free to share it with the entire channel. 
• With the Personal App feature, users  can have the native experience of Stack Overflow for Teams without leaving Microsoft Teams. They’ll have the ability to quickly view bookmarked, followed, and personal Questions along with personal Articles. 
• Users can now reuse existing knowledge before tapping into teammates by viewing a list of Questions or Articles within a channel’s tab. This knowledge can be filtered by tags that are applicable to the channel. 

Knowledge capture 

A key facet of the Stack Overflow for Teams integration with Microsoft Teams is the ability to capture knowledge directly from Microsoft Teams. This helps users from having to search through long chat threads for critical knowledge. Users can ask questions in the channel bot and receive the best matching result directly within their Microsoft Teams chat. We also prompt users to ask a question on Stack Overflow for Teams if there are no existing matches to a question they’ve searched. 

Now, we’ve made the knowledge capture functionality stronger through: 

• Converting posts within Microsoft Teams to a question within Stack Overflow for Teams to reuse the knowledge in the future. 
• An ask modal displays within Microsoft Teams to capture additional detail and help to minimize the need to switch between applications. 
• If a user needs help filling out all of the details within the question, teammates can chime in and finish asking the question.

Personal application

This integration now provides a personal oasis of knowledge tailored to a user within a personal app. The personal app links directly to important knowledge including bookmarks, followed Questions, and a user’s own Questions and Articles. This quick access to solutions helps users resolve technical issues even faster now. 

Automated notifications of new or updated knowledge

Our Microsoft Teams integration keeps users up-to-date with automated notifications any time something is updated within the Stack Overflow for Teams instance. Users can set up tag-based push notifications to share new questions, answers, comments, and Articles directly within Microsoft Teams. They can also preview new knowledge related to a Tag without leaving Microsoft Teams. Lastly, users can create new notifications or edit existing notifications quickly by interacting with the channel bot within Microsoft Teams. 

Want to try version 2 of the Microsoft Teams integration? 

Download it today or, if you’re not already a customer, contact us to learn more about it. 

The post Our new and enhanced Microsoft Teams integration 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.

Collectives

With the launch of its Collective, GitLab will continue to build on the collaboration that already exists with the community of developers and contributors using its platform.  

“Community is at the core of GitLab’s mission. With more than 1 million active license users and a contributor community of more than 2,400 people, we have a strong community aligned with our mission – to create a world where everyone can contribute,” said Brendan O’Leary, Senior Developer Evangelist at GitLab.

“GitLab’s Collective on Stack Overflow aligns with our mission. This new space will help us to expand our open source collaboration so contributors and developers can share and learn about version control, CI/CD, DevSecOps, and all-remote workflows. We believe the GitLab Collective will be a place where we can discover feedback and create opportunities for the GitLab community to contribute to Stack Overflow’s community.”

GitLab’s Collective is defined by a set of specific tags related to the company’s technology such as ‘gitlab’ and ‘gitlab-ci’. Users who join the collective can easily find the best answers and get in-depth technical product information about GitLab’s platform and application through how-to guides and knowledge articles. They can also see how they stack up on the leaderboard, and top contributors can be selected by GitLab as Recognized Members, users the company approves to respond to questions or recommend answers.  

We launched Collectives on Stack Overflow with Google Cloud and Go Language earlier this summer, and have already seen thousands of community members joining in. The contributions of the Collectives’ community, taken together, can help the millions of curious question askers who visit Stack Overflow, as well as users looking for a solution to a problem or a way to improve their skills. GitLab’s efforts to expand the pool of open source collaborators aligns with our mission, to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. 

The post GitLab launches Collective on Stack Overflow 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.

We’re excited that this product is finally live in front of our community of users, and we wanted to take a deep dive into how we designed Collectives, starting from the initial ideation to all the decisions and considerations that led to what it is today. This should give you some insight into how we thought about the product and its use.

A public version of our private version

Collectives was an idea that had been kicking around for a while. For years, we had seen individuals share knowledge about technical products freely. Some companies even provided unofficial (or official) tech support by answering questions on their products. We had explored the idea of providing a home page for a technology or company within Stack Overflow, but never figured out a good implementation of it. 

In 2019, at the Stack Overflow meetup in Austin, Texas, the product team did a buildup and tear down of that idea, an exercise where we collectively “tear down” an idea by identifying potential pitfalls and risks, and then build it back up stronger by addressing major concerns and incorporating additional perspectives. One of the biggest problems we found with the idea was that you’d either be moving or duplicating content. Moving content would remove years of curation from Stack Overflow and remove credit from those that helped create the content. Duplicating the content would create two repositories that needed upkeep and add unnecessary cognitive load to users on where to go for the information. In either case, you’d need to create a new user base for this content in the new location.

But in the buildup, the folks on the Reach and Relevance team saw this as an opportunity for companies to make a positive contribution to the site without taking anyone outside of the public Stack Overflow site or moving content around. The idea was to organize content and put companies around the already built communities, which is where they want to be.

When we got back from the meetup, we started a traditional five-day design sprint: the first day was understanding, the second day diverging, third converging, fourth day prototype, and fifth day test. During this sprint, we came up with the problems that this product would solve:

• Enable organizations to build relationships with the Stack Overflow community in a way that improves Stack Overflow as a resource for developers. 
• Provide unique data showing trends and insights to companies so they can better understand developer needs, measure impact, and see our unique value. 

At the end of the sprint, we had a few different ideas, including allowing users to post on behalf of an organization, an organization recommending an answer, a homepage to curate and interact with the organization, and a dashboard for the organization to learn about their community and users.

Our initial solutions were presented to a small group of potential clients and users with positive results. It took a few months before we garnered enough interest from customers to justify moving forward. We had to move quickly in order to get the product ready for an upcoming conference. 

In order to meet this new deadline, we ran research sprints. Every two weeks, research and product design would get together and decide what we wanted to tackle, then research would design a study, run it, and come back with recommendations. Then we would design based off those recommendations. Altogether there were nine research sprints.

Some of the biggest takeaways from these sprints were that users didn’t want Stack Overflow to feel like a social network and that they wanted the answer ranking to remain the same.

What’s in a name: Recognized members

Looking back at the problems we defined during the design sprint, we wanted Collectives and the organizations that took part to improve Stack Overflow. Recognized Members was our first feature planned to solve that problem. This role is intended to increase the quantity and quality of contributions from an organization to the community. This applies not only to employees, but allows organizations to recognize and discover users that already contribute to Stack Overflow successfully.  We were trying to get more people to answer the right questions or recommend the right answers. The idea that these subject matter experts of the organization could be new users of Stack Overflow and would contribute high quality answers and recommendations alongside seasoned community members at the same level within the collective was a driving motivator for this project.

Originally, the term for “Recognized Members” needed to include both experts within the community and employees of the organization. It started as “Verified;” that was too close to social media. We also tested affiliate, partner, expert, and more. There were terms that the clients really liked, like expert, but then we showed it to users and they disliked it immediately. Users felt that “Expert” was a weighted title that added too much pressure—you’re expected to know absolutely everything about the technology. They also felt it was disrespectful to other experts on the site that wouldn’t have this badge.

By the time we went back the fifth time, “Recognized” was one of the original ideas that had tested fairly neutral—it wasn’t picked as a favorite, but didn’t get any negative feedback. We tested it again. That’s the term that best fit the expectation of what we wanted that role to be. So wording was fun.

The other challenge was how to highlight these users and their answers in the collective. We started with “Recognized Member” written in bright orange text. When you start peppering that around the site in different areas, it gets very long. Then we paired the user name with an icon that shows up alongside it so that when space is limited, we could display the icon by itself. Originally, it was a checkmark, but that just didn’t fly—too much like Twitter. We tried colored backgrounds, but that felt too bold. We wanted to make sure the weighting was appropriate, but still recognizable. Eventually, we settled on a star as the icon. 

In our first design sprints, we made the decision to not do employee labels in order to reduce cognitive load and minimize the amount of new user types that we were introducing. However, our potential clients wanted to differentiate between actual employees of the company versus somebody from the community that they’re recognizing. Some potential clients even had this as a legal requirement. We tested this with users, and they agreed that the information should be upfront and transparent so users know who is official and who is a community user that knows their stuff.

At this point, some of the nuances around Employees and Recognized Members began to reveal themselves. If someone leaves the company and are no longer an Employee, what happens to the badge on their answer? Do Employee and Recognized statuses stay on the question if that was true when they answered? We don’t want to label somebody as an employee when they’re not—there can be legal repercussions around that as well. Alternatively, if someone was Recognized when they answered a question, we want to keep highlighting that answer because they were still a recognized authority at the time they answered.

On top of all this, we had to work around the existing codebase. We had to be mindful of our developers and public users, especially anything that would need extra time from the Public Platform or Architecture team; we couldn’t make large changes. Plus, our engineering team had spent the last three years eliminating tech debt and improving stability; they didn’t want to endanger that by making large codebase changes. Just because we’re introducing this new feature quickly, it doesn’t mean we could disturb existing community functionality. This is supposed to add additional value to Public Platform users, not mess with their experience. 

A new content type for the community

We knew from survey results that Articles were of interest to users, something that we had already been using successfully in Teams. Articles were present in most of the research sessions, and it went through a lot of iteration and discovery. Phase one was pretty easy: port Articles over from Stack Overflow for Teams. 

We heard very early on in research about our Documentation project and how it was painful for the community when that failed. Along with the designer that originally worked on documentation, we examined why it failed and what went wrong. When that feature first came out, some users flooded the site with low quality documentation in order to inflate their reputation. Much of the design effort here was to make sure that the quality was going to be higher and there wasn’t going to be the same reputation grab. 

The power of these Collectives isn’t just in the people who run them, it’s in the Members. We want any Member to be able to propose or submit a draft to the Collective for review. In the near future, we’ll launch an Article proposal flow, but we’re still sorting out the nuances of moderation and review. During user research, we heard from a lot of users who don’t want this to become just another blog site. 

In order to get higher quality Articles, we’ll also want to enable other users to propose edits.  Part of this future feature, will allow authors to add any Member as an editor. But we need to put in extra safeguards when a Member goes back and makes edits to their article. This involves another type of approval queue. We want to avoid someone sneaking malicious content into an article without external review. 

Right now, there’s a lot of research into outdated answers and downvoting on the public site. People just tend to close, delete, or downvote questions if they’re wrong or duplicate. Newer users feel like this poses a barrier to the site—they don’t know why their question was downvoted so it feels a little hostile. Imagine how that feels on an Article that someone put a lot of work into. We’re trying to promote the feedback mechanism on Articles to avoid that. If you’re going to downvote, explain why and help the author.

A concern with the feedback mechanism is that the feedback goes to the author in a private section. Only the author, collective Employees, and Recognized Members can see it. There’s definitely moderation concerns because anywhere that someone can send a private message to somebody on the internet usually turns bad. One of our clients was concerned that some of their members might not want to write an article in fear of just getting downvoted or worse because of their gender or their race. They’re opening themselves up to potential backlash just based on who they are, which they’ve seen before in the developer community.

