At Symphony, we believe in eating our own cooking. In other words, we are active users of the same tools and solutions we offer to help our community work more efficiently. Recently, we introduced two new bots to provide administrative support for our Developer Certification Program: Alfred and Bernard. If you are currently enrolled in the Developer Certification Program, you may have been onboarded by Alfred. Meanwhile, his cousin Bernard monitors program metrics and helps us make tweaks to improve the user experience. I’d like to share the story of these two bots as examples of the kinds of automations that can be created through Symphony.

Alfred’s responsibilities begin when a new user registers for the Developer Certification Program. The bot performs basic administrative onboarding tasks such as sending a welcome email, enrolling the user in the program’s first round of courses, and providing them with access to our developer sandbox. Alfred also reacts when the user progresses to the next stage of the program: when a developer finishes the first course, Alfred automatically enrolls them in the second. Once the developer finishes the second course, Alfred sends them an invitation to take the Developer Certification exam. By automating these repetitive administrative tasks, we ensure that they are being completed efficiently and consistently–and that they are not distracting our team members from more challenging and interesting responsibilities.

Bernard also automates a repetitive administrative task: tracking the key metrics associated with the Developer Certification Program. This bot sends our internal Developer Relations team a daily recap via Symphony message outlining: Number of registered developers in the program Number of developers that have completed the certification Number of new enrollees since the previous day Performance against program growth targets Pass/fail rate for developers who have taken the certification exam

Bernard also posts these updated statistics, anonymously and in aggregated form, to our company-wide OKR system, to enable interested Symphony team members to learn more about the Developer Certification Program. Monitoring these metrics not only helps our team make progress toward our goals for growing the program, but it also alerts us to changes we may need to implement. For instance, if the failure rate on the certification exam increases, this may be a signal that the test is too difficult and we need to modify it.

Bernard saves the Symphony Developer Relations team time and effort by compiling these numbers automatically. Going forward, this bot will also support developer relations between our team and individual Certified Developers. 

Bots like Alfred and Bernard can help Symphony users streamline their workflows by automating repetitive administrative tasks. Taking these responsibilities off of our human staff members’ plates not only boosts efficiency, but also frees up their time to work on more complex and rewarding activities–a satisfying outcome for all involved.