Developer Essentials Kit
In preparation for our annual conference in NYC (MongoDB.local series FY25), I collaborated with a brand designer to ideate and create the Developer Essentials Kit — a digital swag bag of downloadable assets that brought visibility to all types of developers, highlighting their each of their skills and passions. Because I was a co-lead on this project, I will walk through the end-to-end process below.
Responsibilities: Project Co-lead
Contributors: MongoDB Brand Illustration, MongoDB Brand Design
This project was conceived because we wanted a high-impact but low-budget way to garner excitement for a huge upcoming company conference. A major design trend I had seen at that time was personalization and I was excited to try and apply it to our user base.
I ideated 6 developer archetypes and represented them using abstracted designs to symbolize different team roles. These lexicons are intended to build out into highly stylized patterns, subtly conveying that each piece is essential to creating the the bigger picture.
We did a lot of competitor research, but more importantly, we really narrowed in on our attendee demographics, and relied on the MongoDB Developer Relations team to help us understand what would stand out to our target audience.
Attendees could look through the archetypes and download the package that resonated most with them, providing instantly-usable assets like Zoom backgrounds and Social posts to garner excitement about the upcoming conference. As an added bonus, customized templates were also created for event speakers to help leverage their sessions.
At the conference itself, we also implemented a themed mural around this endeavor, and passed out physical pins to attendees to attach to their lanyards, which turned out to be a great conversation piece.
After the event, we were able to see that the kit had been downloaded almost 400 times! We were also able to see that the average time spent on the companion blog post was just over two minutes, meaning people were actually taking the time to read and resonating with our concept.
I was also able to personally attend the event in NYC and talk to attendees, which was extremely rewarding. I had many people tell me they sent the kit to their team to have their teammates identify their personas as well.
Spearheading and launching this project end-to-end was immensely exciting, and showed our stakeholders that creativity and experimentation pay off!