Unlike questions, Articles can’t be answered. They still have comments, though comments on questions are for flagging something, edits, or feedback on the question. That doesn’t really make sense on Articles. Typically, people use comment sections to discuss ideas that were written in the Article. We tested calling comments on articles ‘discussion,’ and it tested pretty well. But there’s a lot of new stuff coming with Collectives. So we pulled back on that plan to wait and see how Articles does in the first place. For now, we still want to encourage interaction with these Articles, so instead of the small “Add a comment link,” we auto-expanded the comment text box to give it more visual weight.

Collective health

Stack Overflow has a heavy gamification component, so we wanted to use that within a collective. When we went to look at designing a Member’s page, we wanted it to be more than a list of members; it should be a little bit more interactive and have a little bit of that competitive spirit. So we pivoted the feature into a leaderboard. We have several leaderboards—the overall one on Stack Overflow, tag-specific ones, ones on Stack Overflow for Teams—so we looked at these and external leaderboards to see what worked and what didn’t. 

The biggest change is that we highlight where you are on the leaderboard. Not everyone will be on the first page, even the first five pages, but it’s still fun to be able to track your progress as you learn and level up. The top three on the leaderboard will get a trophy beside their user card throughout the collective. Employees and Recognized Members will be competing on the same leaderboard; our research showed that users appreciated seeing these users high up on the leaderboard. It meant that the organization behind the collective was actually engaged and putting something back into the site and into the community.

On the client side of things, we still wanted to provide that insights dashboard. We’d heard from users of our Stack Overflow for Teams dashboards that the information in them was great, but that they didn’t know what to do with it. At first, we tried cutting the amount of information down—location, time of day, and other pieces of data got cut. But still, clients ran into the same problem: here’s the info, now what? If my Collective is doing badly, what can I do to make it better?

We were constantly prioritizing during the design of this dashboard. The deadline kept moving, so we always felt like we were up against this tight deadline and we constantly needed to prioritize over other items. Sometimes, one thing would be the most important and other times, it was something else. Constant communication, prioritization exercises, and time management were our daily lives. One of our biggest trip-ups was the amount of times that we had to go through and iterate on it. The team was split on whether to do it at all. 

Just reports and metrics could help prove return on investment with clients. But we wanted something that would ensure that Collectives succeeded, so the insights dashboard evolved into Actions for you, a list of tasks that we think the collective experts should do to make the place successful. It highlights problem areas, so if a Recognized Member has a little bit of time, they know where their efforts will pay off the most. Maybe there’s a lot of unanswered questions. Maybe questions have answers, but those answers need recommendations. 

Along with these highlights, we included a weekly tasks list, steps that the collective team should take every week to help their space thrive. The collective Recognized Members and Admins know exactly what they need to do—write two articles, answer ten questions—and tick off those boxes as the tasks are completed. Next week, it refreshes. It helps level set what a reasonable amount of effort looks like. 

In the future, the task list may have more dynamic items supported by data, nudges to invite more Recognized Members or encourage more edits. When we tested that feature with some of the moderators and high rep users, they all really liked it and requested that we bring it to the mod review queue, which was a good confirmation we were on the right path. 

Getting the dashboards up and running was one of design’s biggest challenges, but it was worth it—it looks great.

And we’re just getting started

Google Cloud and the Go programming language were the first Collectives to launch and those organizations and their users are seeing the value of the work we put in. More technology providers and more features are on the way. 

For example, we’re looking at the ability to pin certain content to the top of the list, perhaps as a way for the collective to promote a certain article for a limited amount of time so that everybody can see the official answer immediately. We’re also looking for ways that the organization can ask and discuss topics with their collective Members. But we want to make sure this adds value to users and it remains within the confines of the collective.These are a few of the features that will really make Collectives feel unique.

As always, we’re trying to lower the friction between technology workers and the answers that they need to get the job done. Technology companies want to be able to engage with those people directly, and Collectives gives both groups a space to interact and share knowledge.

The post A deep dive into how we designed Collectives appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Before I dive in, here are some key things to know:

• We’ve collected a lot of feedback from users and moderators on the site, as well as potential customers. We’ve spent over a hundred hours in 1-on-1 interviews with users and potential customers who have generously given their time to research sessions. We’ve also collected thousands of survey responses, and spent a lot of time reading through feature requests and feedback about past projects on Meta. 
• While we wanted a representative set of feedback, we had a focus on engaging with active, highly contributing Stack Overflow members and moderators. In particular we had a panel of 12 users and moderators who met with us consistently for the last year, and whose feedback has been invaluable.
• This isn’t the end of us collecting feedback – this is still a Beta release. We will continue iterating on these features based on new feedback and insights. I encourage you all to continue sharing feedback, and if you’re interested, to also opt-in to research participation in your email settings so my team and I can contact you for more detailed feedback.

Background and context

When the idea of companies having ‘public teams’ or ‘spaces’ was first brought up, my mind went to all the ways it could possibly go wrong. But I was also really curious about whether there was any genuine value that organizations could add for our users. So this sparked our first big research and design effort: a 5-day design sprint, attended by a wide range of teams from across the company; product management, community management, product design, engineering, data, product research, and more. 

While Stack Overflow needs paid products in order to operate, we want to do this by adding value to the community, not changing things for the worse. So we settled on the following mission statement for our design sprint: “How might we enable companies to build relationships with the Stack Overflow community in a way that improves Stack Overflow as a resource for developers?”

During the design sprint, there were a few things we settled on early:

• We should aim to not change the guidelines around what is on topic for Stack Overflow. This means we should be thinking about organizations who are technology providers, and who likely already have technologies with active tags on Stack Overflow.
• In order for organizations to add value, they would need to directly participate in Q&A in some form – not as a channel for customer support, but as a way for technology providers to share their knowledge in a productive way.
• While so much of our work has been focused on tearing down the barriers to entry for newer users, this would be an ideal project to also focus on where we can add features for more engaged users: what new ways could they participate?

We eventually came to a potential solution (Collectives) which we felt adhered to these criteria, and addressed our initial design sprint mission. The concept consisted of a few parts, including: badges on user cards for verified employees/topic experts, a way for technology providers to indicate an existing answer represented best practice, and some kind of page for an organization to showcase their relevant  tags and other pertinent information.

Early Feedback

The first time we researched these concepts with users (as part of the 5-day design sprint), we learned a lot. One common theme that emerged was that these concepts could help instill trust in an answer, help answer-seekers get to solutions quicker, and potentially help with the issues of outdated answers and identifying canonical answers when it came to duplicates. On the other hand we were cautioned to be careful with not changing things like sort order, so we wouldn’t hurt the democratised nature of the site. 

A couple of other highlights from these early research sessions included:

• When it came to verified employees/topic experts, our research participants saw value here, but only if we maintained relevance. It was critical that these badges were scoped; they should only appear when a user participated on tags which they actually had expertise in. We also got positive feedback about the fact this would be a great way to recognize members on the site who continually contribute their expertise to certain topic areas. On the flip side, we learned that the word ‘verified’ had the wrong connotations (thus beginning a near 18 month struggle for us on what to call this role, with at least 15 different potential names…). Verified reminded participants of social media, and we have no desire to become a social media platform.
• The idea of technology providers being able to mark existing answers on the platform as representing best practice was very popular in research. Some users pointed out that this could potentially be a useful way of designating a canonical answer when handling duplicates. Back then we were calling this concept ‘endorsed answers’, which was not a popular term, and one that non-native English speakers felt was particularly unclear (we weren’t having a good run with copywriting!). So we renamed this to ‘recommended answers’, and this is the one part of the concept that hasn’t changed significantly since our design sprint.

At the end of the design sprint, we were still just scratching the surface of what we needed to learn from Stack Overflow users. We had a million questions about how these features may help or hurt the community, what would make a good collective, what additional features might make this idea more complete, etc. So we began a series of what we called ‘research sprints’, which were essentially intensive blocks of focused research, aiming to address our biggest open questions and hypotheses.

Key findings: Articles

The appetite for longer form content was something we’d heard in the past, but also dug into as part of our research sprints. For example, 23.1% of responses to a survey we ran of visitors to Stack Overflow (n=1010) said they believed how-to guides would be a positive addition to the site. We also know that plenty of contributors have tried to make content that would really be better suited to an article fit into a Q&A format. Overall, the feedback we got through surveys and interviews was that, with the right guardrails, this could be a positive addition to the site.

Some users were cautious because of a project that we had sunsetted a few years ago called Documentation. There were several issues we heard about when it came to Documentation, but the ones brought up by our users most often were the influx of poor quality or repetitive content, as well as issues introduced by users unfairly being able to gain reputation. These were, of course, problems we were keen not to repeat. So that brought us to our first key decision on this feature: at the time of launch we are limiting Article creation to Recognized Members of a collective. However, we are planning on launching a review process where any member of a collective can submit Articles that will then be reviewed by the Recognized Members of that collective. 

In our customer research, something that we discussed was that in order to make this review process successful, customers should be clear about the type and style of Article that would make a good addition to the collective. Hopefully this should go some way to start addressing the first issue we saw with Documentation, helping to raise the bar quality-wise and ensuring that we aren’t just seeing repetition of existing help docs and documentation. 

The other factor when it came to quality was making sure voting was part of the mix. In our initial designs we only had an upvote-style button to signal good quality. But through research we heard that users didn’t want to see upvotes without downvotes. So we added a downvote option in, mirroring Q&A. Which brought us to the other problem we heard about with Documentation: reputation…

I’ll be honest in saying that rep was a topic we got extremely mixed reactions on. Nearly everyone we spoke to had a different take on how we should handle Article rep. So unfortunately, we haven’t found (and probably won’t find) a solution that everyone loves. Some users proposed a new bucket of rep for Article contributions, some encouraged us to offer more rep for Article creation to reflect the added effort it takes to write an Article, and others didn’t think rep should be part of the feature at all.

Key findings: Customer research

Another topic we discussed at length with users was how organizations would interact on the platform. We spoke to some who had attempted to facilitate developer support on Stack Overflow before, and to users who had seen these efforts unfold. Some of the key things we learned from these discussions were that participation from organizations still had to be deeply technical, not be promotional, and perhaps most importantly, we needed organizations to be consistently active to actually see a positive community impact.

This spurred several rounds of research with potential customer partners. We aimed to understand if they would be willing to make this kind of commitment, and if so, how we could facilitate ongoing participation with this initiative. 

This research led to two things. First, helping our team clearly understand what type of organization we wanted to work with: ones that would take the time to understand the site, ensure they were putting dedicated resources towards participation, and didn’t see it as purely an outlet for marketing. 

The second was that we would need to build out dashboards to help Recognzed Members target where to participate on the site. There’s obviously a million ways someone could contribute and we wanted to help make sure Collectives would enhance the community, and fill in the gaps. Part of the dashboards we designed include curated lists to help focus participation, e.g. one of the lists is ‘questions over 30 hours old without an answer’. We hope these curated dashboards will help our customers enrich their community on the site.

Key findings: Moderation

Besides customers and users, there was also another group we were keen to speak to: Stack Overflow Moderators. We were lucky enough to be able to consistently interview several mods throughout our discovery process. These interviews brought a unique perspective to our designs, and helped us consider rules, guidelines, and community health, as well as assess possible abuse vectors. 

Some key topics we covered with participating Stack Overflow moderators were how moderation of new features should be handled, and whether there should be any new rules. One big takeaway from these interviews was that the mod team should moderate the majority of new features, with the option to pull in a Community Manager from our staff where they feel appropriate. 

On the topic of new rules, we didn’t end up adding much. It was agreed that the new content types should still adhere to the existing Stack Overflow rules, licenses, and on-topic guidelines. However, the one thing we were encouraged to do was to provide our customers with guidelines and help docs to ensure their expectations about community norms and rules are set. We’ve done many demos and sessions with our launch customers, and have written several new help docs, and will continue adding to this as the product evolves.

There were dozens more topics we discussed in research, including: our ongoing saga with what to name the new roles and features, how to handle potentially off-topic questions, how to prevent vote fraud, assessing several new content types, possible incentives other than rep, notifications, and so much more. The time and energy that users and moderators have put into sharing their opinions and giving these concepts careful thought and consideration is amazing. If we had launched this initiative without any feedback it would have looked very different, and I am personally really happy about just how much we have learned from community members over the last year and a bit.

Check out the Go Language Collective and the Google Cloud Collective.

For those who want to understand what Product Research looks like at Stack Overflow: Through qualitative and quantitative research, we work to understand the needs, motivations, and pain points of the community and of customers to help guide the direction of our products. This is both in terms of what products should be built, but also how they should be executed. We see ourselves as advocates for the users, and often partner with Community Management, Product Management, Product Design, and Data.

The post Unpacking the user research behind Collectives™ appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Creating and managing relevant content while attracting users, both initially and on an ongoing basis, are challenges that we believe Stack Overflow has spent nearly a decade working to solve. By helping organizations address these challenges, we help our Community access the specific in-depth knowledge of the people directly building and supporting  these technologies.

We believe that we are uniquely positioned to help technology organizations and their users engage directly while identifying where and how to best engage to deliver value to those users. Today, I’m happy to announce the Beta release of a new product called Collectives on Stack Overflow, launching with Google Cloud and Google’s Go Language as our first customers.

Our users leverage questions and answers millions of times a day. This product empowers the organizations connected to these technologies to more directly support the communities that have grown around various topics, bolstering the quality and health of our content in a way that benefits our users as well.

Product Led: What problem are we solving?

We know that engineers at tech organizations have a wealth of knowledge about their technologies and, while some currently participate on Stack Overflow, we identified an opportunity to incentivize, simplify and highlight that participation. An organization’s expertise, when included with the community’s knowledge, can provide a more in-depth and complete understanding of how to better use a language, leverage a service, or troubleshoot a technology so that others with the same issue have a higher level of confidence in the solution provided.

When talking to organizations already represented on Stack Overflow via tags of their technologies, we’ve also learned that there is a strong appetite to contribute their specific knowledge to Stack Overflow. Organizations want to have deeper interactions and provide a better experience to current and potential users of their products and services—something they can’t do with any of our existing products. 

Through the last year, we have conducted extensive product research with moderators, users and potential customer organizations to identify new ways to add value for each to our existing platform while limiting the change to how things already work on Stack Overflow.  We found that users and moderators want to hear from and engage with experts at the organizations who build and support the technologies that they use regularly, and we learned how they want to engage with those experts.  

Collectives features

Collectives is a new set of spaces on Stack Overflow where content related to certain technical languages, products, or services can be grouped together. It’s a place for users who regularly interact with this content to collaborate, and for the organizations who help build or maintain this technology to share their expertise. Collectives are defined by a set of specific tags relating to the technologies that  an organization builds, supports and has an authority over.  It aggregates all content for those interested in these technologies and gives them some special handling of content posted in those tags. This content includes questions and answers as well as new long-form content related to the organization’s products and services. The technology organization doesn’t own the tag, but it has the ability to organize and highlight information it feels is valuable.

Each participating organization will have a Collectives page, which acts as its “home” on Stack Overflow. Questions and answers will continue to belong to the Stack Overflow community, but the Collectives page will aggregate all of the relevant content from the associated tags. Users can join any Collectives page, participate in its leaderboard based on their contributions to its associated content, and find the users that are Admins or Recognized Members of a Collective. 

With this launch we are creating a new Collectives-specific user type: Recognized members are either employees of an organization, part of its Developer Recognition Program, or users selected by the organization from within the Stack Overflow community that are knowledgeable about the organization’s technologies. These users will have a badge identifying them when they post/edit a question, provide an answer, or write an Article that is associated with a collective through its tags.  They will also have the ability to recommend an existing answer within their Collective, highlighting that, from their perspective, this is a recommended way of solving the problem. 

Recognized Members of a collective will also have the ability to contribute a new type of content to our network. They can  create longer form content within a collective which we call an Article. We first introduced this feature within our Teams product last year where we have seen strong adoption and usage. Articles give Recognized Members the opportunity to provide deeper knowledge and insights through how-to-guides, knowledge articles, or announcements. Initially Articles can only be posted by Admins and Recognized Members of a Collective, but we’re planning to release a feature that would allow any member of a collective to submit an Article to the collective for review in the near term.

Our launch customers

We knew early on that we wanted to balance our Collectives between open source and commercial technologies to reflect the diverse landscape that our users work within everyday.  Our target was to launch with an organization of each to demonstrate our commitment to that balance from the start.  I am so pleased to announce that our first two Collectives are Google Cloud and Google’s Go Language. 

“The technical community is the heart of our Google Cloud mission and everything we build and create is grounded in helping them quickly build technologies that push the boundaries of their imaginations,” said Amr Awadallah, Vice President of Cloud Developer Relations at Google. “Ensuring that Google Cloud developers have the information they need to build is embedded in everything we do. Google Cloud’s Collective on Stack Overflow will help us make information more accessible and ignite our technical community so we can all innovate faster.”

“Go was born from the idea that modern open source programming languages should make it easier to build simple, reliable, and efficient software,” says Steven Francia, Product and Strategy Lead for Go Language at Google.” As more developers adopt Go to build their ideas and contribute to its iterations, it feels only fitting to take the same open source approach to technical knowledge sharing with Stack Overflow. Collectives will change how we are able to help technologists understand, implement, and scale Go, as well as collaborate with their peers.”

We designed Collectives to be a win-win for our clients and our community. Organizations get an opportunity to help improve the health and detail of content being created around their technologies, and users have more opportunity to find relevant and accurate information they can use to solve problems and be recognized for their contributions. 

The post Announcing the launch of Collectives™ on Stack Overflow appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

As we begin planning our 2022 product and community strategies and identifying opportunities to invest and innovate, I am excited to collaborate with Prosus to increase the value we deliver to our public platform (Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange) and Stack Overflow for Teams users. We will leverage our user research, backlog of product ideas, and feature requests to define opportunities for deeper impact for all our users and customers. We are excited about the possibility of working with Prosus companies like Codecademy, Udemy, Skillsoft, and Brainly. As these opportunities develop into plans, we will share them through our blog posts and roadmap updates. 

I have read a number of concerns and predictions, both around the acquisition and beyond, which I wanted to specifically address:

• In my one and half years at Stack Overflow, we have never discussed putting a paywall in front of the content that the community has created and curated over many years. We have no intention of ever doing this and understand just how damaging this would be for everyone.
• We also have no intention of limiting the number of copy and pastes for users from our public platform sites. Yes, we did this as an April Fool’s joke, but only because that is just how ridiculous we think this possibility is.
• We have conservative and restrictive advertising and third-party data usage policies because we understand how important this is to our users. Though we ran an experiment on real-time bidding for ads in 2019, we do not use it currently and have no plans to in the future, and all of our advertisers buy directly from Stack Overflow to ensure quality and relevance. We have limited the level of animation and distractions that advertising on our sites creates for our users and investigate any ads reported by users to ensure we maintain high standards. 

We have no intention of changing these strategies or policies. We believe that democratizing technical information empowers the world to develop better technology and innovate faster. Keeping the site open to all has always been core to our values and to our business, and an acquisition doesn’t change that. The team and I are really energized by the impact we have made in the last year and what the future holds for our products, community, customers, and company.

Public Platform

We kicked off Q2 with our April Fool’s Day prank claiming that in order to copy and paste from Stack Overflow you needed to purchase “The Key.” The content and screenshots around this prank were widely shared and hopefully enjoyed as much by our users as it was by our staff. It also taught us some interesting things about how people use our site. 

In May, we launched our 2021 Dev Survey which streamlined both the questions we ask as well as the process to analyze and share the results. As the second quarter ends, we are wrapping up the final phase of our large investment in improving and updating our Review Queue functionality. We have been working on improving content health through research and data collection on closed questions and outdated answers. I look forward to potential improvements based on our learnings which we will share in future roadmap blog posts. We are in the planning phase of user and product research on improving the new user onboarding and overall experience. 

Community Management

We have been focused on growth and renewal in Community Management this year through investment in people and tooling. We have welcomed three new team members who have been introduced to the community on Meta. We have kicked off the search for a VP of Community Management and just recently welcomed a former team member back from within the company. We currently have two additional open positions on Curator Support and Community Operations.

The team transitioned into three sub-teams earlier this year: Community Operations, Curator Support, and Trust and Safety. The creation and focus of these teams enable us to ensure we are on track to meet the fundamental needs of our community. Everyone is settling into their more defined roles and responsibilities, and with the addition of the new team members, we are making real progress on delivering more timely support to our users and reducing our backlog of improvements. 

Reach & Relevance

We are focused on building and operating product features that address real user needs while giving technology vendors and employers the ability to build awareness and engage with interested users on our sites. We have invested months of user and customer research over the last year to innovate and inform how we build new features and functionality. The entire company is excited about what we have been working on and looking forward to sharing more with you; stay tuned for more news later this month. 

To support this, we are focusing more on customer employer branding and company awareness needs, and moving away from job slots and direct hiring. We have begun to wind down the sale of some of our Talent products, namely job listings. We will give our users and customers plenty of notice before we sunset products. More details on this change can be found here.

Teams 

We launched our freemium Stack Overflow for Teams product in March after months of planning and hard work across our company. User response has exceeded our expectations!  In Q2, we have surpassed 25,000 free teams created, which nearly meets our goal for the entire year. Our previous investments from creating product onboarding, messaging, and work within the product and engineering to build high performance and efficient scaling were instrumental in enabling us to launch our Freemium Teams product tier. We are continuing to invest in our product-led growth and SaaS transformation through improved analytics and ongoing engagement with users to inform and educate them about the product. 

We are just getting started with user research on our Basic and Free Teams tiers to understand how we can provide more value to smaller teams and organizations. We are continuing to investigate how and where Public Platform content can be integrated into the Teams experience. We just launched Unified Search on our Enterprise Team tier to allow each customer to decide whether they wanted an integrated search experience or not while ensuring users knew whether they were leveraging internal or public content to help them solve problems. 

Conclusion

Taking a broad view, I see some important themes are emerging in our work. We are investing deeply in research across many areas to understand where our users and customers see the most value and how we can make the greatest impact across the communities, products, and platform that make up Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. We are seeing real impact in the areas we have focused our investment. The announcement of our planned acquisition means we can lean into the strategies we committed to in our roadmaps for this year with increased confidence and speed. We remain committed to building an open, public platform that allows anyone to share and find knowledge. We’re building for our users and customers so they can build for the world.

Please share your thoughts with us on the MSE feedback post.

The post State of the Stack Q2 2021 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.

Since that initial launch, we have listened to customer feedback and have incorporated the top three requested features into a new release.

With this new release, users can now:

• Find Articles alongside Questions when searching for particular tags.
• Save a draft of an Article before publishing later.
• Earn reputation points by creating an Article or responding to an Article.

With these new features, knowledge becomes even easier to find, content becomes better, and the experience becomes more enhanced.  We think users will find these new features make creating, interacting, and discovering Articles easier and more fun.

Knowledge discoverability

Articles are now easier to find.  No longer are Articles and Q&A treated as separate items; search queries will return both. Search and uncover long-form content by topic or subject with tags. Also, when users follow specific tags or ignore specific tags, Articles will either show or not show in their feed or digest. This makes it even easier for users to find the most fitting content when they need it. 

Better knowledge sharing experience

Articles now have enhanced edit capabilities that are similar to Questions.  We listened and now users can start an Article, save it as a draft, and come back to it before publishing to the team or organization.

Improved recognition

Articles now contribute to reputation points, rewarding users for contributing to the knowledge base.  Similar to Questions & Answers, reputation points can now be earned for performing functions.  For example, users can earn +10 points for upvoting an article. Bonus: early adopters of Articles will receive reputation points retroactively.

Explore all of the features of Stack Overflow for Teams or explore all of our plans.

Tags: se-all, new features, stack overflow for teams, se-stackoverflow

The post Find knowledge faster: New Articles features appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

I mean, we knew that. Our April Fool’s joke ended up showing us how much you all value the knowledge shared and reused on our site. Almost one in four visitors copied something from a question or answer, whether it was to use code in a project or correct something for a better answer. The web has always worked best when it is open and shareable, and we’re proud to be the source for knowledge shared among coders and technologists. 

We’re honored to be nominated again. It shows just how valuable people find us. Last year, we were nominated in the Community category, so we’re looking to shine in a new category. Competition is stiff—we’re up against GIPHY. Words alone can’t express how we feel. 

This is the 25th Webby Awards, which means they’ve been picking the best of the internet since the days before JavaScript and HTML 5—just look at 1997’s best film and TV website, IMDB. 

Their slate of awards covers everything, from websites and apps to podcasts and games. The only qualification is that it has to appear on the internet. It’s the internet’s most prestigious award, beating out the badges and internet points we distribute by just a hair. 

While the Webby is picked by the members of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, the People’s Voice award is selected by you, surfers of the net, browsers of the web. You drove us to digital glory last year, and we’re hoping we can muster enough virtual muscle to get us the nod again. Head over to their site and vote for Stack Overflow as the best Web Service & Application. Just think, there might be people who have never heard of Stack Overflow. Help us win, and there will be a whole new audience who will copy and paste your code! 

The votes will be tallied and presented live and virtually on Tuesday, May 18th, so don’t wait to vote. Then tune in for the stream—hosted by the talented Jameela Jamil—and see who the internet crowns as the people’s champion. 

The post Vote for Stack Overflow in this year’s Webby Awards! appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

This means you can find answers to your engineering questions even if your engineers haven’t answered them in your private collaboration and knowledge sharing platform. This post will take a peek under the hood of this new feature and explain how we built this and which architectural trade-offs we dealt with along the way.

Most of our visitors find questions on Stack Overflow via their search engine of choice and not by using Stack Overflow’s internal site search. While it’s hard to beat professional search engines at their game, our site search still offers a few advantages: First, it allows you to narrow down your search queries via advanced search operators. Second, our internal site search is the only way to search for private content as you’d have on Stack Overflow for Teams. Teams content is yours and most often contains confidential information that we never want to expose to public search engines.

Searching for answers

Our site search is powered by Elasticsearch. Our Elasticsearch cluster contains one index per site on the Stack Exchange network: stackoverflow.com has an index, superuser.com has an index, bicycles.stackexchange.com has an index, you get the idea. This Elasticsearch cluster is running on our own infrastructure in our own data center next to our web servers, SQL databases and Redis instances. Each Teams instance has it’s own private Elasticsearch cluster that’s completely separate from our public search cluster. If you’re an Enterprise-tier Teams customer, for example, you’ll have your own Elasticsearch cluster for your private content. That cluster would be running on the same infrastructure where we (or you, if you self-host your Enterprise instance) host your Stack Overflow for Teams instance.

For Teams, we offer different hosting models. Some of our Teams are hosted on stackoverflow.com (you’ll get a fancy URL for your team like stackoverflow.com/c/myteam). Those teams are running on the same server infrastructure and in the same data centers that we use to run stackoverflow.com and the entire Stack Exchange network. If your Team is hosted on stackoverflow.com, you’ve always had the option to run a mixed search when using our site search: You could run the same query against your Team’s content as well as the content on stackoverflow.com and the results would show up neatly grouped by origin:

For larger Teams, we also offer hosting your stuff outside of our own data centers: on Azure or—if you’re an Enterprise customer and prefer this—even on your own infrastructure. In both of these cases searching content from stackoverflow.com becomes a little more tricky. We can’t just run a search query against Stack Overflow’s Elasticsearch database as we do on Teams that are hosted on our own infrastructure. Elasticsearch is simply not accessible from your hosting environment.

Larger Teams customers kept asking us for a way to search their own private content and content from Stack Overflow in one swoop. Sometimes you’re looking for information that might have been answered within your Team just as much as it might’ve been answered on stackoverflow.com. Being able to query both data sources from a single place would be comfortable. However, we didn’t have a trivial way of allowing this. We can’t just open up our data center for incoming connections from the cloud or our clients’ own infrastructure to allow them to access Stack Overflow’s Elasticsearch. So we needed to come up with a different way.

The discarded option: Searching via our public API

Stack Exchange sites offer a public API that you can use to fetch information from a site on the Stack Exchange network. The /search/advanced endpoint looks like a reasonable candidate for unified search. Whenever a user runs a site search on their Team we could send an extra HTTP request to our public API, pass the search query and show the results side by side with your local Team results.

There are several benefits to using the public-facing API.

First: We’d be eating our own dog food. Using your own public-facing APIs within your product is a great way to make sure that your API is in fact useful, reliable, and actively maintained. Another benefit is low coupling. The only communication between our Teams instance and stackoverflow.com would go through a well-defined public API. We would end up with two systems—Teams and public Stack Overflow—that could each live and be useful on their own without relying on intimate knowledge of each other. Each system could change independently and we wouldn’t have to worry about breaking the other as long as we handle changes to the public API in a thoughtful and non-breaking way.

Unfortunately, we had to take a different approach.

Mostly for two reasons:

1. Confidentiality vs. abuse prevention: The content in Teams is confidential. And if you try to search for it, you’re likely using search queries that are confidential, too. Our users store private knowledge about their organisation, their products, or whatever else is important to them. We don’t want to see that information—ever. Our public API, however, needs to have a couple of mechanisms in place to prevent abuse. We see a lot of jokers out there trying to slam our API or hit it with nonsense requests. Diligent logging is a necessity to deal with these scenarios. If we sent Teams users’ requests to our public API, we’d risk having their confidential search queries end up in our logs. Sure, we could come up with ways to exclude those queries from ever being logged. But what if we accidentally missed an edge case and ended up with confidential queries in our API logs? This was a risk that was unacceptable to us and opposed to the confidentiality we promise to our customers.
2. Lack of information & simplicity: The data returned by our /search endpoint is limited (Here’s all the data we include). While this is great for most applications, for our site search we rely on more information than we expose via our search API. Of course, we could go and expose all those required data points on our public API, but this would be bad for the API’s simplicity and usability—some data points are highly technical and related to our underlying Elasticsearch. Exposing these data points only for our own search queries would be possible but completely undermine the idea of having a public API.

Software architecture is about trade-offs. You’ll often face multiple options with different flaws and have to pragmatically decide for the one that sucks the least. Using the public API would’ve come with some convincing benefits and part of me is still sad that we didn’t get to use this approach. But ultimately we decided to do something else:

The winning option: Setting up a new Elasticsearch cluster

After coming to terms with the fact that the public API was not the right way to go, we found a different approach: We’d spin up a new Elasticsearch cluster that holds Stack Overflow’s questions and answers. This cluster would be queried by all cloud- and on-premise-hosted Enterprise and Teams instances for the purpose of unified search. For private content, they would query their local private Elasticsearch instances respectively.

Thanks to flexible cloud hosting, setting up a new Elasticsearch cluster is not nearly as daunting as it would be if we were to host one in our own data center. Since we’ve used Elasticsearch before, we got a lot of pieces in place that we need to shove our questions and answers into an Elasticsearch instance, so with a few modifications, we could reuse a lot of the data transfer code we already had.

We saw a few key benefits to spinning up a separate Elasticsearch cluster for unified search. Most importantly this approach solves the risk of accidentally leaking confidential search queries into our server logs. The unified search cluster is set up in a way that we don’t store query information, only operational metrics like the number of requests, query duration, index size, and anything else we might need. Secondly, directly querying Elasticsearch without going through a higher-level API allows us to use the same logic for querying your private Elasticsearch content as well as public stackoverflow.com content stored in the unified search cluster. It’s all just a bunch of queries to Elasticsearch’s REST API. Another benefit is a little more fundamental: With a new search cluster in the cloud, we avoid having a dependency from our cloud infrastructure into our own data center. This way we can continue to keep the most of our data center infrastructure within our perimeter without exposing it to the public internet.

There were two more than welcome side effects to this approach. The first one was rather pragmatic: Currently, we’re in the process of moving a bunch of our infrastructure into the cloud. A new Elasticsearch cluster was a self-contained and low-risk piece that we could use to gain experience with what it takes to define, provision, and maintain cloud infrastructure. The second one was more product-focused: A new search cluster allows us to do some experimentation when it comes to how we store our data without affecting our existing site search for our Stack Exchange sites. We used this to sneak in a new way of presenting search results that we’ve started experimenting with a long time ago but never fully completed: Showing search results as nested questions and answers.

Experimenting with nested search results

Public search results in unified search look different than regular search results—they look a little better if you ask me but hey, I’m obviously biased.

Imagine you’re using our site search to figure out how to maneuver yourself out of this mess you made in your local git branch. You enter git undo commit into our search bar and see a bunch of search results coming up:

That’s what our site search looks like today. You’re likely to get reasonable results. But one thing stands out: We’re showing questions and answers as separate results. See the first and the third result? Both belong to the same question. The first one (prefixed with Q:) points to the actual question while the third result (prefixed with A:) points to one of its answers. There are moments where this works well and there are other moments where this is pretty confusing.

A good while ago we came up with an idea to group search results that belong to the same question. All answer results would be displayed in the context of their respective question in a nested way. We’ve run a few internal experiments but never really got this new approach shipped because it was quite a drastic change not only to the visual representation of our search results but also to the way we store and query our data in Elasticsearch. Now that we’re moving a bunch of stuff around with unified search anyways, we decided that this might be a good occasion to get this experiment out of the door and to display the new public search results in unified search in a nested way. Our designers came up with a really neat way of presenting this information so that the relationship between questions and answers becomes much more obvious.

Here’s what the new nested search results look like:

This is not only a new way of displaying search results. We changed the schema of our data stored in Elasticsearch to properly represent the relationship between questions and answers via nested document structures. We used to have a flat document structure with a separate document for each question and answer before. The nested document structure allows us to always fetch information about the question that an answer is referring to alongside the answer in a single query. This way we can display answer search results in the context of its question without having to do an extra lookup. Our hypothesis is that this new structure should give us a better search relevance but this is something we’ll have to carefully monitor and verify.

Chances are that this new way of querying and presenting search results is a good candidate to be used in our regular site search. Before we can do that, we have to look at query performance, relevance and number of successful searches and see if this proves to be an actual overall improvement.

A smoother search experience

For the longest time, finding content from Stack Overflow when searching for answers on Teams has been exclusively available to Teams instances hosted on stackoverflow.com. The way our architecture is set up made it trivial to provide this feature to Teams customers but impossible for the more isolated hosting models that some of our Enterprise customers require. We’re happy that unified search can bring a similarly smooth search experience to our Enterprise customers and help them find questions and answers from stackoverflow.com right within their cloud or on-premise hosted Teams instances.

The post Access broader knowledge with Unified Search 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.

Simplicity. Elegance. Form. Function. 

Today marks a new beginning for programmers around the world. Stack Overflow is proud to unveil our first venture into hardware, The Key. 

They say good artists copy, but great artists steal. They were wrong. Great artists, developers, and engineers copy. Then they paste. 

Every day, millions of innovators and creators across the globe move society and industry forward by copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow. But for too long, this process has been stuck in the past. 

Say goodbye to cramped fingers, sore wrists, and wasted movement. Say hello to The Key, a device built from the ground up to make copy-pasting code from Stack Overflow fast, painless, and fun. 

Our keyboard is made of 100% machine milled plastic sourced from the rarest polyurethane plants. 

The switches underneath each keycap have been rigorously tested to ensure the optimal finger feel and smooth action. 

What happens when you press a keyboard? It clicks. Every day you’re working on a computer, you’re hearing thousands of clicks. Millions of clicks shape your experience each year. 

Our click’s volume and tone were crafted by sampling the natural wonder of song bird chirps. We run that audio data through cutting edge deep learning systems to produce a sound that is optimized to improve productivity and mood.

Each key cap has been precisely etched using industrial grade lasers normally reserved for diamond cutting and quantum fusion drives.

The Key is compatible with virtually any computing device. From a Raspberry Pi to a high end gaming rig, cutting edge copy-paste is within your reach.

For now, The Key is a stand alone device, but in the future, it will unlock an ecosystem of creativity. Our R&D department is already at work on incorporating virtual, augmented, and uncanny reality into the roadmap. 

The Key is available for pre-order now! Be the first to get yours.

UPDATE: There has been a lot of interest in purchasing a real life version of our prank. The good news is we anticipated this might happen and we’ve been working on something along these lines. Stay tuned for more!

UPDATE 2: The Key is actually, for real available for pre-order. Our original production line sold out in six hours, so please be patient.

The post Introducing The Key appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

What you need to know

• Our private knowledge sharing and collaboration platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, is now free for up to 50 users. 
• No credit card is required to start your Team, and it’s free forever.
• Our Free plan includes ChatOps integrations to Slack and Microsoft Teams.
• We have invested in a guided onboarding process to help admins and users experience value quickly and efficiently.
• Our Basic customers now get access to single sign-on (SSO) for an easy and secure login experience.

If you aren’t familiar with Stack Overflow for Teams, it combines the best features of the public Stack Overflow platform with features tailored for companies who need a private knowledge sharing and async collaboration platform. Check out our Product Tour page to learn more about these features. 

With Stack Overflow for Teams being a flexible platform, we’ve seen customers use it for everything from helping onboard new employees, driving innersource initiatives, enabling cloud or platform migration efforts, a self-serve help center to reduce tickets, and so much more. Since launching Teams in 2018, we have added thousands of customers ranging in size and use cases including Microsoft, Expensify, Box, Instacart, and Unqork.  Developers and technologists love our Teams platform because they spend less time answering the same questions over and over again and can unblock their colleagues while reducing their own disruptions. 

The open source ethos that is foundational to this network was an inspiration for our new free offering. We’re excited to enable those who are working towards a common goal to develop a collective knowledge base. I truly believe those in our technology community will find value from our free, private environment. Whether it’s in a startup, a side project, user group, open source project or hackathon, these communities can now ask questions that might be off-topic to our public site, but are essential to their knowledge base.

We know that sharing knowledge and collaboration is critical to companies and teams of all sizes. We also know people need a large enough group and time to see the impact and value of a knowledge sharing and collaboration platform like Stack Overflow for Teams. Our previous 30 day free trial of our Basic tier wasn’t long enough. Now, anyone can experience Stack Overflow for Teams free with a significantly sized group for as long as they need.

With the roll out of our new Free plan, we’ve enriched our Basic plan to now include a single sign-on (SSO) without changing the current price.  SSO allows users seamless and secure access to our critical platform anywhere, anytime across all of our paid products. 

If you want to know more about all of our plans, learn more here. 

Start your free Team

Create a free Team by following the link, and invite with your colleagues or a group of people you’re looking to collaborate with. 

The post Stack Overflow for Teams is now free forever for up to 50 users appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

In just one year, I’ve learned so much about Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange, our Teams product, and our Talent and Advertising businesses. I want to express my thanks to my colleagues, our community, and our users.  I’m so grateful for the honest and transparent feedback that gave context to our data, insights, and history.

In the quarterly blog post that follows, which is the first of an ongoing series, I’ll elaborate on what I’ve learned, what we’ve accomplished, and what we’re focused on in the future. I want to ensure we’re always keeping community at our center, and that means updating you all regularly with what we’re working on.

What I’ve learned in my first year

In the last year, I have learned two fundamental concepts that I believe are key to why Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange sites are successful but we don’t really talk about much (at least lately). 

First, when I think about the reasons why a Q&A site became integral to developers, technologists, and other learners, I believe it’s because we empower the efficient building of context around code, applications, services, etc. This knowledge is sourced from our  community’s expertise.  In technology, documentation and error codes cannot cover all the use cases, dimensions, and complexities that we encounter every day and often requires huge effort from a handful of folks to keep up to date. I think this paradigm extends to our non-technical sites.  So much of the information and advice in most technical articles is written for a broader audience.  Q&A allows for more specific and nuanced content.

Additionally, the value of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange Network for the vast majority of users is the reusability of existing Q&A content.  The best case scenario is that I find a question that has been asked and answered well. There are a lot of discussions and debates around content quality, but I think we can all agree that perfect content doesn’t have much value if it sits on a shelf where no one uses it. A high-quality question is specific not just to increase the chances of a good answer, but also so that others can quickly determine if the question is applicable to their problem. Great answers are clear, accurate, relevant, and complete. Anyone who finds the answer should be able to leverage it, not just the original asker. The questions and answers that are created and refined on the platform become a common good, shared and ideally beneficial to anyone who visits the site. 

These fundamental understandings are important to both helping us improve and evolve the Public Platform, but are also foundational as we grow and scale our Teams product.  We have to understand which features, functionality, and norms are worth transfering from a huge, public, largely anonymous platform to a private platform shared with your colleagues where you are identifiable.  For example, in Teams, we found little to no use of the public site’s downvote feature.  User research informed us that colleagues are unwilling to downvote each other’s content but are willing to give private feedback.  For our launch of Articles, we replaced the downvote with a “Feedback” capability that allows private feedback to express to colleagues when you feel the information is incomplete, inaccurate, or out of date. 

Q4 2020 highlights and updates

Here are a few of the updates we made in the final months of 2020 across the Public Platform and Stack Overflow for Teams, all of which helped inform the insights above and how we’re approaching 2021:

Within the Public Platform and across the community: 

• We added moderation capabilities to the Teachers’ Lounge chat room (where our mods hang out), a priority for our community managers.
• We started delivering pieces of a big overhaul of our long untouched Review Queues which direct users to what needs their attention and possible action.  
• You can now include tables in markdown language, a much-requested feature request. 
• We announced that we are bringing back swag for users and are hard at work right now making that a reality. 
• And finally, our Winter Bash this year had more participation than in the last several years and we even created a new hat on the fly to recognize users that found and shared ways to cheat at Hat Dash or who could pass a Stack Exchange trivia challenge.  

Within Stack Overflow for Teams, our SaaS knowledge management and collaboration product:

• We launched the new Stacks Editor because many of those users are unfamiliar with Markdown. This work is the foundation of the alpha test we are doing on the Public Platform. 
• We expanded and updated our Slack integration, which has great adoption across the Teams users. 
• We also invested a lot of time into improving and expanding our self-serve capabilities across signups, onboarding, and product support.
• Just after the new year, we launched For You, a personalized feed highlighting actions to take and content that might be of interest to a user.

This work has only been possible thanks to a hardworking and dedicated team, and we’re continuing to add more people there. Last year, we kicked off recruitment to add folks across Product, Community, and Engineering (and across the rest of the company). We’re excited to be growing and adding new colleagues with diverse experiences, fresh perspectives, and the people power to drive our plans and deliver impact to our users.

We’re lucky to have an overwhelming response to our open roles and are hard at work on the hiring process. You have probably started to see some new Stack folks on the platform. Say hello if that’s the case!

When it comes to new faces on the Community Team, we’re also in the process of dividing the team into more specialized sub-teams as we grow. This will improve focus and reduce the context switching for our existing CMs. As we grow our team, bringing new community managers into a more focused team reduces their initial scope of learning and more quickly allows them to support and deliver impact to our Community. If you are interested in joining us, check out our Work Here page for more information and open roles.

Looking Ahead: 2021 and Beyond

In January, we published a deeper dive into our 2019 security incident, which got a lot of attention and was highly shared. In continuing our commitment to transparency and communication we shared our Q1 Community & Public Platform Roadmap as both a blog post and a meta post.

We continued our annual Stack Gives Back program where we donate towards a set of charities on behalf of our moderators based on their votes as a way to thank them for their contributions for the previous year. This year, we are going to continue to explore social impact initiatives in hopes of having an impact on developers and technologists everywhere, but also on making the world a better place.

And finally, a quick update on our annual Dev Survey. Last year, we opened the Dev Survey on February 5, 2020 and released the results on May 27, 2020.  As you well know, an awful lot happened during that stretch and we learned our lesson around needing a faster turnaround between the two milestones.  This year we plan to launch the 2021 Dev Survey in or around June and have results back to everyone within 1-2 months. We’re focused on shortening the window from when the survey runs to when it’s released given how rapidly the world is changing right now. Look out for more soon.

I hope you’re looking forward to our future initiatives as much as I am. I am grateful for our many users across all our products and the opportunity to provide value to you all. This is an exciting period of growth for Stack Overflow, and we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for our incredible community.

The post State of the Stack: a new quarterly update on community and product 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.

With this release (available for Basic and Business today, for Enterprise in the 2021.1 release), we wanted to dig into some of the technical details of what we did. There’s a lot of great new features, and a lot of work behind the scenes to make them a reality. For reference, the integration that most people use was version two; version one was a bare-bones integration that just supported notifications (and is still used by a small fraction of Teams).

This version brings several new features that will improve your overall experience:

• A more secure and configurable authorization experience.
• Org-wide installs, so organizations with multiple Slack workspaces can add our integration to all of them at once. 
• Ask questions directly from Slack with /stack ask. 
• A one-click autoupdater that uses a modal dialog to make sure the app is current on all associated workspaces.

Additionally, our previous integrations were built on functionality that has since been deprecated. So the work we’ve done here sets us up to provide even more functionality in future versions. 

We had originally worked with Slack to be one of their launch partners in implementing their workspace apps. When the developer preview for the feature ended, they recognized that this was the wrong path for them, and they deprecated workspace apps. While we had been planning to include features that built on workspace apps, Slack was such an incredible partner on this that we were able to pivot smoothly.They reached out and gave us a shared support channel and were incredibly responsive to our support questions. We wouldn’t have been able to implement the features in this release without them. 

We had to do a fair bit of work to make sure that the new granular bot version had feature parity with what we had previously. Asking you all to upgrade only to lose functionality would have been a hard sell.

In this article, we’ll talk about how we built this new version and the path we took to ensure our new bot useful, usable, and secure. 

Authentication and permissions for the granular bot

One of the primary features of the Slack integration is notifications. You can configure Stack Overflow for Teams to send a notification for a channel whenever there’s activity you are interested in. 

Previously, the mechanism were used for notifications was incoming webhooks. These are URLs that we could post to whenever we wanted to send a notification to a channel. These URLs were automatically generated, so that Stack Overflow for Teams had easy access to post to any channel. 

We decided to stop using incoming webhooks for a good reason: improved security. If one of these URLs returned an error, that has potential to get logged on our side. Now we (and anyone who got a hold of our logs) could spoof whatever messages they want to corporate Slack channels. For some of our more security conscious customers, this was a big no-no. They had actually asked us to disable this feature because it opened a new angle of attack.

With these updated scopes and without the incoming webhooks, we made some InfoSec teams quite happy and they were green-lighting our applications. But we still had to figure out how to get notifications sent to the right channels. Without the incoming webhook URLs, we were restricted to scopes available to our Slack bot. 

For public channels, this wasn’t much of a problem. The bot just has to join all of the channels that one might want to send notifications to. We give workspace admins an opt-in setting that instructs the bot to automatically join all public channels, which has to be done one by one. It’s kind of a pain in the butt, but it worked fine on our testing environments. 

Once we decided to dogfood the app and try it out on our own workspace, it broke completely. On our testing workspace, we have maybe ten channels. On our company’s workspace, we have something like 350. In stepping through these one by one and joining them, not only did it take a long time, we hit Slack’s rate limits. So we had to build a background queue on our end, which would send join messages until we saw a failure, then stop processing the queue and wait a few seconds. 

But for private channels, this meant that the bot had to be manually added to a channel by a user before anyone could consider interacting with it. This may seem like an extra hassle, but it’s actually a good thing. Imagine you’ve been invited to a private channel to discuss an upcoming feature. Just revealing the name of the channel could be a massive information breach. 

There’s another side effect to having to manually add the bot to channels. Imagine you have a channel with hundreds of people, something like #engineering, and you don’t want it clogged by bot spam. Admins can now exclude a bot from a channel, preventing everyone else from targeting it with notifications, no matter what their permissions, even if the channel is public. 

As a result of these changes, we had to build a channel selector drop-down in Stack Overflow for Teams. This is not something we wanted to do; previously, when you were choosing which channel to send a notification to, we would send you to your Slack instance. Slack would then show you a channel selector based on your privileges. Instead, we had to create an external component that should only have access to what the bot has access to, and nothing more. Unfortunately for us, that type of scope is not currently supported by the Slack API. 

Our options were to request all public channels or all private channels—separate and complimentary scopes. But both scopes are all of nothing. As we talked about earlier, just displaying some of those private channel names could be a huge problem. We don’t want to do that, and our customers don’t want us to do that. So our channel browser only has the scope to access public channels. We need to do a second check on these channels to make sure that the bot has access. Once we configure this, we can then access the bot directly to post notifications. 

One install to rule them all

It’s becoming more common for large companies to have multiple Slack workspaces—one workspace for C-level execs, one for the engineers, one for sales, etc. Each of those workspaces may have their own administrator. But if you’re installing an integration with an enterprise-level piece of software like Stack Overflow for Teams, you’ll likely want that to work on every workspace in your organization. If you have ten workspaces, that’s ten installs coordinated with ten admins. Org-wide installs help to reduce the administrative burden that comes with delploy app integratiosn across multipel workspaces. 

But it was worse than that. Our Enterprise customers have the option of installing our software on a local or organization-controlled server, which means the endpoint that the Slack integration interacts with will be at a different URL than normal. Admins on Enterprise installs would have to manually edit this URL in the app; we provide instructions on how to do this, but still, this makes ten edits to apps to make, ten installs on ten workspaces with ten admins. That’s exhausting. 

With this release, we’re introducing org-wide installs. One person—the organization admin—can install the integration on all workspaces. If Enterprise customers need to edit the endpoint, they do so on one integration app and then install that. If the organization needs to create new workspaces, then they can make it installed by default so it already has the application baked in. 

Now a single Teams user can be associated with multiple Slack workspaces, including multiple unconnected workspaces. Because of this, we had to change our database schema to support more than one workspace per user. Previously, we had one Slack access token associated with each Stack Overflow for Teams user. But now we store as many tokens as the user has workspaces in a single grid. 

This can get complicated (and annoying) with a lot of workspaces in an org. In order to send notification DMs to Slack users when they are tagged in a question or otherwise need to be directly notified, we have to store a mapping of these users in addition to the access tokens. This is based on the email address, which lets us automatically map any users that match. 

If a user has a different email address on Slack and Stack Overflow for Teams, then you can use the new `/stack connect` command in Slack. This gives you a link that will take you to the workspace’s associated team and allow you to link your user accounts. On the one hand, it’s not great for notifications because it adds a new requirement to map users. On the other hand, you can mention people on Slack when you create a question and that’s going to properly tag them on Stack Overflow for Teams. 

Security-minded Enterprise customers have some additional new options. Those worried about storing more PII on their installation or exposing their entire company mailing lists to us can turn off the mapping feature—notifications will still work. It’s as simple as a checkbox during the install process. Some might be protective of their internal information and firewall their Enterprise environment away from the rest of the internet. For them, we allow restricting their instance to outgoing-only traffic. Only notifications will work, but it still gives us the opportunity to integrate with strictly controlled environments. 

Ask directly from Slack

For this release, we also wanted tighter—and two-way—integration between Slack and Stack Overflow for Teams. To compliment notifications, you can now ask questions directly from Slack to help reduce context switching.  

As you can see, this command displays a modal dialog where you can create a question with all the features as if you asked it on Stack Overflow for Teams. We had to write new code to support modals, but this modal is essentially a dumb layer that interacts with Stack Overflow for Teams APIs. The only part that is doing real time work is an autocompleter for tags. Both of these functions were part of the prep code we put in place before implementing the feature; once they worked, most of the `/stack ask` feature was easy to write. 

We were able to keep most of the functionality on our side and reuse the existing post insert and post validation logic. On submit, we have the barest basic validation in the modal, checking that required fields are filled in and that they have the appropriate content lengths.

Despite being able to entirely reuse the existing post validation functionality, it turns out that the solution wasn’t so simple. At one point, one of the automated unit tests failed in a weird way. Like a lot of mysterious errors, it worked on the dev machine. However, the dev machine was set up for developing against Teams Basic and Business, while the failing test was being run against an Enterprise environment, which is code-wise closer to the public Stack Overflow site and therefore has much stricter rules around what a valid question is. In this case, the test was periodically failing because the “duplicate post” checks were triggering a warning if the unit tests were run in a specific order.

The validation logic that checks word counts, grammar, and more has to work inside of the modal. And any errors that come back from failed validations have to be visible in the modal. Those errors have to be one-to-one with what comes back from the Teams instance. Not to brag, but we did such a great job matching the behavior on both sides that it messed us up with a later automated test. Nice job, us. 

Reducing friction now and forever

Chat programs like Slack are an integral part of the contemporary workplace—especially remote workplaces—so we want to make sure that the Stack Overflow for Teams experience integrates seamlessly into Slack. Requesting and providing information should be frictionless, and with this latest iteration of our Slack integration, we think the experience is even easier than before. Even with the challenge of building towards a changing paradigm, this is a better integration than before. 

Of course, this won’t be our last version. The work that we put into 3.0 will pay off in future versions, and we’ll be in a better position to implement new features. For example, we’re looking at expanding on the base functionality written for modal support to add more features within Slack, such as creating and managing notifications. 

We hope you enjoyed this peek under the hood of what goes on with Stack Overflow for Teams development. It’s a product that we think will make a lot of people more productive, and we look forward to making collaboration and knowledge sharing easier than ever. 

The post Announcing the launch of our Slack V.3 integration appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Setting the scene

On May 12th, 2019, at around 00:00 UTC, we were alerted to an unexpected privilege escalation for a new user account by multiple members of the community. A user that nobody recognised had gained moderator and developer level access across all of the sites in the Stack Exchange Network. Our immediate response was to revoke privileges and to suspend this account and then set in motion a process to identify and audit the actions that led to the event.

After initial discovery, we found that the escalation of privilege was just the tip of the iceberg and the attack had actually resulted in the exfiltration of our source code and the inadvertent exposure of the PII (email, real name, IP addresses) of 184 users of the Stack Exchange Network (all of whom were notified). Thankfully, none of the databases—neither public (read: Stack Exchange content) nor private (Teams, Talent, or Enterprise)—were exfiltrated. Additionally, there has been no evidence of any direct access to our internal network infrastructure, and at no time did the attacker ever have access to data in Teams, Talent, or Enterprise products.

Walking in the attacker’s shoes

In order to understand how the privilege escalation and subsequent exfiltration of source code occurred, we needed to be able to trace the attacker’s accesses to our sites prior to the culmination of the attack. Fortunately, we have a database containing a log of all traffic to our publicly accessible properties—this proved invaluable in identifying activity associated with the attacker. Using the account identifier that had been escalated, we were able to use the IP address and other identifying information to correlate traffic to a candidate set of rows. This amounted to well over 75,000 rows of data that we then set out to categorise. Based upon that categorisation, we were able to further filter out rows to those that were deemed “interesting.” Coupled with other information from our customer support team and various other sources of log data, we came up with a timeline of events. This is quite detailed but it’s here because we’d like to bring attention to the amount of time the attacker took to understand our infrastructure and gradually escalate their privilege level to the point at which they could exfiltrate our source code.

Timeline

Tuesday April 30th, 2019

The attacker starts probing our infrastructure, in particular parts of our build/source control systems and web servers hosting some of our development environments.

Wednesday May 1st

The attacker continues probing our public network and attempts to access employee-only rooms in Stack Exchange Chat—notably our SRE room. They get “access denied.”

Additionally a person claiming to be one of our Enterprise customers submits a support request to obtain a copy of source code for auditing purposes. This request is rejected because we don’t give out source code and, additionally, the email cannot be verified as coming from one of our customers. It is flagged for further investigation by our support team.

Next, the attacker creates a Team on Stack Overflow on one device and sends an email invite to another account, which is accepted using another device. 

Thursday May 2nd

The attacker visits a number of Meta posts associated with our Teams product and publicly available case studies related to Enterprise published on stackoverflow.com.

Another support ticket is raised following up on the previous one, but this time with a spoofed email address of an actual customer. Details were apparently harvested from the case studies above. An automated reply is sent to the customer (because of the spoofed address), and we are quickly notified that it is not a legitimate request.

Friday May 3rd

Support request is denied. Attacker continues probing public facing infrastructure, including viewing user profiles of support personnel dealing with their support ticket. 

Saturday May 4th

Attacker accesses a URL to attempt to download a ZIP file containing Stack Overflow source code from our GitHub Enterprise instance but is redirected to login. We later discover that the repository URL is inadvertently referenced in a public GitHub repo containing some of our open source code. 

Sunday May 5th

This is a busy day. Attacker starts with further probing of our dev environments and a little later a login request is crafted to our dev tier that is able to bypass the access controls limiting login to those users with an access key. The attacker is able to successfully log in to the development tier. 

Next, the attacker starts probing a number of internal URLs that we later find are documented in our Enterprise support portal but is unable to access many of them due to an insufficient level of privilege.

Our dev tier was configured to allow impersonation of all users for testing purposes, and the attacker eventually finds a URL that allows them to elevate their privilege level to that of a Community Manager (CM). This level of access is a superset of the access available to site moderators. 

After attempting to access some URLs, to which this level of access does not allow, they use account recovery to attempt to recover access to a developer’s account (a higher privilege level again) but are unable to intercept the email that was sent. However, there is a route on dev that can show email content to CMs and they use this to obtain the magic link used to reset credentials. This is used and the attacker gains developer-level privileges in the dev environment. Here they are also able to access “site settings”—a central repository of settings (feature flags) that configure a lot of functionality within the site.

Monday May 6th

Another busy day—the attacker resumes with access to the dev tier. While they are browsing around and understanding what their new found privilege gives access to, they are also browsing production to harvest more information about the Stack employees that work on the Teams product. In addition, they use their freshly created Teams instance in production to try some admin-level functionality in a “safe” environment as well as trying to use impersonation on production. Impersonation is not compiled into production binaries, so all of these requests result in HTTP 404 responses.

After some time spent investigating URLs on dev, the attacker accesses site settings again and stumbles upon a setting that contains credentials of a service account with access to our TeamCity instance. Historically, this was used for accessing the TeamCity REST API from within the Stack Exchange Network’s code base and, while the functionality was removed a long time ago, the credentials remained and were still valid.

Using the credentials the attacker attempts to login to TeamCity (which at the time was accessible from the internet) and is granted access. This user has never logged in interactively before and a misconfiguration with role assignments means the user was immediately granted administrative privileges to the build server.

A significant period of time is spent investigating TeamCity—the attacker is clearly not overly familiar with the product so they spend time looking up Q&A on Stack Overflow on how to use and configure it. This act of looking up things (visiting questions) across the Stack Exchange Network becomes a frequent occurrence and allows us to anticipate and understand the attacker’s methodology over the coming days.

While browsing TeamCity, the attacker is able to download build artifacts containing binaries and setup configuration scripts for our Enterprise product. From here, they browse more questions on Stack Overflow—including configuring IIS and migrating data from our Teams product to an Enterprise instance, among many other questions related to our Teams products.

For their final act of the day, the attacker attempts to gain access to a build agent within our data center but is unable to connect because they would need VPN access to do so.

Tuesday May 7th

Attacker browses questions related to setting up and configuring Enterprise, and they investigate more site settings.

Wednesday May 8th

Attacker immediately logs into TeamCity and continues browsing the administrative sections of the site. They stumble across a diagnostics section that allows browsing of the build server’s file system—this yields a plaintext SSH key used by build agents to obtain source code from GitHub Enterprise. Within minutes, this was used to clone several key repositories (gathered from VCS roots configured in TeamCity).

This process of gradually cloning continues throughout the day, and the attacker browses questions on Stack Overflow related to the build of .NET projects. Over the course of the day, they manage to get their hands on our local development setup scripts (called `DevLocalSetup`) and wikis related to operating our production environment.

Later, they attempt to directly login to GitHub Enterprise using the web interface and the service account credentials that were used to access TeamCity. Fortunately, login to our GitHub instance is protected by 2FA and the service account is not in the relevant AD groups that permit access to it.

Thursday May 9th

Attacker pulls latest copies of all the repositories they had previously cloned.

The attacker attempts to use an Azure-based VM to connect to our VPN using the service account credentials that were used to access TeamCity, but the attempts to login fail because service accounts are not permitted to access the network in this way.

They continue to browse Stack Overflow for details on building and running .NET applications under IIS as well as running SQL scripts in an Azure environment.

Friday May 10th

Attacker pulls latest copies of all repositories they had previously cloned and browses configuration settings in our TeamCity builds.

They continue viewing Stack Overflow and Server Fault questions around IIS and .NET applications.

Saturday May 11th

This is the day that the attacker manages to escalate their privileges across the Stack Exchange Network. Once again, the attacker pulls the latest copies of source code and immediately starts to investigate build logs and configurations.

From an Azure VM, the attacker changes Git username mappings in TeamCity to make it look like the build service account (which the SSH key is mapped to) is another account in audit logs. They then create a project in TeamCity, switch off versioned settings for that project (which audits changes to Git), and starts to configure the project with build configurations.

Several different builds are attempted. Initially, they attempt to create a copy of databases that are used to configure our local environments from a network share but are unable to upload to any externally accessible locations. After that they attempt the same thing with some of our internal NuGet packages, but this attempt also fails.

After failing to upload files they create a public gist on GitHub that contains the SQL needed to elevate permissions across the Stack Exchange Network. After several attempts, they are able to craft a build that executes this as a SQL migration against the production databases housing data for the Stack Exchange Network. 

Immediately they attempt to clean up any evidence of the attack by removing builds and history. Fortunately, we have a “trash can” for TeamCity configuration and are later able to recover these builds to understand what aspects of the attack each build was responsible for.

Sunday May 12th

Shortly after execution of the SQL, we were notified of the odd activity by the community and our incident response team started investigating.

At this point, we did not know the extent of the attack so initial remediation focused on removal of privileges and credentials. Further investigation led us to the builds that ran on TeamCity and the compromised TeamCity account which was immediately disabled, followed by bringing TeamCity offline entirely.

Once we discovered that the escalation path involved dev and the use of site settings to acquire credentials, we committed code to remove those paths—notably, the tool used to view an account recovery email and the site settings used to compromise the TeamCity service account. Additionally, all affected accounts were removed or had their credentials reset. At this point, the initial incident is considered to be dealt with and emails are sent to engage a secondary response team for forensics and further fixes on Monday.

Meanwhile, the attacker attempts to access user impersonation on production (functionality isn’t present in production builds) and also tries to access TeamCity (which is now offline) but both attempts fail. However, they continue to be able to pull source code (at this time we were not yet aware they had access to Stack’s source code).

Monday May 13th

Attacker pulls source code again. Whilst doing this, they are viewing questions on Stack Overflow on how to publish and consume NuGet packages, how to build .NET codebases, and how to delete repositories on GitLab.

They attempt to access TeamCity repeatedly, but it is still offline.

Secondary response team starts work. We start by pulling traffic logs to understand what happened. Given that the attacker had access to dev, we rotated the access keys used for that environment and began rotating any secrets that were exposed from site settings or TeamCity. In order to allow us to build fixes to production, the TeamCity service is brought online but, this time, only inside the firewall. We ascertained that dev access checks were missing from some login routes, allowing the attacker to replay a login from prod and successfully gain access to dev—these checks are then added. Additionally, we add write-only access to secrets on site settings, closing the vulnerability that enabled the attacker to retrieve credentials from this UI. We also discover that many secrets stored in the build server are not marked as secrets (this obfuscates them in the UI)—so anybody could view them. These are updated appropriately as part of the rotation process.

Meanwhile the attacker continues to pull source code—at this point, we’re still unaware that they have a valid SSH key for GitHub. They keep trying to access TeamCity—we can see this because the traffic is still hitting our load balancer and landing in our logs. They continue viewing Stack Overflow questions, this time related to refreshing many Git repos programmatically (surprise!) and creating SQL databases.

Secondary response team investigation continues into the following day.

Tuesday May 14th

Early in the day, the attacker pulls the latest source code again and continues trying to access TeamCity (now available from inside our network only and inaccessible to the attacker).

During our continued analysis of the attacker’s traffic, we find evidence of access to the SSH key used by the build server. We immediately revoke the key and investigate any attempts to use it. We were able to dump all SSH and HTTPS traffic logs from GitHub and found indications that the key was used outside of our network. We make the decision to immediately move GitHub behind the firewall in case the attacker has more than just SSH access. It’s worth noting that once an SSH key has been added to a GitHub account, if the raw key material is exposed, the key can be used without any form of 2FA involved. The same is true for personal access tokens which are provisioned when cloning using HTTPS + 2FA.

We begin auditing for any commits that were not pushed by a Stack employee, but find nothing untoward. We also begin an audit of all repositories for any secrets that are not injected at build time and instruct the team that owns each repository to move secrets into the build process and to rotate them. Additionally, we begin auditing all third party systems for unauthorised access (we find no evidence of access).

We contract an external security vendor to audit and double check our methodology and all available data as well as assist us in the investigation.

Thursday 16th May

Auditing continues and secret rotation propagates across the various affected systems. We start to categorise traffic that resulted in inadvertent PII access—we don’t see any evidence that the attacker was actively seeking personal data, but want to be able to notify affected users if we can.

A blog post is published notifying our community of the breach.

Attacker has little activity today, limited to viewing Q&A around SQL databases in Azure.

Friday 17th May

Attacker continues viewing Q&A, this time around SQL and certificates. No other activity of note.

We continue to categorise the traffic to find any PII access.

A blog post is posted with an update, including intent to notify an estimated 250 users who had their PII accessed.

Saturday 18th May

Attacker continues viewing Q&A, this time around removing git remotes. No other activity of note. 

Wednesday 22nd May

Users affected by PII leaks are notified.

Thursday 23rd May

Our secondary investigation concludes but we produce a set of remediations to address underlying issues that led to the attack happening; more details on that below.

Remediations

This incident brought to light shortcomings in how we’d structured access to some of our systems and how we managed secrets, both at build time and in source code. During the investigation, we made a number of short-term changes to address some of these shortcomings:

• Move build and source control systems behind the firewall, requiring valid VPN credentials to access. Most of our engineers are remote so these systems were originally on the Internet for ease of access. Our GitHub Enterprise instance was already using 2FA.
• Removal of default group assignments from TeamCity. This was an accidental misconfiguration from many years ago that was never reverted and meant all newly created users inherited administrative privileges. Administrative privileges in TeamCity can browse the server’s file system where things like SSH keys are stored in plain text.
• Bad secret hygiene—we had secrets sprinkled in source control, in plain text in build systems and available through settings screens in the application. We made sure all secrets were removed from source code, rotated, and then securely added to build systems or made available at runtime to the application. All secrets are now write-only—once set, they cannot be read except by the application or specifically authorised employees behind the firewall.
• Access to support documentation for our Enterprise product was limited to authorised users of that product.
• Metrics and alerting around privilege escalation in production. Any escalation to developer level access now notifies a group of people that can validate the escalation is legitimate.
• Hardening code paths that allow access into our dev tier. We cannot take our dev tier off of the internet because we have to be able to test integrations with third-party systems that send inbound webhooks, etc. Instead, we made sure that access can only be gained with access keys obtained by employees and that features such as impersonation only allow de-escalation—i.e. it only allows lower or equal privilege users to the currently authenticated user. We also removed functionality that allowed viewing emails, in particular account recovery emails.
• All employees were made to change their passwords in case of a compromise of those credentials. This was a “just in case” safety measure—no employee credentials were found to be compromised or used during the incident.

We also made plans for some slightly longer term projects to address larger issues that were brought to light by the incident:

• We gave higher priority to an existing project to replace our VPN with a system that mandates 2FA and restricts access to secure zones within our network based upon role membership. Although this was not an attack vector during the incident we wanted to further harden ingress points into our network. This has been put in place since last year.
• Moving away from secrets that are injected at build time to using a runtime secret store. This is part of a larger project to better handle configuration management in our data center environments. In our Azure environments, we already use KeyVault and AppConfig to do this.
• Migrating our CI/CD pipeline to break apart the build and deploy components. This is an on-going effort to migrate away from a TeamCity process that builds and immediately deploys our code to using GitHub Actions to create artifacts and Octopus Deploy to manage deployment. This allows us to have deterministic builds and better manage deployment permissions.
• Moving to use SSO and 2FA on as many third-party systems as we can. We’re actively moving to Okta Workplace Identity and using it for any third-party systems that our employees need to access.
• Better role-based access control—one of the things we discovered was that diagnosing why a particular user gained privileges in a specific system was made difficult by the culmination of years of group nesting and difficult to understand security group assignments. We have tooling being built to better manage this process.
• On-going training to ensure employees are aware of and can identify phishing techniques. This is especially important for our Customer Success team that routinely deals with support emails.

Advice to others

This incident reminded us about some fundamental security practices that everyone should follow:

1. Log all your inbound traffic. We keep logs on all in-bound connections. This enabled all of our investigations. You can’t investigate what you don’t log.
2. Use 2FA. That remaining system that still uses legacy authentication can be your biggest vulnerability.
3. Guard secrets better. TeamCity has a way to protect secrets, but we found we weren’t using it consistently. Educate engineers that “secrets aren’t just passwords.” Protect SSH keys and database connection strings too. When in doubt, protect it. If you must store secrets in a Git repo, protect them with git-crypt  or Blackbox .
4. Validate customer requests. The more unusual a request from a customer, the more important it is to verify whether or not the request is legitimate.
5. Take security reports seriously. We’re grateful that our community reported suspicious activity so quickly. Thank you!

Wrap-up

There’s a lot to digest here, but we wanted to give a good overview of how an incident like this starts out and use it as an opportunity to inform other companies and sites on how these things unfold. The more that we are prepared for and anticipate events like this, the better protected we all will be against future events of this nature.

We are not able to comment on any other details related to the attacker due to ongoing investigations. If there is anything that you would like to discuss please do so on our Meta Stack Exchange feedback post.

Thanks for listening!

Stack Engineering Team <3

The post A deeper dive into our May 2019 security incident 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.

In an effort to rethink how documentation work, we recently introduced Articles, a new type of content inside Stack Overflow for Teams that is meant to pair with our traditional questions and answers. Articles allows for longer-form documentation and prose that can sit side by side with shorter Q&A. The goal is to build a system for documentation that can be both proactive and reactive, flexible and on-demand. We decided to sit down with team leads from across Stack to learn what it’s been like to drink our own champagne, be among the first to use our own product, and how it has changed their approach to documentation. 

Migration and meaning on SRE

Chris Hunt, a site reliability engineer at Stack, had actually begun a process of reworking his team’s documentation several months before we introduced Articles. His team found itself with a fractured system that had stopped working well in several areas, a condition that often befalls documentation, even with the most well-intentioned coders. “We have three different wikis, and two of them were broken, so we couldn’t update them at all.”

The SRE team prides itself on a culture of continuous improvement. After all, it’s responsible for ensuring that Stack Overflow and our network of exchanges stay up 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. When there is even a brief outage, we hear about it, from millions of developers across social media. “In SRE, we have a culture of ‘leave things better than you found it.’ If you have an alert that’s noisy, fix the things causing the fires. If you found documentation that wasn’t helpful, update it for the next person.” 

“The author of 90% of our documentation doesn’t work here anymore!”

So how did Hunt and his team wind up with three wikis, two of which were broken? Often, with documentation, the issue is about the transition between different systems or different employees. “I see two common issues,” says Hunt. “One, maybe they wrote it to the best of their ability, but it hasn’t been updated in a while, and it’s no longer accurate given changes in other systems. Two, the author of 90% of our documentation doesn’t work here anymore! Now, I could take on the task of updating and migrating that information, but as every developer knows, that means I am now the owner, and I may be hesitant to take on that responsibility, especially if I’m not familiar with how and why it was originally written.”

The SRE team wasn’t alone. Erwin Alberto, who heads up our IT team, was also in the process of trying to design a new system for documentation when he learned we were creating Articles. “We had stuff all over the place. Some were in wikis, some in Google Docs, some in email. Sometimes it was on a work drive, sometimes on a personal one. At that point, even though we had hundreds, maybe thousands of pages, it’s really like having no documentation at all, because the whole point is having something that anyone on your team can find and access when they need it.” 

Migration

Alberto had already put in the hard work of auditing existing content with his team. His advice? Start with your worst pain points first. “We were in a position where there was a lot of great expertise on the team, but a lot of it was hidden in peoples’ heads.” 

So, how do you decide what’s worth migrating and what’s no longer relevant? Erwin and his team looked at what would be the most common support tickets and the Q&A on Teams that had the most engagement and traffic. This allowed them to identify the most pressing topics, and then divide them up, with team members committing to write pieces as part of their next sprints. 

The IT team assigned one author for each piece on the sprint, with at least one other team member assigned to check the Article immediately after for quality control. “In a way, part of the audit of content happened in Articles.” Alberto remembers, “It was the easiest way to get visibility into the different fragments. We put them up and then edited them.” 

Another way this problem is being addressed is as part of the onboarding process for new hires. Josh Duffney, another site reliability engineer, joined the company in June of this year. He began asking lots of questions on our internal instance of Stack Overflow for Teams. 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 Teams is tribal 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.”

“It really reduces the friction around contribution.”

Duffney sees a big difference between the existing wikis and the system of documentation the SRE team is now working towards with Articles. “As someone who was recently onboarded, the pain points with the existing systems was that it was fractured across three wikis, and it’s in a hierarchy that is tough to navigate. As someone new, I don’t know the context of the directory structure.” With Teams, a query will surface any Q&A, Articles, or collections tagged with a topic like SRE, Talent, or legal. “Relying on search and tags is a natural fit for how we operate on the internet anyway. It really reduces the friction around contribution.” 

Level Zero Support

Having done the heavy lifting of content auditing, Alberto’s team is now migrating everything to Articles. He says that he sees the combination of long form pieces and Q&A as a new level of support. “We used to have level one, which was sending a ticket to the help desk, and it was something we could easily resolve for you. Level two was a more complex problem that maybe required an engineer or specialist from a certain team to figure out. I look at this new system as a level zero.” Before sending us a ticket, folks can search Teams. If they find a question that solves the problem, great. If they need more details, they can follow links to in-depth articles or collections that bring together Q&A and article with the same tags.“

This activity is both generous and selfish. “One motivation is great support for our colleagues, call it great customer service. But another is to avoid having to answer the same question—How do I reset my password? How do I install and set up OpenVPN?—a dozen times a month,” says Alberto. “If we can teach people to look to our knowledge base first, and if the results they get are helpful, they will learn that habit, and that will free my team up for the bigger challenges that require our personal attention.”

Integration as Innovation

Dean Ward, a senior developer on our architecture team who heads up work on billing systems, says he looks at Articles as a chance for a fresh start. “Normally I would be getting a ping in group chat apps or I would get an email thread. Very little of that information exchange makes its way back as productive additions to the original documentation.” 

“I think the fact that Articles are linked to Q&A, it can drive you to keep everything fresh. It’s the little nudge. There are a lot of two way links between things,” explains Ward. For a developer, a wiki isn’t a place they want to spend time very often. “Articles, and traditional documentation, is not something you use everyday. For developers, Q&A can be something they touch every day, or a few times a week, and so that means your documentation has a much better chance of staying up to date.”

Ben Matthews, the engineering manager on Talent and Ads, says that even after a year on the job, he would ask a question and be directed to a piece of documentation that he never knew existed. Because knowledge was scattered across so many different platforms and so frequently exchanged in ephemeral conversations on chat or in person, he never felt confident that an answer existed or needed to be created. 

Giving users the chance to enter text into a box and search with tags isn’t exactly breaking new ground when it comes to functionality. But that’s not the point. “In some ways it’s obvious. It feels like table stakes,” says Matthews. “But when you layer on the connection to Q&A, the integrations so you can search, ask or answer from within a work chat or email thread, and the gamification that adds just a little more incentive to the writer, overall it adds a lot of momentum and removes a lot of friction around content creation.”

The post How Stackers ditched the wiki and migrated to Articles appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.